To Improve Fitness, Try Sleep

Tara Parker-Pope writes about a small study on sleep and fitness for the NY Times.

To Improve Fitness, Try Sleep

Most people training for a race or sport focus on adding more miles, workouts or weight training to improve their fitness. But new research suggests that simply getting more sleep can improve athletic performance.

The small study included five members of the Stanford women’s tennis team. For two to three weeks, the athletes maintained their regular schedules, sleeping and working out as usual. They took part in sprinting and hitting drills to measure their performance. Then the players were told to extend their sleep to 10 hours a night for five to six weeks.

After increasing sleep, the athletes performed better on all the drills. Sprinting drill times dropped on average to 17.56 seconds from 19.12 seconds. Hitting accuracy, measured by valid serves, improved to 15.61 serves, up from 12.6 serves, and a hitting depth drill improved to 15.45 hits, up from 10.85 hits.

Nice to see these ideas hitting the mainstream press.

Alpha^2