Athletes often struggle with sleep
Getting good sleep as an athlete is hard. Early sessions steal the morning hours in bed and late evening training makes it harder to fall asleep. Athletes, of course, have to juggle all of the other obligations and responsibilities on top of exercise too. If there’s too much to do, sleep is usually the thing that gives. As if the time pressure wasn’t enough, hard training itself can create extra stress that impacts sleep. Unfortunately, research shows that adults who habitually get fewer than 7 hours of sleep per night are more susceptible to respiratory infections. Sleep affects your immune health
There’s nothing worse than missing a week of training because of an illness. That’s why researchers at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK decided to investigate the relationship between sleep and immune health. They studied more than 1,300 army recruits who went through a 12-week training programme. The recruits were asked about their sleep habits before they joined the training and the researchers then divided them into two groups. Those who slept their usual number of hours during the 12-week training
Those who were asked to sleep at least 2 hours fewer per night than their habitual sleep
Their sleep duration was recorded over the 12-week period and they were also asked to evaluate the quality of their sleep. Their physician-diagnosed upper respiratory tract infections were recorded to see which group was more likely to get ill. We all have […]
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