Sleep is one of the most important tools for enhancing recovery and improving performance. Wahoo coaches Dr. Jinger Gottschall and Suzie Synder look at the dynamics of sleep, why it's so critical, and serve up some top tips for getting a good night's rest.
For athletes, sleep is the ideal recovery tool. Lack of proper sleep can slow down training adaptation and may actually increase the risk of injury or illness. Despite the importance of sleep, many athletes are often unable to get good, quality sleep, especially during hard training blocks or leading up to the competition. In this episode, Wahoo Sports Science coaches Dr. Jinger Gottschall and Suzie Snyder look at the dynamics of sleep, why it's so critical, and serve up some top tips for getting a good night's rest.
**Learn more:**
How to Get a Good Night's Sleep
Recovery: When, How Much, and Does it Work
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Jinger Gottschall 0:00
Hey, welcome back to another episode of the knowledge podcast by Wahoo. I'm Dr. Jinger Gottschall, Director of applied sports science.
Suzie Snyder 0:08
And I'm Susie Snyder, a multi-sport coaching specialist or Wahoo sports science. And today we're discussing the importance of a good night's sleep as well as the three primary sleep stages. So Jinger,
Jinger Gottschall 0:20
Yeah,
Suzie Snyder 0:20
About you?
Jinger Gottschall 0:21
Uh-huh.
Suzie Snyder 0:22
But sleeping is not my forte. I know people that can sleep anywhere, anytime through anything. And I am so not one of them. I wake up to the slightest noise. I can't fall asleep. Unless it's dark and quiet. I've never been a good sleeper. And it's so frustrating. And I feel like I've tried everything. And I'm still trying, and it's just terrible
Jinger Gottschall 0:44
And it's kind of messes with your mind. Right? Once you are in that I can't get to sleep. I'm not getting to sleep and the time is ticking, ticking into the wee morning hours. It doesn't help.
Suzie Snyder 0:57
Yeah,
Jinger Gottschall 0:57
It's anxiety-producing
Suzie Snyder 0:59
Yeah, How about you?
Jinger Gottschall 1:00
Well, I don't want you to kill me. But...
Suzie Snyder 1:03
I'm not gonna say it right now.
Jinger Gottschall 1:05
I am that annoying, can sleep anywhere go to sleep super fast person. And that might actually show signs of other things that aren't ideal. Like, perhaps I'm not getting enough sleep in general, which is allowing me to fall asleep super easy and stay asleep while I'm actually in bed. But what we want to do today is first to tell you why we care so much about this topic, and the importance of sleep, particularly for endurance athletes, and also what the stages are and how you can start to learn about them independently, and how tracking can actually be super beneficial for you.
Suzie Snyder 1:45
You know this is such a big topic. Today, let's talk about the phases let's break them down. So we understand what's happening while we sleep, and why sleep is so important. And why we as athletes typically call it our best recovery tool.
Jinger Gottschall 1:58
Awesome. This is when our minds and bodies are recovering. And it is also going to be when the adaptation occurs. So I think a lot of folks have heard that when you get stronger is when you're sleeping. And although that's kind of a bit of advice for strength training, it's actually the exact same for endurance athletes. So that's why we want to make sure that we understand how to improve it. And what it's all about. The recommended amount of sleep is seven to nine hours and healthy adults. And endurance athletes can actually push this towards that nine-hour and even more into 10. If you find you need that, or you're going through particular times when that would be helpful with a high load. The thing is with athletes, as you know because I happen to know when you wake up in the morning, and it's not late, let's just say
Suzie Snyder 2:51
There's no sleeping in,
Jinger Gottschall 2:52
Right
Suzie Snyder 2:52
Ever.
Jinger Gottschall 2:53
And you can imagine this is going to be the same for a lot of endurance athletes. So that's one big thing. We are waking up really early to make sure we're getting the training in there are periods of increasingly high load. We're often traveling for races, and performing at various temperatures and altitudes. All of these factors lead to reduced sleep time.
Suzie Snyder 3:17
Oh my god. Yeah. I go to Costa Rica to race and there's no air conditioning. How are you supposed to say that it doesn't drop below, like at night? How are you supposed to sleep?
Jinger Gottschall 3:27
Right? So you're switching timezones in a completely different climate than you're used to? And it's going to reduce those hours. So we athletes want to be thinking about these details, and how we can basically improve them in order to get more sleep.
Suzie Snyder 3:44
You know, it's just one more thing to add to your training diary.
Jinger Gottschall 3:46
Right?
Suzie Snyder 3:47
No big deal.
