Athletes awaken to link between proper rest and success

And teams are tracking sleep like any other stat, using the data they glean to adjust schedules

As a kinesiology student Alex Malone has a keen awareness of the link between recovery and performance, but didn’t always think it applied to him. One day last winter the star running back at U of T headed into an intense weight training session on five hours sleep, but still figured he could dead-lift 600 pounds.

He made the lift, but as he put the barbell down blood tricked from his nose. Then it flowed. And then he admitted to himself he wasn’t sleeping enough to support his heavy lifting.

“Sometimes I’ve had enough rest days that I should be performing well, but I’m physically and mentally exhausted,” says Malone, who sleeps seven hours a day in season but less than six over the winter.

These days, athletes at U of T regularly complete sleep questionnaires to help coaches manage their workloads, and across the broader world of high-level sport sleep is getting more attention than ever.

Last week, fitful sleep forced Texas Rangers first baseman Prince Fielder to leave spring training in Arizona and head to a sleep clinic, where he was diagnosed with sleep apnea.

In Florida, the Yankees pushed practice time back to noon to allow players to sleep later and perform better.

It’s not just a matter of telling players to get more rest. Increasingly, teams are tracking sleep like any other stat, using the data they glean to adjust schedules and gain an edge in competition.

The Raptors are one of a growing number of pro and NCAA outfits working with Vancouver-based Fatigue Science, a small firm that provides sleep monitoring data for clients in high-level sports and heavy industry.

“We’ve seen this shift from subjective to more objective data,” says Jeff Zeilstra, Fatigue Science’s account executive for high performance. “We’re getting realtime insights into (athletes’) cognitive effectiveness and their fatigue scores daily and weekly.” The focus on sleep isn’t brand new. The Vancouver Canucks first connected with Fatigue Science in 2011, while coaches at Northwestern University first employed wearable sleep monitors on football players in 2013.

Last winter, the Raptors were among several NBA teams to ditch the traditional morning shootaround, opting instead to let players sleep in.

While players report feeling better, the evidence of the benefits of enhanced sleep runs deeper than anecdotes.

Zeilstra says Fatigue Science licenses software developed by the U.S. military and employs an algorithm that predicts the erosion of an athlete’s reaction time based on their sleep scores. According to the model, an athlete who scores 90 will react 25 per cent more quickly than one who scores 70.

In 2013, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine published the results of a three-year survey of major league baseball players that asked them to report their levels of sleepiness. Among players who reported fatigue in 2010, 39 per cent were still in the league in 2013 compared with 72 per cent of players who reported low levels of sleepiness.

Researchers at Stanford University found that three-point shooting accuracy increased by 9.2 per cent after basketball players were asked to up their sleep to 10 hours daily.

“Athletes are going to these crazy extents to make themselves better, with gas masks and all these different things,” says Adrian Lightowler, U of T’s head strength and conditioning coach. “The two we hit them with all the time: hydrate and sleep. That’s the two easiest things you can possibly do to make yourself significantly better.”

Lightowler points out that sleep helps athletes recover by boosting growth hormone while limiting cortisol, a stress-related hormone that suppresses immunity and breaks down muscle tissue. But he acknowledges scheduling sleep is a tougher task for university athletes, who balance practice with classes and tests.

Volleyball standout Denise Wooding remembers her first year at U of T as a hard lesson in the importance of sleep.

“Once you don’t get a good sleep you can’t focus on class and you have to go through everything twice just to make up for what you missed,” says Wooding, who just finished her fifth year of eligibility. “You feel bad at practice and you’re not recovering, so you’re always sore. Then you feel like you need more sleep but you don’t have time.”

Zeilstra says the goal isn’t just getting athletes to sleep better, but to use sleep data as part of an integrated approach to boosting performance and avoiding injury. A soccer team, for example, can pair sleep stats with data gleaned from wearable GPS units to determine which athletes are fresh and who can use a recovery day.

He also says clients commonly consult with his company on travel schedules, adjusting flight times to optimize sleep. Soon, athletes will be able to access sleep stats on a mobile app and receive updates to help them schedule rest.

“We’re going to start to get really granular on this as it pertains to an athlete’s competition,” he says. “Sleep is the foundation for health and performance, and we’re trying to get these athletes two or three per cent better.”