SLEEP KEY TO PERFORMANCE & RECOVERY

by Rebecca Roberts - 22.09.09

Sleep is vitally important to our health and for elite athletes in particular, it is essential for recovery and performance.

Looking at how athletes’ can maximise the benefits of sleep and why it is so important, eis2win.co.uk talks to a number of EIS expert practitioners across its sport science and medicine  support services.

“Research has shown that high performance athletes need more sleep than others. However, sleep is often neglected when considering strategies for optimal training and competition” says EIS Dr Cathy Speed.

“Apart from heavy training and the stresses of competition, jet lag can of course affect sleep, training and recovery. Even those who do not notice much difficulty in adapting to the new time zones will usually suffer a decrement in reaction times, visual processing, agility, speed and patterns of movement.

“A range of approaches can be used, including simple education about “sleep hygiene”, relaxation techniques, alteration in training and recovery regimes and medicines. One of the most important things to address is the athletes’ understanding of how important sleep is to their training, recovery and performance, whilst learning the approaches that suit them in optimising their sleep patterns” she adds.

Sleep hygiene refers to the behaviours and habits that someone engages in before falling asleep which, as EIS Sport Psychologist Simon Drane explains, is key in preparing to benefit from a good nights sleep.

“Just like a pre-performance routine, a pre-sleep routine should be consistent and use ‘good’ sleep hygiene behaviours to help achieve a person’s optimal sleeping state” says Drane.

“Aside from setting up a conducive sleeping environment, the first step, and the most important one of sleep hygiene, is to be able to ‘turn-off’ from the day’s activities and tomorrow’s thoughts and slow the functioning of your brain down.

“Once achieved, you can start your pre-sleep routine which has been well-practiced at home, but which can also adapt to travelling to a competition when you may have to share a room with another athlete” Drane adds.

Taking on the right foods before trying to sleep can also play a vital role in maximising sleep, which EIS Head of Performance Nutrition Dr Samantha Stear says needs to be tailored to the individual athlete.

“To bring on sleep tryptophan must be able to enter the brain so that it can be turned into the ‘sleep hormone’ serotonin” Dr Stear explains.

“The general consensus supports the fact that when a carbohydrate meal is absorbed into our bodies it actively helps open the pathways for tryptophan to reach the brain whereas when a protein meal is eaten, the opposite happens. However, the research evidence is not conclusive so individuals need to work out what works best for them” she adds.

Whilst each individual will be different on the foods which work best for them, there are some common points which can help athletes’ in their planning the right nutrition to help them sleep.

“A carbohydrate-rich meal at dinner will help you sleep, whereas a protein-rich one is more likely to make you alert and ‘high GI’ carbohydrates are more effective than ‘low GI’ carbohydrates in doing this” explains Dr Stear.

“Alcohol and caffeine are both stimulants so should be avoided or limited and also avoid excessive spices as these can disrupt sleep. Finally, the timing of the meal is important as research studies have shown that it is better to allow longer (around 4 hours) after eating a meal before going to bed” she adds.

Research into elite athletes’ experiences with sleep has often been done through questionnaires, which are subjective, or the other extreme in a sleep lab, which can prove invasive. EIS Physiologists have been compiling information on athletes’ sleep for over four years by using wristwatch actigraphy, as EIS Physiologist Jonathan Leeder explains;

“The watches measure the body’s movement during a nights sleep. Good quality sleep is characterised by limited body movement, whereas a poor quality sleep will involve increased movement patterns. Therefore the watches are able to give objective detailed information about the duration and quality of sleep. Over a two week period, a detailed habitual sleep profile is developed, highlighting areas for potential improvement.”

Leeder, who is also studying a PhD on the subject of recovery, has been part of the EIS team involved in undertaking tests when athletes travel abroad to measure the effects of jet lag and altitude in order to better understand the negative effects on sleep and how to combat them.

“We have actigraphy sleep data on over 60 elite athletes and have analysed over 1000 individual sleeps “ Leeder explains.

“We found there were differences in sleeping patterns according to the sport the athlete did, which supports theories that training load and type may affect the quality and type of sleep athletes are able to get.

“One of the main findings of this work however, is the sleep quality of elite athletes has been found to be lower than that of an age and sex matched control group. Although often in bed for longer, the quality of sleep of athletes is lower and therefore more time has to be spent in trying to achieve more sleep to recover effectively” he adds.

A more controversial but potentially high impacting topic in sleep research is ‘sleep-dependent brain plasticity’. This research links the amount of motor skill improvement with sleep, revealing some interesting findings. Evidence suggests that when learning motor skills, a certain level of post-training sleep is required for optimal consolidation and learning, and this may be sleep stage dependent.

“With those sports which have a high requirement for learning or refining motor skills, an athletes’ ability to retain and consolidate the skills learned over the course of the day is affected by subsequent sleep they have the night after training” says Leeder.

“Whilst there are no definitive reasons for why this, it is an important part of our work to continually develop understanding around a key issue like sleep in recovery, so we can combine understanding to give informed advice and support to elite athletes, coaches and sports” he adds.

It is taking this inter-disciplinary approach to key performance-impacting factors such as sleep, which provides sports with the support in developing tailored programmes to suit the requirements of their sport and their athletes.

Photography © Getty Images