Do This Tonight to Play Better Hockey Tomorrow
I bumped into a very interesting study that depicts the effects of sleep on athletic performance.
Athletes from several different sports at Stanford University underwent a sleep extension period with a minimum goal of 10 hours in bed each night.
Check out what happened to athletes who did so over the course of 5-7 weeks...
Swimmers:
* Improved their 15-meter sprint times by 0.51 seconds
* Reacted 0.15 seconds quicker off the blocks
* Improved turn time by 0.10 seconds
Football players:
* Average 20-yard shuttle improved from 4.71 seconds to 4.61 seconds
* Average 40-yard dash decreased from 4.99 seconds to 4.89 seconds
Tennis players:
* Average sprinting drill time decreased from 19.12 seconds to 17.56 seconds
* Hitting accuracy including valid serves increased from 12.6 to 15.61 serves
Basketball players:
* 282-foot shuttle runs improved from 16.2 seconds to 15.5 seconds
* 10 free throws shot from 15 feet improved from 7.9 to 8.8 successful shots
* 15 three-point attempts improved from 10.2 to 11.6 successful shots
Another study by the same research group on elite male cyclists shows the negative effects of sleep restriction. With athletes who slept only 4 hours per night for three days in a row:
* Maximal aerobic power decreased 2.9%
* Time to exhaustion decreased by 10.7%
If all that number-crunching makes your head spin, here's the big takeaway:
Athletes who spent 10 hours a night between the sheets ran faster, reacted quicker, and hit or threw a ball with greater accuracy.
And those who got only 4 hours of shuteye fatigued faster and saw their performance take a dive.
An obvious conclusion from these research findings:
Sleep more. Play better.
For more athletic performance-boosting tricks, visit:
http://www.NextLevelHockeyTraining.com
Yunus Barisik
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