The Power of Sleep

The Power of Sleep

During sleep, the body engages in critical restorative processes, such as tissue repair, muscle growth, and the release of growth hormone. Adequate sleep allows for optimal physical recovery, ensuring that muscles and tissues repair themselves, reducing the risk of injury, and enhancing overall athletic performance.

Lack of sleep has shown to negatively impact performance in aspects that are critical to rowing, such as reduced muscle strength and endurance performance, in addition to degraded motor skill execution.

Whilst the clear best practice is ensuring you get a full night sleep, here are some additional interventions you can make to your current sleep practices to give yourself the best platform to train and compete.

Naps
Supplementing sleep during the day with a 20-90min nap can improve performance outcomes after a regular night and restore performance decrements to baseline levels after a night of partial sleep restriction.

Light Manipulation
By activating night mode on your digital screens, you remove the blue light which fools the brain into thinking its day time. When this happens, the body stops releasing a sleep hormone called melatonin. Melatonin is natures way of helping you wind down and prepare for bed.

Sleep Banking
Before a big race it’s understandable that you might endure more difficulty falling asleep the night prior due to nerves and anxiety. Similar to the benefit of napping after sleep-restricted night, it is also found to be a useful intervention to ‘bank’ sleep in the days leading up to competition where possible. An extra 1-2 hours per night in these lead up days can help off set a sleep-restricted night prior to competition.

Cold Water Immersion or Cold Showers
Cold water therapy stimulates the vagus nerve, boosting parasympathetic system activities that induce relaxation and stress reduction. Its ability to regulate body temperature, induce deep sleep, and align our natural sleep patterns is supported by scientific evidence. Cold water immersion is best done at approximately 2 hours before bed (ideally in Red Shed’s Cold Plunge pool).