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Sleep is Good Stuff...

Friday, 05 February 2016 00:10

By Marty Gaal (teamusa.org)

Sleep is a wonderful thing. It lets us recharge and wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to tackle another adventure. Or does it?

Your body needs sleep. But many of you are not getting enough of it. A recent review of insufficient sleep data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that about 35 percent of adults are not getting enough sleep. The data from 2009 shows that only about 30 percent of teens were getting enough sleep (70 percent are not getting enough). ...

This information is from a general population review. When you add in endurance athletics and strength training, you require even more. This short article from WebMD on sleep improving athletic performance explains that, while everyone is different, athletes in training should add about an hour of extra sleep per night. You can extrapolate this to mean if you're training at an unusually high level, you may need even more than that.

This article from the Gatorade Science Institute lists a few more studies showing the impact of sleep or lack thereof on maximal and sub-maximal performance. And here is a very descriptive article from the National Institute of Health about how a lack of sleep affects health via metabolic, endocrine and immune system consequences. If you read this article you will be scared, or convinced, hopefully both. READ MORE