How to Enhance Performance With Better Sleep

1. Dr. Andy Galpin

   The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. Hello, everyone. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor of kinesiology in the Center for Sport Performance at Cal State Fullerton. In today's show, we're going to be talking about sleep performance. Now, I like the term sleep performance to really indicate the difference between going from good sleep to great sleep. And so what I don't want to spend much time on today is talking about things like complete sleep deprivation, so what happens to physical performance when you go 24 hours or 48 straight hours without sleep. I don't even really want to talk about what I'll call extreme sleep restriction, so sleeping for two hours a night, four hours a night, things like that, or even a single bad night of sleep. What I really want to spend most of our time here talking about is what really happens, does anything happen, when I go from six or seven hours of sleep to eight or nine?

2. Dr. Andy Galpin

   How much of a competitive advantage am I getting over other high performers when I can go from that good to great sleep? We're also going to talk about why you should be approaching your sleep with the same vigor and specificity as you're doing your nutrition or your exercise training. Think about it this way. If you were trying to perform at your absolute highest and you had the resources, or if you simply look at the model for those individuals who do, you would see that they have dedicated professionals for high-performance nutrition. And you probably have done, or would do rather, some sort of extensive blood work or testing so that you can get the best nutrition supplementation for your unique body. We would take a similar approach, right? Some sort of advanced testing, perhaps, and an individualized program that is being modified and adapted as our goals are changing, as our body is responding, as we move throughout our life.

3. Dr. Andy Galpin

   Now, in the sport performance world, we call this periodization. So this is a phrase where we have different volumes or intensities or exercises and goals based upon different phases of the year, trying to get to a specific outcome. We wouldn't necessarily eat the same thing every day if our training wasn't the same. We would adjust our food intake or our calories. We would have more volume in our workouts. We'd have less volume. We would have more days off, less recovery, and everything else that goes into this. So you see what I'm getting at here, right? This is the idea that what we eat and how we train are highly responsive and adaptive to both our unique physiology as well as what we're expecting out of our body. Why do we not have the same approach with sleep? Well, the answer is we can, and in fact, I'll try to convince you here that we should. We should be taking the same level of specificity and precision with our sleep.

4. Dr. Andy Galpin

   Our plan and protocols should be adapting and changing based on how our body is responding and what we're asking our body to do. Now, as you can probably tell, I'm so fired up about this, I'm doing my best to mentally go slow here so I don't trip over my own words. I'm completely obsessed with this topic, and I've been on it for a while now, and that's because the data are so robust and impressive about what happens when you optimize sleep performance. So again, I'm not really talking about the consequences of bad sleep on your long-term health or things like that. It's the opposite. It is how much of an advantage you can create in your performance when you sleep better. One quick example here, because it's something we're dealing with right now with a handful of our NFL athletes, and that is the ability to aid in injury recovery, post-surgery, as well as even return to play for concussion and other physical problems when we're maximizing sleep.

5. Dr. Andy Galpin

   But then there's also the direct performance benefit. Pick your metric here, whether you want to look at surrogates and physical attributes, things like endurance, coordination, speed, physical strength, et cetera. You want to look at on-field play, so basketball shooting accuracy, tennis serving accuracy, or other markers of, again, performance directly on the field. But then probably the one we use most often is it directly translates into more wins, and these data are very well-rounded from a number of areas, the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, the Olympics, PGA Tour, et cetera. There is clear and impressive evidence that those who maximize their sleep win more games. Now, I know what you're probably thinking. That's great, Andy. I'm sold, I'm bought in, I want those benefits, but it's just not feasible for me to sleep more. Any number of reasons, whether you're an athlete or not, that could be legit.

6. Dr. Andy Galpin

   And so I want to make it ultra clear here, I'm not only talking about the need to just extend sleep and sleep more hours, but how you can mimic the benefits of sleep extension for these performance enhancement, for these injury mitigation, and return to play benefits without just extending the hours you sleep. Let me give you a couple examples here. What you may or may not realize is, depending on the study you pull, somewhere between 20% to 40% of athletes have clinical sleep disorders. And so by simply treating those things with any number of simple and specific solutions, you can create such improvements in sleep quality that you're effectively extending sleep. An easy example here for a Major League Baseball player I worked with for a very long time. We had no reason to think he had a sleep disorder. Slept pretty well, but not great. Kind of the same thing you'll hear most people say.

7. Dr. Andy Galpin

   I think I sleep pretty well. I'm not having huge issues, but I also don't feel incredible either. And so we were actually to get a full appropriate diagnostic of him, found he was actually having a large number of sleep issues at night. But the solution is the fun part here. We were able to actually buy him a very cheap pillow, if you will. It kind of looks like a fanny pack that you wear in reverse, and that kept him from sleeping on his back. That reduced the amount of times he woke up throughout the night by about 80% in the very first night, and it stayed that way ever since. So again, just another example of the power of precision in treating your sleep the same way you would treat your training and nutrition allowed us to create an incredibly powerful sleep extension solution with very minimal effort, and it didn't require us to change his daily schedule, ask him to get to bed much earlier, or any other things that are sometimes not realistic for your personal situation.

8. Dr. Andy Galpin

   So for those reasons and many, many more, I'm super pumped to be talking about sleep performance today. Now, in doing that, we're going to cover a lot of the research, both systematic reviews, meta-analyses, as well as direct studies on this. I've also talked to a number of professional experts in this field, and so I'm going to be bringing you a combination of what the research says, what these experts in the field say, what I've used in the athletes I've worked with, and my personal experience, and we're going to bring all that together in a cohesive system to help you do what we always do here, and that is address the three I's. So we'll start off by investigate. So how do you investigate? How do you measure and diagnose and manage your sleep? The second I being, of course, how do you interpret that? How do I know if that's good, great, okay, sufficient, good enough, or et cetera? And then three, how do I intervene?

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