Monta Vista students are notorious for their late night study and homework sessions. My friends and I are amazed at how late you all stay up on a regular basis! I didn’t pull an all-night study session until college, and I’d guess that I only stayed up after 2am studying a dozen times or so in college and graduate school combined. The hard work and dedication that you all demonstrate is amazing!
But no matter what anyone says, there is no magic elixir that allows you to go without sleep.
We all know what happens if we don’t get enough sleep. Coaching at Monta Vista, I’ve learned that when an athlete is having a rough day, there are three questions I should start with:
- What did you eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner last night?
- How much water have you been drinking?
- How much sleep have you been getting?
We have talked about nutrition: http://www.mvrunning.com/coachs/nutrition/
And we have talked about hydration: http://www.mvrunning.com/coachs/hydration/
So let’s take a little time to think about sleep.
WHY DO WE NEED SLEEP?
It is much too easy to think, I don’t have time to sleep more than I do. Sleep just does not seem that important compared to school work, our friends, workouts, and everything else that fills up our daily lives. It’s easy to not listen to your parents or your coach tell you to get some more sleep—they don’t understand what you are going through, and what do they know anyway! OK, so listen to an expert:
“Adequate sleep is clearly underappreciated. It can do more for an athlete’s running performance than the proposed benefits of any vitamins, minerals or supplements.”
–Dr. Michael Fredericson, MD (Medical director, Stanford Track & Field)
So, what is going on while you are sleeping?
Our bodies have evolved with sleep as a critical part of our natural rhythm. Sleep is meant to be a time for our bodies to be restored. During the day, our bodies use vast amounts of energy to move about, study, think, eat, remember—and of course, if you are on the track & field or cross-country team, to train! While we are asleep, our body can focus on healing, recovery and growth. Growth hormones are released. All the effort you put into training your muscles during the day can be incorporated into your body while your body sleeps and rebuilds. While you are sleeping, your immune function increases (this is why you are more likely to get sick when you are short on sleep), your muscles regenerate, your skin heals, and you grow. Molecules are released that are antioxidants and anti-inflammatories. Sleep seems passive, but a lot of things are going on while you are sleeping that effect your body and your mind.
WHAT HAPPENS IF WE DON’T GET ENOUGH SLEEP?
Lack of sleep has a negative impact on both your mind and on your body. Many effects of sleep deprivation come quickly; other effects are cumulative over time.
Your mental processes change rapidly if you don’t have adequate sleep. Different studies report the following changes in sleep deprived subjects:
- Increased irritability
- Cognitive impairment
- Memory lapses or memory loss
- Reported mental fatigue
If you think about what happens to you when you lose sleep, you can probably think of examples of these effects. Can you think of a time when you snapped at a parent or friend for no reason after several nights in a row of studying past midnight? Or can you remember doing poorly on a test when you were sure you had studied the material the night before? Maybe lack of sleep is the culprit.
The changes in your mental processes from lack of sleep will have an immediate impact on your athletic performance, too. Your endurance performance can be affected by one night of reduced sleep. Just one night of sleep deprivation increases the perceived effort in endurance athletes (Martin, Effect of sleep deprivation on prolonged exercise, 1981). What is going on in your head has a huge impact on how you perform in your sport. And after one night without sleep, your head is going to tell you that you don’t have a lot of energy.
A 2009 study showed that subjects time to exhaustion shortened by 5 to 40% after just one night without sleep (Oliver, One night of sleep deprivation reduces treadmill performance, 2009). So if you are thinking you can go run a race or even a hard workout after an all-nighter, forget it.
In the long term, adequate sleep correlates strongly with decreased injury rates. A recent study focused on new recruits in training in the Israeli army. Any of us who have watched old war movies have learned that recruits are woken up in the middle of the night for drills all the time! Well, the Israeli army tried giving their recruits more sleep and found out that the incidence of stress fractures went down. Why? They found that with increased sleep, the bones had more opportunity to remodel and strengthen. (Finestone and Milgrom, How stress fracture incidence was lowered in the Israeli army, 2009).