Jinger Gottschall 3:48
We love metrics. Yeah, we heart metrics,
Suzie Snyder 3:51
Metrics and research. There's so much research on sleep. We'll just give you a couple of little tidbits here. One really kind of scary point from the National Health Service in the UK. They said that lack of sleep can increase your risk of cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes, high blood pressure, mental illness, and a weakened immune system. And all of that ultimately leads to a shortened life expectancy.
Jinger Gottschall 4:17
Very scary. And that actually is in parallel to a 2014 report in the US that found that of the 15 leading causes of death seven of them so almost half are directly linked to reduced sleep duration.
Suzie Snyder 4:35
It's not just you know, one night a bad sleep, right? I mean, one night of bad sleep can be bad. A recent study that I read found that individuals who got less than six hours of sleep on consecutive nights, they experienced negative effects on both physical and mental well being but even just one night of bad sleep the next day resulted in feelings of frustration, anger, nervousness, loneliness, and irritability. Those are not qualities we want.
Want to express when we're going to the office to interact with our peers?
Jinger Gottschall 5:04
Disturbed mood states? That's all I'm gonna say disturbed mood states. Also, I do want to give you one fun fact Susie, I don't know how this one is or not, I like fun. It's actually two nights before competition day. That's the sleep that matters that evening. Did you know that some Flippin smart love put anything past you?
Suzie Snyder 5:26
I love that fun fact!
Jinger Gottschall 5:28
It is so cool, though. Because I know, that night before the actual competition is just much lighter sleep, and constantly worried about waking up on time and going through this mental checklist of the day. That's ahead. So give yourself a pass. That's not the most important night if you can actually not travel until you absolutely have to and have that two nights before be the critical one then came on?
Suzie Snyder 5:55
Yeah, I mean, I've had so many races that I've slept so badly the night before, and still perform just fine. And, you know, part of it is because I know, okay, I slept Okay, two nights before, so I'll be fine. It's a little mental game totally. But if I sleep terribly two nights before, then it's a mental game that you're like works so well in our favor, right. And then maybe you get better than the night before a race. And it all evens out. That's a whole nother
Jinger Gottschall 6:27
What we've just been talking to you about so far, is sleep duration in general. And what we want to now get into is a little bit more complex. because sleep is not created equal, there are stages within our sleep. Thankfully, these days, there are many different types of devices that allow us to track them. And we will describe the stages for you the optimal percent of the time and what they mean in terms of if you get less or more of them. So again, you can use this as a helpful tool and strategy in your training.
Suzie Snyder 7:04
Let's start with deep sleep because it's the most restorative and the most rejuvenating. So this phase is when your body goes into repair mode, your muscles grow, they repair themselves, and they use all that great nutrition that you take in after your training session. They use that to do that deep repair, your immune system also goes through the same process, refreshes itself, and uses all those nutrients to bump up, shall we say, defense to the colds that are going around and all that stuff. And then your brain also flushes out all these toxins that accumulate during the day. So during this phase, all this can happen because your body just comes down to a really low resting state, your blood pressure comes down your heart rate, and your breathing rates both come down. They just stay really low and steady and your body's just completely relaxed. All of these functions can happen easily in your body just that's what it does. Experts say that on average, adults need 15 to 20% of their sleep time in this face of deep sleep. If you're sleeping the recommended seven to nine hours, right, that's about 60 to 90 minutes.
Jinger Gottschall 8:16
Okay, total. And is this broken up?
Suzie Snyder 8:18
Well, one more note on that. Experts say that there's no such thing as too much deep sleep.
Jinger Gottschall 8:23
Ohhhhh
Suzie Snyder 8:24
So the more you sleep in deep sleep, the better your body can repair itself. So and yes, it's broken up because we sleep in cycles, right, which we'll talk about, yeah, it's broken up through the night. Typically you get more deep sleep early on in the night, or during the first couple of cycles that you sleep, you get more deep sleep. And then later in the night and towards the morning, we typically get more REM sleep.
Jinger Gottschall 8:50
Great. If you have a tracker that is actually allowing you to see each individual stage in that minute by minute or block by block time. That's what Susie's referring to, you're not going to necessarily see these hour-plus long in one certain stage, it can be anywhere from around 10 to 30 minutes in this deep stage that you would see then repeated anywhere from depending on how many cycles that you're getting. It could be from five to seven of these cycles.
Suzie Snyder 9:21
And there is a myth out there that older people need less sleep and less deep sleep especially, I did find something from the National Sleep Foundation that says that's a total myth and that older people need just as much as younger people recommended seven to nine hours, no change.
Jinger Gottschall 9:40
Right. So I think another thing that's changing is that older adults are maintaining their activity levels. So, therefore, we're starting to understand a little bit more than age doesn't necessarily dictate what we can and can't do in training as well as in this recovery and sleep. Right scenario.
