Early morning practices might be a staple in college sports, but they could be scoring an own goal when it comes to the sleep health of student-athletes. Recent findings from a study at The Ohio State University, reported by more than 27,000 sleep records, suggest that these pre-dawn training sessions are significantly cutting into athletes' rest.
The research, meticulously collected over five years, included data from 359 varsity athletes wearing sleep trackers. It revealed that athletes are set to lose about 20 to 30 minutes of sleep the night before an early morning practice, which typically begins before 8 a.m. "The strength of our study is that we have objective data on a large sample of athletes showing the impact of early practices on sleep," Emaly Vatne, lead author of the study and a PhD student at Ohio State, told the Ohio State University's news outlet.
It's not just the quantity of sleep that's taking a hit; the quality is too. The study observed that sleep was less efficient and that athletes took longer to fall asleep on nights preceding early workouts. This new evidence challenges the prevailing trend of predawn training, equipping coaches and athletic directors with quantitative data to potentially reevaluate practice schedules.
What's perhaps even more telling is the behavioral change noted in the study: athletes were found to stay up over an hour later when practices were scheduled for the afternoon. Joshua Hagen, co-author of the study and faculty director of the Ohio State Human Performance Collaborative, reflected that "Coaches and others may have this intuition that early practices are not optimal for sleep, but now we have the data to quantify that," according to the news release from Ohio State News.
The study involved athletes from a variety of sports, including football, basketball, ice hockey, and swimming, providing a comprehensive look at the issue across different disciplines. The findings, published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, underscore the importance of sleep for both daily recovery and peak athletic performance. With sleep recognized as a critical element of success, it may be time to rethink how to best balance team schedules and athletes' circadian needs.
