Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [105]
This doesn’t mean that you won’t get a performance boost from lining up at a big race—but it suggests that the encouraging shouts from friends, family, and complete strangers aren’t the crucial factor. Instead, it’s the adrenaline-producing stress and anxiety of participating in a big event that harnesses your fight-or-flight instincts and allows you to exceed your usual abilities. “For your local marathon, you will not be as pumped up as for the Boston Marathon,” van de Ven says. But there’s a trade-off, as the study suggests: if you run your local marathon, you’ll not only benefit from sleeping in your own bed and avoiding travel, but you may also be able to train on the course to become familiar with it. The best choice may depend on your personality: if you’re usually anxious before races, the local race may be your best bet; if you need help getting psyched up, taking a trip to a big event could give you a boost.
How much sleep do I need for optimal physical performance?
For top athletes, getting enough sleep has long been considered the sort of bland good advice that is obvious but easy to ignore—like eating lots of vegetables. A pair of recent pilot studies by Charles Samuels, the medical director of the Centre for Sleep and Human Performance in Calgary, confirms that poor sleep quality is prevalent even in Olympic-level athletes (in this case from the national bobsleigh and skeleton teams). But the problem is even worse for ordinary people: “It’s average athletes who are the most likely to curtail their sleep to train,” Samuels says. “They’re getting up at 4 a.m. to run for an hour so they can get to work by 7 a.m.”
That’s not necessarily a winning strategy, especially for people who are already operating on the least amount of sleep that they can handle. Incurring a steadily mounting sleep debt has well-known effects on mood and cognitive ability, and a few studies are now suggesting that sleep also has direct links with physical performance. For example, Stanford University sleep researcher Cheri Mah has conducted a series of small studies testing athletes on the university’s teams. When five varsity swimmers increased their sleep time to ten hours a night from their typical six to nine hours, they slashed 0.15 seconds from their reaction time off the start and similarly improved their turn time, 15-meter sprint time, and kick rate. Similarly, increased sleep improved sprint time and free-throw percentage for a group of basketball players.
With only a few participants and no control group, these results are far from definitive, but they represent a first step to quantifying the athletic benefits of sleep. Samuels, meanwhile, has been working on a project with the Canadian downhill ski team to investigate the link between inadequate sleep and injuries, as well as studies of how globe-trotting athletes can best adjust to crossing time zones.
It’s still a challenge to apply these results in the real world. “I know it sounds ridiculous to get 10 hours of sleep a night,” Mah admits. “That’s an extreme.” For the typical person, she says, consistently increasing the amount of nightly sleep by even a small amount can produce positive effects. Most adults need seven to eight hours of sleep nightly, while teens and young adults need nine or more, though there’s quite a bit of individual variation. One of the most interesting implications of her studies with varsity athletes is that even just a few weeks of concerted sleep catch-up has a measurable effect on performance—something to keep in mind before the next big game or race.
It’s also worth noting that, just as