EAT, SLEEP & STAND UP STRAIGHT: Things you should have learned in Kindergarten!

A few posts back I talked about the San Francisco Giants use of a Sleep Coach and their dramatic travel changes to best allow for consistent sleep bedtimes. In fact, I have posted quite a bit of SLEEP information in the attempt for parents, coaches and athletes to see it as ONE of many, small performance enhancements that can make a difference.

Consider these THREE PERFORMANCE ENHANCERS that together can make monumental differences in both ACADEMIC and ATHLETIC performance improvements: 1) Consistency in Sleep Patterns and Volume of Nightly & Weekly Hours of Sleep, 2) mindful practice of correct Posture Mechanics throughout all daily activities and 3) attention to positive and consisitent nutritional practices.

I have already written posts (archives) concerning FATS, CARBOHYDRATES, PROTEIN, SUPPLEMENTS, etc. POSTURE and SLEEP.

So, "Why another one?"

 BECAUSE, improving academic & athletic performance WHILE  insuring OPTIMAL PHYSICAL, MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT of today’s youth IS NOT A QUICK FIX.   

Just consider the Medical costs involved with treatment of athletic injuries and you would be wise to employ prudent sleep, diet and postural guidelines so as to reduce chances of injury and illness.

British Sprint and Bobsled Olympian Craig Pickering posted a list of tips on his recent blog that could help reduce injury. Here are THREE of his TWELVE tips:

 1)Make sure your nutritional status is good; you should get sufficient vitamins and minerals to insure your bones and immune system are healthy; 

2) WORK ON YOUR POSTURE and ability to hold this posture under fatigue;

3) Make sure you aid your recovery and adaptation from training by getting SUFFICIENT SLEEP.

I have attached two very informative articles regarding not only how Elite/ Pro Athletes have included GOOD SLEEP HABITS but HOW you can harness the value of Sleep by keeping track of your average nightly and weekly sleep to make sure you are getting the right amounts of this PERFORMANCE ENHANCING and HEALTH MAINTAINING activity.

So, to enhance performance, maintain good health, insure optimal physical, emotional and mental development and maturation…hit the pillow nightly for at least 8-9 hours, clean up your diet and pay attention to your posture…DAILY.

“Athletes who sleep on average < 8 hours per night have 1.7 x risk of injury and longer RECOVERY before the nest training session.”---Raymond Verheijen

“Accumulation of fatigue due to insufficient recovery or sleep deficit between training sessions and/or contests remains a main reason for injuries due to SLOWER nervous system performance.”---Raymond Verheijen

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Building Better Athletes With More Sleep//The Atlantic

Getting enough rest can be a struggle for those who play professional sports. But even among those getting enough, adding a few extra hours may dramatically enhance performance.

Mark McClusky Nov 4 2014

For us humans, sleep is completely crucial to proper functioning. As we’ve all experienced, we’re simply not as adept at anything in our lives if we don’t sleep well. Without proper sleep, whether it’s a short-term or long-term deficit, there are substantial effects on mood, mental and cognitive skills, and motor abilities. When it comes to recovery from hard physical efforts, there’s simply no better treatment than sleep, and a lot of it.

Most research on the effects of sleep on athletes has studied sleep deprivation. And those effects are quite strong. Just like the rest of us, athletes see a drop in their performance across all sorts of measurements if they are kept awake for the entire night, or even just interrupted in their sleep.
It seems like certain kinds of athletic tasks are more affected by sleep deprivation. Although one-off efforts and high-intensity exercise see an impact, sustained efforts and aerobic work seem to suffer an even larger setback. Gross motor skills are relatively unaffected, while athletes in events requiring fast reaction times have a particularly hard time when they get less sleep.

Bouncing around the country, leaving late, arriving early, having to play the next day—it’s no surprise that sleep management is a huge issue for athletes.

