2023-10-10 07:30:00
Dear athletes, whether you are preparing for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games or amateurs, have you ever heard of a method so effective that it allows you to reduce your reaction time in just five weeks, improve your sprint speed and your technical skills by 9%, all while improving your vigor and reducing your level of fatigue?
If this seems too good to be true, it is nevertheless what some have observed. Stanford researchers by proposing to American university basketball players to… spend more time in bed.
The “happy” subjects of the experiment were in fact instructed to spend a minimum of 10 hours in bed each night for five to seven weeks. Their effective sleep duration during the night, assessed using an activity monitor watch, increased on average from 6:40 at the start of the experiment to 8:30 during the sleep extension phase. With the consequence of multiple positive impacts on their performance and their level of well-being.
Other studies have shown the benefit of such a sleep extension strategy on swimming performance or even on psychomotor performance and the level of alertness.
Beware of lack of sleep
The sleep of top athletes is now the subject of increasing attention in sports training centers around the world. If being a good sleeper does not necessarily win, sleeping poorly can be detrimental to performance, especially in a context of very high performance where the difference between the best is tiny.
READ ALSO Why sleep is health! Insufficient sleep, whether from a quantitative or qualitative point of view, impacts several determinants of sports performance and recovery: the speed of resynthesis of muscle glycogen stocks is slowed, as is the speed of healing of induced muscle damage. through practice, the risk of injury is possibly increased.
Thus, at the National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance (Insep), we scrutinized the sleep of nearly 800 high-level French sportsmen and women from around thirty Olympic disciplines. And our results tend to show that the quantity and quality of sleep of certain athletes are insufficient, particularly in certain disciplines such as swimming which is characterized by sometimes very early morning training.
READ ALSO Swimming, the best summer sportA good amount of sleep is between 7 and 9 hours of sleep per night according to the recommendations of the National Sleep Foundation. And even more – between 9 and 10 hours – for athletes engaged in endurance disciplines and who accumulate up to 35 to 40 hours of training per week. Roger Federer regularly extolled the benefits of a good night’s sleep during his press conferences, having declared that he needed his 11 to 12 hours of sleep daily.
A good night’s sleep allows you to recover from one training day to the next, so much so that sleep is recognized today as one of the gold standard recovery methods. During a night’s sleep, composed of different stages of sleep (stages N1, N2, N3, and Rapid Eye Movement – REM), the body’s metabolic activity is at its lowest level (slowed breathing, frequency slowed heart rate, reduced cerebral blood flow) while the secretion of growth hormone via the pituitary gland (in stage N3) allows physiological recovery. Motor learning as well as the memorization of gestures are associated with deep slow-wave sleep, paradoxical sleep and sleep spindles, which results in cerebral plasticity at a systemic level during the night, including in particular an increase in activity. of the primary motor cortex.
Evaluate sleep quality
Sleep quality is assessed in various ways, for example by “sleep efficiency”, which is the ratio between total sleep time and time spent in bed. Sleep is considered sufficiently restorative if you convert more than 85% of the time spent in bed into effective sleep.
More advanced recording methods such as polysomnography provide access to sleep architecture and ensure the correct sequence of sleep stages throughout the night.
The quality of sleep can thus be assessed by the continuity of sleep, or the proportion of deep slow-wave sleep (N3 on the hypnogram) during the night. Deep slow-wave sleep is mainly present at the start of the night, and fundamental for the athlete’s physical recovery.
Variable sleep
When we consider the thousands of nights that we have recorded, one of the particularities of sleep is that it is eminently variable, from one athlete to another but also for the same athlete from one night of sleep to the next. other and throughout the season.
In order to holistically understand all the stress factors likely to disrupt sleep, a collective of experts suggests firstly considering the sporting factors (in blue in the figure): the training load which can weaken sleep, travel with jet lag or even anxiety before an important competition such as the final of the Olympic Games.
But every high-level athlete is above all a man or woman prey to various beliefs and personal attitudes around sleep, excessive use of screens or even school or professional constraints. These are all non-sport-specific factors (in green in the figure).
Strategies to take care of your sleep
Taking all of these factors into account allows us to best support each athlete in their uniqueness. Over the past few years, particularly in anticipation of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, we have developed and validated a set of sleep hygiene strategies.
The first strategy concerns the optimization of the sleeping environment and in particular the bedding. Thus, we showed the interest of using a high thermal capacity mattress topper on the sleep of rugby players after a match. Such a mattress topper promotes heat exchange during the night and reduces the nighttime core temperature more significantly than a conventional mattress. An effect which could also be very useful for preserving the quality of sleep during heatwaves…
Another way to cool the body is to take a cold bath, a recovery strategy widely used by athletes on the field. A study carried out at Insep with athletes showed that an original protocol, namely a full body immersion – including the head – made it possible to increase the depth of sleep and ensured better continuity of sleep with fewer micro-arousals during the night, compared to partial immersion of the body.
Finally, we also offer sleep education programs for athletes during which we give them valuable advice on how to take care of their nighttime sleep and possibly compensate for a lack of sleep with judiciously placed naps during the day. .
The practical applications of the research that we carry out with high-level athletes are also of interest to the entire population, particularly in our Western societies which are cruelly lacking in sleep.
*Mathieu Nédélec is a doctor in sports sciences at the National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance (Insep)
This article is republished from The Conversation sous licence Creative Commons. Lire l’article original.
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