ZZZ

I asked one of my players what I should write about next in my upcoming blog. He promptly replied—sleep. I responded with “I bet you food is the next thing on your list.” He smiled and nodded. 

Lo and behold, the sleep blog. Yes, I am going to take up that challenge and write about sleep. At first, I was stuck. What can I write about that isn’t extremely obvious? Sleep is good! Sure! Too much sleep is bad!

Whenever I am stuck, I research. I guess that’s the researcher in me. I googled sleep, athletic performance, and even tennis and sleep. I found some interesting articles about how sleep not only is good for you, but also that it can, in fact, improve your athletic performance. 

See, just like athletes need more calories than an average person to fuel their training bodies, athletes also need more sleep, because during sleep is when our body repairs itself, and our internal organs that may have been working really hard throughout the day get to regenerate cells and gear up for the next day of hard work. 

How much sleep is enough, then? The average person should be getting between 7 and 9 hours of sleep, even though there are the strange anomalies that function best at 5 or even 10 hours of sleep. However, because of our action-packed lives and typically late work hours, whether as an adult or a student completing their last-minute touches on their projects or essay, typically people in the US get only about 5.5-6.7 hours of sleep a night. And sleep means actually falling asleep. It doesn’t count if you are just in bed watching TV!

So let’s do a study together. Add an hour to what you typically sleep, and see how your body performs with that hour. This hour should be a regular hour that you add on, either go to sleep earlier or get up later. A regular schedule is essential for athletes—contrary to popular belief, you can’t “makeup” sleep hours. So, if you are working on an essay all night until 4 am, if you sleep the next night from 6 pm to 6am, you still haven’t “caught up” with your sleep. The best thing to do, actually, is to continue on with your regular sleep cycle as best as you can. For example, if you sleep from 11pm-7am, and then you decide to hang out with friends at a sleepover until 2 am, your sleep cycle has been messed up, and you have to make sure you restart it. Go to bed the next night at 8pm or 9pm, and your cycle will get even MORE messed up!

So what’s the big deal? Why all this emphasis on sleep? Well, a study done on NCAA Division I basketball players shows that an additional hour of sleep a night for at least a week improved their speed by 5% and their accuracy by 9%! (Griffin, n.d.) Lack of sleep causes irritability, decreased energy (duh), but also hormonal changes and worse decision making and reflexes. 

Add that extra hour, and see how much sleep really does impact your athletic abilities.  

Griffin, M. (n.d.). Can sleep improve your athletic performance? Retrieved 14 April 2014 from http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/features/sleep-athletic-performance.