Sleep and recovery
By Andy Newell
The key to unlocking our skiing and fitness potential might be more obvious that we think. A topic that both doctors and physiologists have been buzzing about recently is the power of sleep and how rest (or lack thereof) affects our immune system and performance. Erika is currently reading the book Why We Sleep which is a great all-around recourse what exactly out bodies are doing while we sleep.
An interesting article/study on athletic performance and sleep is posted here where physiologists monitored recovery and naturally accruing human growth hormone.
The general consensus: sleep is important for everyone but REALLY important for athletes who put tremendous stress on their bodies when training.
I’m writing this entry from an airplane as the US Team and I fly to Finland for the World Junior and U23 championships. The first few days in Europe are always a bit ‘foggy’ while we try to adjust to the time zone and our circadian rhythm normalizes. It’s easy to feel the effects of sleep deprivation on our cognitive function but it can tougher to FEEL it during physical activity. Usually after a bad night’s sleep I’ll head out training and the activity will snap me out of my funk and I feel just fine, but should training be modified when athletes are not sleeping well?
We asked this question some top coaches to get their thoughts:
Jason Cork. “If you aren’t sleeping well for a night or two, it’s probably not a massive issue; there are all kinds of things which can hamper recovery (e.g., a less than ideal meal; stress from work or school; fighting a tiny illness that never materializes.)”
Jason makes an interesting point while a poor night sleep might not be the end of the world it can often be a byproduct of something else which is why skiers should proceed with caution after a bad sleep and evaluate how they are feeling. If a restless night is caused by your body trying to fight off an illness it’s best to cut back on training right away.
“If you’re stringing multiple nights of bad sleep together, for sure it can be an issue, and you might need to adjust training back. As an example, if you aren’t adjusting well to altitude or travel, that stress can be massive, and de-loading some training stress may be necessary.”
To get a better idea of what TYPE of our training we should scale back we asked Sarah Willis PhD
“If the sleep disturbance is leading to effects on performance and further to fatigued status, then some changes should be made to the training to avoid overreaching and overtraining. We train with the goal of inducing a stimulus to stress the body (this can be thought of from different standpoints: as session (s), day (s), week (s)) and then we need to allow a compensation time to recover and create an overcompensation to improve the body and baseline above that of the original biological state. Ideally, this compensation is occurring sooner than later after a said session/day/week and the body is able to 'bounce back' to attain a new level of fitness. It is when this compensation/recovery is not happening and not happening quickly we can start to be concerned of underlying issues with sleep, nutrition, life stress, physical/health conditions, etc. In this case, we possibly need to reduce the training load. I believe I would tend to first decrease volume in the training, and if needed to decrease intensity.”
Both Sarah and Jason agree that subjectively monitoring sleep can be tricky so any kind of daily recovery markers can really help. HRV testing with a watch or simply doing morning heart rate tests can help skiers identify the difference between one bad nights sleep and a trend toward overtraining.
