Importance of Sleep for Athlete Performance

Most of the time with athletic performance you usually think about how much time you spend in the weight room, your practice, your recovery, sometimes your nutrition but you never really think about your sleep schedule.

The National Sleep Foundation found out by the 12th grade 75% of students get less than eight hours of sleep a day. Now this is still a growing area of research since there’s so many variables with lots of different kinds of activity with athletic performance, so there’s still a lot to learn.

In this study by Sleep Research Society they studied the Stanford basketball players, by extending an extra hour of sleep to the players they found out that the players increase their sprint times!

Now only lack of sleep hurts the muscular performance but it also hurts the cognitive performance. It impairs intention, alertness, reaction, concentration and problem-solving which is huge for an athlete.

In the same study from above researches found a 9% increase in their three-point shooting percentage and a 9.3% increase in their free-throw percentage, now I’m pretty sure any hooper would love to increase their shooting percentage!

So if you can focus on sleeping better, your nervous system is going to be in a better place resulting in better results in the gym, so just little things can count.