But instead of focusing on the effects of a lack of sleep, it’s more interesting to explore additional sleep as an advantage. If an athlete gets more sleep than his or her competitors, will that lead to an edge? That’s just the question that Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah set out to answer. She reached out to athletes at her university, trying to find a group that would participate in an experiment in which they would first measure their athletic performance after having their normal amount of sleep, and then spend weeks trying to extend their sleep as much as possible, to see what effect it would have on objective measurements of athletic performance. Amazingly, no one had ever done a study to see the effect of sleep extension on competitive athletes.

The Cardinal men’s basketball team volunteered to be Mah’s study cohort. Eleven players used motion-sensing wristbands to determine how long they slept on average—just over 6.5 hours a night. For two weeks, the team kept to their normal schedules, while Mah’s researchers measured their performances on sprint drills, free throws, and three-point shooting. Then, the players were told to try and sleep as much as they could for five to seven weeks, with a goal of 10 hours in bed each night. Their actual time asleep, as measured by the sensors attached to their wrists, went from an average of 6.5 hours to nearly 8.5 hours.

The results were startling. By the end of the extra-sleep period, players had improved their free throw shooting by 11.4 percent and their three-point shooting by 13.7 percent. There was an improvement of 0.7 seconds on the 282-foot sprint drill—every single player on the team was quicker than before the study had started.

A 13-percent performance enhancement is the sort of gain that one associates with drugs or years of training—not simply making sure to get tons of sleep. Mah’s research strongly suggests that most athletes would perform much better with more sleep—if they could get it. But it’s not quite that easy; in fact, athletes face challenges with their sleep that many of us don’t have.

Related Story

The first challenge that many elite athletes face is the travel demands of their sport. When you’re a pro athlete, you spend a lot of time on the road. If you’re a professional sports team athlete in the U.S., you’re spending your time zigzagging across the country, flying back and forth to meet the demands of schedule-makers who don’t always take the travelers’ circadian rhythms into account.
The mileage can pile up in a hurry, especially for teams on the West Coast, which are farther away from the rest of the teams in their leagues. West Coast teams perennially have to travel more miles than their competition—in 2013, the Seattle Mariners flew more than 52,000 miles while the Chicago White Sox, with their central location and nearby division rivals, only flew about 23,000. Some years, the L.A. Kings have had to fly more than 55,000 miles to reach other teams in the NHL, while the New Jersey Devils were clocking less than 29,000. Bouncing around the country, leaving late, arriving early, having to play the next day—it’s no surprise that travel and the management of sleep is a huge issue for athletes.

To try and deal with this disruption, teams have consulted with sleep researchers like Mah. Most NBA players have adapted by taking a nap in the afternoon, between morning practice and the evening’s game. “If you nap every game day, all those hours add up and it allows you to get through the season better,” NBA all-star Steve Nash told the New York Times. “I want to improve at that, so by the end of the year, I feel better.”

Domestic travel is bad enough, but for athletes in many Olympic sports, there’s a heavy dose of international travel as well. Randy Wilber, at the U.S. Olympic Committee, notes that there’s very little published research on how to deal with jet lag even for people who travel professionally, like pilots, let alone research on how to minimize its effects on elite athletes. “We’ve had to develop those protocols ourselves pretty much from scratch,” he says.
Does traveling a long distance have a demonstrable negative effect on teams? There haven’t been a lot of studies, but Bill Barnwell, of Grantland.com, looked at 15 years of data for the NFL, examining the winning percentage of road teams by the distance they had to travel. Teams who traveled more than 2,000 miles had a winning percentage of 40 percent, while those who traveled less than 1,000 miles won 43 percent of the time.

Bad news for teams like the Oakland Raiders, who had to travel more than 28,000 miles in 2012, while teams like the Indianapolis Colts only traveled 8,494 miles.

Most NBA players adapt by taking a nap in the afternoon, between morning practice and the evening’s game.

