Multisport: To Sleep or Not to Sleep?

By Kelli Emmett, CTS Senior Coach

All athletes have good intentions of getting the necessary sleep before jumping out of bed in the morning. Yet, when life gets in the way, it is easy to skip a few hours of sleep to finish off more of a busy day’s tasks. This leads to the inevitable question: Should you take the next day off from training to get a few extra hours of sleep?

A few questions you might want to ask before dragging yourself out of bed at 5 am are: How many days in a row have you slept less than 7 to 8 hours? Has your resting heart rate been higher then normal within the last several days? How rested should you be to maximize the benefit of this workout?

While a single night of poor sleep will not affect your overall performance, consistent sleep deprivation could be detrimental to your training. A study, led by Eve Van Cauter Ph.D., researcher at the University of Chicago, IL suggested that, at rest, athletes who are sleep deprived move glucose from the blood into waiting tissues 40 percent slower than when they are fully rested1. This could make it extremely difficult for endurance athletes to replenish their fuel tanks and perform at their best the next day. This study also confirmed that your body releases human growth hormone that repairs and strengthens muscles, and revitalizes the immune system while you are asleep. Therefore, consistently cutting into your sleep time may do you more harm than simply making you tired.

One way to help you determine if more sleep or higher quality sleep should be made an immediate priority is to measure your resting heart rate. During a week in which you are healthy and rested, find your average waking pulse so you have a good baseline value for comparison. It is best to measure your heart rate as soon as you wake up and before you get out of bed. Any time your heart rate is 5 or more beats higher than your baseline value, consider it a warning sign and make an effort to get extra rest.

Intense training requires intense recovery. The importance of doing high intensity training is to push your self harder than you normally would. In order to do this, you must be psychologically and physically ready to give it your all. Lack of sleep can negatively impact that mental edge necessary to push yourself to maximum power output.

The best advice to heed is to listen to your body. If you are continuously feeling tired and exhausted day after day, then a few days away from training would do you some good. If you still lack a strong desire to train, then a full week away from training might be just what the coach orders.

To answer the original question about the wisdom of skipping workout after late or restless nights, get up and do your workout if trouble sleeping is an occasional occurrence. If troubled sleep happens regularly, or happens for more than two nights in a row, stay in bed and skip your morning workout.

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1. Spiegel, Leproult and Van Cauter, Impact of sleep debt on metabolic and endocrine function. The Lancet (1999;354:1435-1439).

Kelli Emmett is a Senior Coach for Carmichael Training Systems, Inc. (CTS) and a professional mountain racer for the Ford Cycling Team. As the winner of the 24 Hours of Moab mountain bike race in the Solo Women category, she’s an expert on sleep and sleeplessness. To find out what CTS can do for you, visit www.trainright.com.

© 2005, Carmichael Training Systems, Inc.