As athletes, we spend a lot of time and energy trying to feel good. Training, recovery, diet, supplements, smartwatches, every metric you can think of — it all factors in. But one of the most important aspects of athlete wellness may be among the most underrated, and could be a secret weapon: sleep.
Sleep has proven impacts including reducing stress, maintaining a strong immune system, improving heart health, strengthening attention and memory, and reducing the risk of injury. Lack of sleep—or lack of good quality sleep—correlates to accidents, slow responses and poor performance. But even with these facts becoming fairly well known, sleep is often still a low priority for most people, let alone athletes who are often balancing training with work, school and other responsibilities.
CrewLAB’s Head Coach Simon Hoadley shared some of his insight on sleep and sleep tracking as both a coach and athlete.
“It’s probably as important as your training,” said Hoadley. “Probably more important, with the idea that even without training, I’m capable of a performance today.”
Even without training, athletes may be capable of a decent performance in a race or fitness benchmark test, but without good sleep, those athletes are simply leaving potential out there.
“I think the idea of training is that there is a regeneration component where you train and then your body compensates and regenerates and comes back better than it was,” he continued. “So if you don’t sleep, you can’t get the benefit of training.”
The role of trackers
Now, sleep analysis data is more accessible than ever. Many athletes use watches or apps to track sleep length, cycles, and quality. While this might be a useful tool to include in the big-picture overview of athlete wellness and health, it shouldn’t be seen as a true authority.
“More and more now, we’ve got all these apps that tell us how good our sleep is and they all track it a little bit differently, which is interesting.” Hoadley noted. “There’s different ways of tracking it now and most of them have some sort of a sleep quality score in there. You have to take that with a grain of salt, especially considering that of all the different apps that that track it, that none of them seem to agree on when you’ve had a good sleep.
That idea ties in closely with insight Richmond University swim coach Matt Barany shared in a prior CrewLAB interview.
“I think there is a heavy level of fatigue around trackers right now. And I think athletes are letting the trackers dictate too much,” said Barany.
“I think that the best metric you can have for if your sleep was good or not is if you think your sleep was good or not, versus what your watch or your arm strap or whatever has told you,” Said Hoadley. “Whenever we’ve spoken to experts in the sleep fields, they’ll clearly state that there’s almost like a placebo effect of sleep. If you believe that you had a great sleep, even though it was only an hour and a half, that’s, that’s as powerful as having an eight-hour sleep.”
How can CrewLAB help athletes have better sleep?
CrewLAB’s check-in feature allows athletes to note how they feel about the previous night’s sleep, among other factors like hydration and recovery. As Barany said, the brain is a “pattern recognizing machine” — and often files away information we may not even be aware of consciously. Keeping track of how athletes feel day to day allows them to recognize patterns, both positive and negative.
“Just being reflective for 10 seconds a day is really powerful. It makes it hard to ignore the fact that if you’ve checked bad sleep for four days in a row, [you have to say] ‘Okay, I’ve gotta change something, something’s not right.’” Hoadley said. “I can look back on previous workouts and get a sense of why I overperformed or underperformed relative to a recent effort. It’s unlikely that when I look back on my previous PRs, that I’ll see I had a bad sleep and I was in a bad mood.”
That insight not only into performance but why a performance turned out the way it did can be a valuable tool for coaches too. Coaches seeing that individual team members, or crews as a whole are dealing with factors such as finals may prompt a change in training—a lighter workout or focus on rest over the weekend in order to come back stronger.
This was the guiding principle for Barany to change his team’s training schedule to include a built-in morning off every week. The change had concrete results: average sleep time per night jumped up an hour, and team GPA rose from 3.0 to 3.82. Barany stressed the fact that it wasn’t simply sleeping more, it was sleeping more consistently that made the difference.
As athletes, we often put emphasis on doing more, whether that’s more training sessions, harder workouts, or a packed schedule even outside of practices and meets. But doing less, or at least doing our downtime differently, makes it easier to bring our best when we do return to training. Work-life—or work-sleep—balance is easier said than done. But the impacts are enormous—not only in training results, but in team culture, reducing burnout, and commitment.
Further reading
The full interview with Richmond’s Coach Matt Barany can be found on CrewLAB’s YouTube channel. More from CrewLAB is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, as well as our website.
If you want to get in touch with us about this article (or suggest a topic for a future blog!) you can also check us out on the new CrewLAB Community page.
