Preparing for competition athletes focus heavily on physical training, some also focus on their diet, but few focus on sleep.
Meet Isabella, a sprinter specialising mostly over 200m whose goal is “Want to become a pro athlete and it’s been my dream since I was younger“.
Isabella runs for Crawley Athletic Club, in May 2024 she ran a personal best (PB) of 24.20, close to the Euro u18 standard. Well on her way to achieving her dream of becoming a pro-athlete.
Isabella started the 2024 athletics season ranked U17 #1 in the UK at 200m. A five week lay off due to injury caused Isabella’s ranking dropped. At the time of writing Isabella was ranked 3rd overall for U17 200m.
Unable to train fully following her injury Isabella’s lead coach, Jon Humphries-Cuff, suggested she work with Aliénor to develop behaviours that could increase her energy availability.
Aliénor has worked alongside Jon with some of his other athletes, including Joel Masters, to help them identify areas where tuning their nutrition, sleep and stress behaviours could increase energy availability.
Unmasking the Challenge
Actively looking for any areas where she can find a performance gain, Isabella strives to achieve her goal
To help Isabella understand the areas where adjusting her behaviours had the potential to improve her energy availability we started by helping her to collect data about herself.
Being an evidenced based practice we knew that establishing this baseline would highlight the areas to work on and engage Isabella’s competitive desire to improve.
3 areas for improvement stood out from the data Isabella collected, of these the big one was sleep.
Figuring Out the Why
The evidence pointed to sleep as a key area for Isabella to focus on.
We developed Isabella’s knowledge base through exploring some of the scientific findings.
How does not enough/poor quality sleep affect athletic performance
Numerous studies point to the importance of sleep for all of us. Some of the findings relating to athletes include:
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Average and total sprint times decreased
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Athletes exhausted faster after sleep deprivation
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Lack of sleep adversely affected reaction time
Elite athletes are encouraged to consider sleep as important as training and diet.
Sleep permits the storage of energy. The absence of sleep prevents energy savings and instead energy stores meant for normal waking activity are used during the sleep deprivation period.
Isabella had recounted how she struggled to sleep through the night and consequently felt lethargic as a result. Putting this subjective evidence alongside the objective evidence of scientific study helped Isabella understand how her sleep may have been affecting her athletic performance.
Together we agreed a series of small actions that Isabella would do. Actions focussed on developing Isabella’s nighttime rituals. The aim being to put her in the best possible physical and mental position to benefit from deep sleep
For each of the actions we agreed how Isabella would measure the action, and what success looked/felt like.
As Isabella progressed through the actions she built new habits focussed on improving her sleep quality.
Unlocking Hidden Benefits
Within a matter of weeks Isabella was reporting that she was enjoying good quality sleep and sleeping through the night. Feeling refreshed each morning Isabella reported being less tired in school.
She’d successfully changed her habits and in the process improved her available energy.
We went on to work with Isabella on hydration and her confidence in how much to eat.
When Isabella returned to competition, she discovered that she had barely lost any time against her personal best:
Isabella ran 12.2 [100m race]
On the grand scheme of things, it’s a good time/race. Her PB is 11.9 but the truth is she had 5 weeks off the track and only 2 weeks of gradual training so overall we’re pleased with the result
– Jason, Isabella’s father
The invaluable support of nutrition and sleep coaching had enabled Isabella to unleash her energy potential. Creating a foundation upon which she could build on to get to the European’s.
References
The effects of sleep loss on capacity and effort, Engel-Friedmen, 2014
Intermittent-Sprint Performance and Muscle Glycogen after 30 h of Sleep Deprivation, Skien & Dufield, 2011
Effects of sleep deprivation on cardiorespiratory functions of the runners and volleyball players during rest and exercise, Azboy & Kaygisiz, 2009
The effect of sleep deprivation on choice reaction time and anaerobic power of college student athletes, Taheri & Arabameri, 2012