Suzie Snyder 10:00
And we know that exercise helps you sleep better.
Jinger Gottschall 10:02
This is also true. I don't know...
Suzie Snyder 10:04
Our support for exercise.
Jinger Gottschall 10:06
Just one more reason why exercise is critical.
Suzie Snyder 10:09
That's right.
Jinger Gottschall 10:10
Susie just mentioned the second stage that we're going to chat about, which is rapid eye movement, or REM. This is actually where we dream. This is another thing for me, I never remember my dreams. Therefore, it might be that I have less REM and am deeper. It's also the time when we are consolidating our memories, and process both emotions. And that includes stress. And along with that goes, cortisol that we end up bringing up a lot, that's our stress hormone during REM is when we actually see a drop in cortisol. So it is a critical stage just for that simple reason. Rem starts after about 90 minutes of falling asleep. So where you said deep sleep can begin much earlier. And within the first cycle, sometimes we don't see REM start until the second cycle for folks. And that's okay, it's meaning that we're kind of going in and out of this brain active and inactive stages. And it's when we can actually start to really bring the stress level down recommended time in this stage is 20 to 25%. So again, if we are shooting for that seven to nine hours, we're going to be talking anywhere from about 90 minutes to 120 or two hours of your total time. So the right amount of REM is important.
Suzie Snyder 11:42
I know I don't get a lot of REM. So.
Jinger Gottschall 11:44
I don't know, I don't know if I do either. If you don't get enough, it can actually leave you in this heightened state of arousal. But if you get too much, then sometimes you have really intense dreams, which is why I think I don't get a lot because my dreams are actually non-existent in terms of me recalling them, or very few times do I actually have an emotionally charged dream?
Suzie Snyder 12:09
Yeah, cuz seems like the more intense dream you have, the more likely you are to remember when you wake up very true. And speaking of tired, light sleep is such a big part of I know, based on my tracking, I, a huge amount of my sleep is light sleep, okay, which it's normal that you go into light sleep first when you fall asleep, and then you fall into a deep sleep. And then your light sleep is kind of a transitional phase. So typically, adults spend about 50% of their sleep time in this light sleep where you know, it's not deep, it's not REM, I guess we don't really know that much about it. It's just that transition phase, not much happened in there. Now.
Jinger Gottschall 12:54
And in this light phase, you might also see very brief times of awakening. And there can be really anywhere between five to even 20 of these little bursts that you don't even know that you're awake. But again, that's because we're in a lighter stage, and we're transitioning between zones, we've gone over the sleep importance, we've gone over these stages. And the other part is the quality in terms of restfulness. And that is basically how much you're moving around and how comfortable you can be. And there are also strategies to assist you with this with respect to your sleep environment,
Suzie Snyder 13:34
The things that wake you up and make you fight for the bed or whatever that constant battle is these things, you know, they affect how you feel the next day, right. So we as athletes, often make decisions based on our sleep, in terms of our training based on how we feel in the morning. And you don't need an app to track it or a device to tell you how you slept, you wake up and you know, how you feel and how you slept. So a lot of times, we'll have an intense training session on the schedule and be like, You know what, I do not feel like doing that session today. I am tired, I cannot get going. You know, you start your warm-up and heart rates not coming up. My body's telling me, nope, this doesn't happen. So I guess I'm doing an endurance spin today. So we just make these decisions based on our sleep, and especially if we feel like we need more deep sleep or we need more sleep, we know that our bodies need more recovery. Yes. And there's plenty of research that supports that theory.
Jinger Gottschall 14:35
Absolutely. And therefore listen to your body. Yeah. And there's something to be said for not necessarily being motivated for a workout but still being able to do it high quality. And on the other side of that is feeling very tired and modifying that workout. So you're still moving and feel successful but you're not pushing yourself over the edge.
There's also an athlete's mental strain, which is going to come from all of your varying life stress stresses. And when an athlete is just experiencing the mental strain, you'll typically notice just decreased total sleep time and decreased light sleep when you add in additional physical strain. So from the training load, then you might see a decrease in the REM. And that's when you want to then be aware. I'm not only physically but I'm also mentally stressed. And if that REM is continuing to go down, then it's maybe time to pull back a little bit and try to make some adjustments.
Suzie Snyder 15:37
Yeah, recover away. Sleepaway.
Jinger Gottschall 15:39
Sleepaway. You have total permission to get out. Yes. Get some extra z's. Well, that is it for another episode of the knowledge podcast by Wahoo. We hope that this episode gives you some tips about why sleep is important. Understand the various stages and then you can use it to become an even better endurance athlete.