There are other effects that different studies have highlighted, including weight gain, decreased reaction time, impaired immune systems, and some studies have even suggested major long-term health risks such as cancer and diabetes. We are not saying that this is going to happen to you, we are not trying to scare you, we are just saying that there are many, many scientific studies that say a healthy amount of sleep is good for us, and a lack of sleep has many negative implications.
So pay attention. You might think ‘Oh, hey, I’m different, I don’t need to sleep that much.’ You might say, ‘I hear that there is a magic elixir I can drink so I can go without sleep.’ That is just not true! You might be able to take something that can keep you awake, but that does not replace sleep. You have to get sleep.
This is freaking science, dude!
HOW MUCH SLEEP DO WE NEED?
On average, it appears that humans need six to eight hours of good, solid, uninterrupted sleep each night. Of course you are a person not a statistic and everyone is a little unique! However, you are probably within that range.
(By the way—you cannot ‘bank’ sleep. I find a lot of Monta Vista kids say that they ‘catch up’ on sleep over the weekends. If you need 8 hours of sleep a night/56 hours a week, it turns out that when it comes to sleep,
8+8+8+8+8+8+8 does NOT equal 5+4+6+5+12+12+12
Sorry!)
You can figure out on your own how much sleep you need. If you have trouble getting going in the morning—the alarm clock or your mom shaking you awake is torture, you need a sugary snack or something with caffeine to get going, and by 11am you are taking a nap in AP Quantum Mechanics—well, then, you probably are not getting enough sleep.
It is time for an experiment. Start logging the number of hours you sleep every night. Then try a week where you give yourself an extra hour of sleep every night over this base. Do you feel like you are thinking a little more clearly? How was that quiz in biology? Did that run feel easier? How did your muscles bounce back from a hard workout?
If you are feeling better, maybe you need to figure out how to make this new sleep pattern part of your normal routine.
HOW TO ORGANIZE OUR LIVES?
Being a Monta Vista student-athlete is tough. There is no reason to deny that truth. You have challenging academics, a lot of interesting extracurricular activities, and you are in a competitive environment. You also have a family that cares about you and you want to spend time with, and friends who are important to you. However, it is still possible to get the grades you want, compete at the level you want to, and have activities that are important to you and still get enough sleep.
Before you say ‘no, coach, you don’t understand my situation, Monta Vista classes are really hard, that’s impossible!’, remember our friend Kate Niehaus.
http://www.mvrunning.com/news/kate-you-are-great/
Kate got her bioengineering bachelors and masters degrees from Stanford, while being part of the championship cross-country team and the track team. Kate had the highest GPA of anyone at the NCAA XC championship—and she was taking science classes at Stanford not phys-ed classes someplace less academically rigorous! (Let’s take a moment to think about how amazing runners are…I love runners and track athletes! There are so many of us who end up accomplishing such great things, and are such great people! Such as Kate.)
So you can organize your life to get what you want and get the sleep you need, just like Kate did. First, figure out the things that are most important to you—your grades at school, your family, building your assassin robot, athletics, whatever. Can you identify big uses of time that are not on this list?—Facebook, Call of Duty, watching every episode of Glee multiple times, whatever. Figure out opportunities to cut out things that take time that really are not important to you. Then figure out ways to fill in the cracks in your day with some studying; Kate talked about how she would crack a book for 20 minutes while waiting for her potatoes to bake in the oven, and how those bits of time added up. You can do that too.
BOTTOM LINE
Yes, the life of a student-athlete is tough. We are talking about sleep now, but you also have to keep your grades up while you train, hydrate, eat right and still get plenty of sleep. But you can do all of these things—and when you do, not only will you be healthy, but you are setting yourself up for long term success in life.
Monta Vistans are achievers, and achievers are always going to have lots of good things going on in their lives. Today it is school, athletics, family and DECA or robotics or the Yearbook. Tomorrow it might be college, club sports and some other cool activity. And later, it will be a job and family, or writing the great American novel, or starting a company, or curing cancer. Whatever it is you are trying to achieve, you need to organize your life to do the important things well—and get your sleep!
(This article was inspired by a Monta Vista athlete who I hope will always keep striving to achieve—and take care of herself, too. I hope this helps every achiever on the Monta Vista track & field and cross-country teams take a little better care of themselves, and accomplish a little bit more.)
