Zzz

Sleep should not be viewed as a single entity. We cycle through stages every 90 minutes and go through 4-6 cycles per night. There are many different layers to sleep. Stage 1 is the lightest stage of sleep. In order to initiate that light sleep, we have to allow our body temperature, our core temperature to decrease. This stresses the importance of sleeping in a comfortable environment Hence in the summer we may struggle more to fall asleep. Stage 3 is our first stage of deep sleep. This is the stage when recovery is at it's highest. So if we're thinking about how we recover from a hard training session or recover from a competition, whatever it might be, we need to be accessing our deep sleep to make sure that we're maximising our recovery components. If we're not getting into those deep sleep cycles, we're not getting the sufficient levels of sleep that we were require. So how much sleep do we need?? The amount of sleep that we require differs quite significantly as we go through life. As we age, we require less sleep as we're not growing as much compared to babies. During our teenage years we should be aiming for 8-10 hours of sleep within a 24hr period. A recent study showed that 300 athletes were averaging a duration of 7.4hrs which is below the recommended guidelines. Late sleep timing, short sleep and greater variations of timings are associated with poor health outcomes in healthy adults (Chaput et al., 2020). Athletes are more prone to disrupted sleep The biggest contribution to this is training stress and irregular meal times due to training schedules whilst balancing school and work. Not only does sleep directly affect our performance and recovery, it also impacts movement biomechanics and movement quality. Studies suggest that sleeping less affects how well you're gonna move, which can predispose us to injury risks A lack of sleep also impacts mental wellbeing, ability to tolerate stress and concentration. Although not directly related to performance, these may impact our sessions if we're not feeling good about training on a particular day and won't elicit the same training response