Sleep is the part of training nobody sees. With too little sleep, reaction time, accuracy, endurance and mood suffer most. In a well-known Stanford study, basketball players ran faster and shot more accurately after weeks of sleeping longer. If you train seriously, fixed bedtimes and a cool, dark room often gain you more than an extra session.
Reviews show a consistent picture: after too little sleep, reaction time, accuracy and mood decline, and the same effort feels harder. For short, maximal strength efforts the results are more mixed — the body can give everything once, even when tired.
The problem is cumulative. Sleep an hour short week after week and you train harder than you recover, and only notice when your form fails to come.
In 2011, Stanford researchers had eleven players from the university basketball team aim for ten hours in bed for several weeks. They slept almost two hours longer per night on average. Their sprint times dropped, their free throws and three-pointers became more accurate, and they felt less sleepy during the day.
It was a small study without a control group, as the researchers themselves point out. But the direction has since been confirmed in other research: for those who train hard, extra sleep is one of the cheapest performance enhancers there is.
Fixed times. Your clock recovers best on a fixed rhythm, at weekends and after matches too.
Cooling down. A hot shower or sauna an hour and a half before bed helps your core temperature drop afterwards, and with it falling asleep. After a late, hard session that cooling takes longer; notice how your sleep onset responds.
Caffeine in good time. Caffeine blocks the substance that builds sleep pressure, and works for hours. An evening pre-workout often costs more sleep than it gains in training.
A cool, dark, quiet room. Boring advice, and the most underrated.
A bed doesn't decide your recovery. But a bed that sleeps warm, or that wakes you when you turn with a stiff shoulder or sore legs, does cost sleep — and after hard days you turn more.
You don't test that in ten minutes in a shop, but in a night after training. That is what SleepSpa is for.
For adults, sleep physicians recommend seven hours or more per night. In heavy training periods the need is often higher; research in athletes regularly aims for nine hours or more in bed. The best gauge is how you train and how you feel during the day.
A short daytime nap can help with sleepiness, especially after a short night. Keep it short and not too late in the day, or it eats into the sleep pressure you need in the evening.