And these travel effects seem to accumulate over the course of a season. Researchers at Vanderbilt University examined the plate discipline of hitters in baseball over the course of the season, and found that hitters swing at more pitches outside the strike zone late in the season than they do earlier in the season. Why? Dr. Scott Kutscher, the leader of the research team, said in a press release, “We theorize that this decline is tied to fatigue that develops over the course of the season due to a combination of frequency of travel and paucity of days off.”

Kutscher’s team has found that this decay in plate discipline has become more pronounced in baseball since 2006—the year that Major League Baseball banned stimulants. (For years, bowls of amphetamines, known as “greenies,” were a fixture in baseball clubhouses.) Out of the 30 teams in Major League Baseball, 24 saw this decrease in 2012, the year the study examined. That suggests that if a team can find a way to stem this fatigue effect, they might have a competitive advantage—in fact, it’s already happened. The San Francisco Giants actually improved their plate discipline over the course of the 2012 season, and the team went on to win the World Series.

Perhaps the Giants also improved what researchers call “sleep hygiene”—making sure that your bedtime is as regular as possible, removing the bright digital clock from your bedside table (studies show the light disrupts sleep), finding a comfortable temperature (research shows a cool room is best). Start viewing sleep as a performance booster rather than a chore, and the effort it takes to sleep well will seem like a smart investment.
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Morning Heart Rate and "Functional" Overtraining

Weekly averages, rather than daily measurements, help you keep tabs on fatigue.

Alex Hutchinson

There's an interesting article just published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise on "evidence of parasympathetic hyperactivity" as a marker of overtraining. It has some interesting insights on the causes and underlying physiology of pushing too hard – but what I'm going to highlight here is some potentially practical findings.

The basics: French researchers took a bunch of well-trained triathletes and divided them into two groups. Both groups spent one week doing regular training; then for the next three weeks, the control group continued regular training, while the other group ramped up their training by 40%; then both groups tapered for a week before a final performance test. The goal here was to push them into "functional overreaching" – the kind of temporary overtraining that leads to worsening performance but then can be reversed with a short period of rest (as opposed to chronic overtraining that takes much longer to dissipate).
Each morning, when the subjects woke up, they took four minutes of heart-rate data before getting up for the first time, and then another four minute of data after standing up. The heart-rate data included simple measures like average heart rate, as well as more sophisticated analysis of heart-rate variability – the amount that the time between heart-beats fluctuates, which is considered a sensitive measure of autonomic nervous system function. (They also did a bunch of other tests, but I'll focus on these ones.)
Here's the data showing supine morning heart rate every seventh day (i.e. the week before the overtraining period, three overtraining weeks, and after one week of taper); the closed circles are the overtraining group and the open circles are the controls:

Hard to see much obvious pattern there. But what happens if we look at the seven-day averages instead of single-day readings?

Now we're talking! After smoothing out the day-to-day fluctuations, we see that the control group stays fairly constant throughout the experiment, while the overtraining group declines steadily during the overtraining period and then recovers a bit after the taper. This is useful information (and precisely what they expected, relecting increased parasympathetic drive). It's mirrored in a number of other measurements – standing-up HR, HR at lactate threshold, HR at exhaustion, as well as some of the HRV values. The key finding (echoing some earlier HRV studies) is that day-to-day measurements are simply too variable to extract reliable information from – but weekly averages can reliably show significant trends that reveal how your body is responding to the training load.

One other interesting point worth considering. Here are the results of the run-to-exhaustion performance tests they performed at the end of each week:

Once again, the normal training group doesn't change much – maybe a slight boost after the taper. The overtraining group, as expected, gets steadily worse as the three-week overtraining period goes on... but then, after the taper, they supercompensate and produce by far the best results of the study. It's a reminder of why "overtraining" is such a difficult beast to get a handle on: this sort of "functional overreaching" is indeed very functional, and is precisely the high-risk state you want to push experienced athletes into at certain points in the season. Push too hard, and they'll keep getting worse. But get the balance just right, and you'll get results like those shown above – because in the end, very hard training really works.