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.
