While things such as nutrition and physical training are part of an athlete’s daily regimen, Mah said competitive athletes at all levels typically do not focus on optimizing their sleep and recovery. And few other groups have looked specifically at the effect of sleep on athletes.
But, as Mah and her colleagues point out in the paper, very few studies have looked at the opposite: the effect that sleep extension can have on performance. Extensive research has shown the impact that sleep debt has on cognitive function, mood and physical performance. It’s no secret that lack of sleep can have negative consequences. In the paper, she and colleagues wrote that “athletes may be able to optimize training and competition outcomes by identifying strategies to maximize the benefits of sleep.”
The study suggests that “sleep is an important factor in peak athletic performance,” said first author Mah. In a study appearing in the July issue of SLEEP, Cheri Mah, a researcher in the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Laboratory, has shown that basketball players at the elite college level were able to improve their on-the-court performance by increasing their amount of total sleep time. Now, new Stanford University School of Medicine research suggests another tactic to achieving their hoop dreams: sleep. Young basketball players spend hours dribbling up and down the court aspiring to NBA stardom.
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