If you’re an athlete, there’s one advantage that allows your body to perform at the highest athletic level during game time: the right amount of high quality, restorative sleep.
Athletes who lose out on this advantage jeopardize their ability to perform in the following ways:
1.) Reaction Time / Concentration Decreases With Lack of Sleep
When we suffer from a lack of sleep, we risk negative effects on our body’s performance. A 2009 study conducted with the Stanford University Women’s tennis team found that players who were able to increase their sleep time also increased their sprinting speed, accuracy, and ability to learn new skills.
The study also found that when an extended sleep schedule was maintained over several weeks, the improvements in the body’s athletic performance were also accompanied by improvements in mood and alertness — both critical to the success of any athlete.
2.) Recovery Decreases With Lack of Sleep
When you engage in any sort of physical activity, you are depleting your body’s stores of energy and fluids. If that physical activity takes the form of serious athletic training, you are also causing serious damage to your muscle tissues.
While that breakdown of muscle and use of energy are all a normal part of training, a lack of sleep can affect your body’s performance by hindering your ability to recover from these exertions.
Through the proper dieting, hydration, and mobility work, you can help your body replenish key nutrients and aid in the recovery process, but true recovery only happens with effective sleep.
Deep, restorative rest gives your body time to rebuild muscles, replenish nutrients, and become a stronger athlete. Not only does that sleep help you to improve athletic performance factors such as endurance, speed, and accuracy, but it will also help you maintain your health, ensuring that you remain a successful and high performing athlete for the duration of your career.
3.) Hormones Don’t Remain Stable With Lack of Sleep
One study found that even mild sleep deprivation has been shown to decrease your ability to produce glycogen and process carbohydrates, both of which are critical sources of energy for your body’s performance. A lack of sleep can affect those stores of energy, resulting in fatigue and poor focus during game time.
Similar research concluded that a lack of sleep can also impede the production and release of growth hormone. Critical to stimulating muscle growth and repair, a lack of this hormone in the body could be career-ending for any athlete.
No matter what your athletic demands are, the one piece of equipment you should invest in is a mattress that helps you get restorative sleep. Built with premium materials for the Performance Enhancing Sleep® that elite athletes need, an Accel Sleep® mattress is designed to elevate your sleep to elevate your game.
Shop the Accel Sleep™-Hybrid Mattress or contact us to learn how you can experience maximum recovery.
