An essential component of the success, regarding your training process, is how well you adapt to the training stimulus, and how you optimize daily nourishment, rest and recovery. Sleep, being the integral part of the recovery process, has tremendous effect on your athletic performance and competitive success. Furthermore, it has impact on your immunity, cognitive performance, cellular repair, memory processing and important function in many organs and body systems. In today’s 24/7 world, when everything is available all the time, where we are constantly bombarded with new information, where we are expected to always be better and accomplish more it is very hard to wind down and give your body well deserved rest and restorative sleep. Being the athlete, you are constantly challenged with number of circumstances that significantly impacts both your sleep duration and quality. To name a few – Late evening trainings that raise your cortisol levels, competitive schedule, late evening meals, traveling, stress and pressure to perform, academic requirements, etc. How you cope with these challenges is ultimately going to have significant effect on your overall health and athletic result.

It is important to mention that sleep has 5 stages – stage 1, lasting only several minutes, represents the change from being awake to the start of the sleep cycle. Your muscles relax, your heartbeat and breathing slows. You go to the stage 2, which marks the beginning of your actual sleep, a period of light sleep before you enter deeper sleep stages. Your eye movements stop, your breathing and heartrate slows even further. This stage usually lasts between 10-20 minutes. Stages 3 and 4 are the deepest sleep stages and are most difficult to wake up from.  These stages are the most rejuvenating for your body, and are integral part to the athletic development, due to hormonal activity and muscle/tissues restauration and repair. Following stage 4, is the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of the sleep, the stage where dreams and revitalization of the brain occurs.

To feel rested, energised, like you had enough of sleep, you need to ensure that you’re completing at least 4-5 sleep cycles a night. Having said that, we have to mention few important factors that influence your sleep, like – food choice and timing, caffeine and alcohol intake, sleep environment like light and temperature, stress and chronic stress, electronic disruptions and blue light exposure, etc.

All of the factors named above are well recognised and given important attention with all of our athletes. We can never over emphasize significance of your sleep and practical strategies that we use to enhance your sleep quality and ultimately your performance and excellence!