Sleep and Athletic Performance
Three articles on PainSci cite Watson 2017: 1. Sports Injury Prevention Tips 2. The Insomnia Guide 3. Insomnia Until it Hurts
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
Sleep is an essential component of health and well-being, with significant impacts on physical development, emotional regulation, cognitive performance, and quality of life. Along with being an integral part of the recovery and adaptive process between bouts of exercise, accumulating evidence suggests that increased sleep duration and improved sleep quality in athletes are associated with improved performance and competitive success. In addition, better sleep may reduce the risk of both injury and illness in athletes, not only optimizing health but also potentially enhancing performance through increased participation in training. Despite this, most studies have found that athletes fail to obtain the recommended amount of sleep, threatening both performance and health. Athletes face a number of obstacles that can reduce the likelihood of obtaining proper sleep, such as training and competition schedules, travel, stress, academic demands, and overtraining. In addition, athletes have been found to demonstrate poor self-assessment of their sleep duration and quality. In light of this, athletes may require more careful monitoring and intervention to identify individuals at risk and promote proper sleep to improve both performance and overall health. This review attempts to highlight the recent literature regarding sleep issues in athletes, the effects of sleep on athletic performance, and interventions to enhance proper sleep in athletes.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
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- No effect of creatine monohydrate supplementation on inflammatory and cartilage degradation biomarkers in individuals with knee osteoarthritis. Cornish 2018 Nutr Res.
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- Modulation in the elastic properties of gastrocnemius muscle heads in individuals with plantar fasciitis and its relationship with pain. Zhou 2020 Sci Rep.