How to Enhance Performance With Better Sleep

**Andy Galpin** (0:00)
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 gonna 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 wanna 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 wanna 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 wanna 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?
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 gonna 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. I mean, kind of think about it this way. If you were trying to perform 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. 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. Now in the sport performance world, we kind of 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.
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 the 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. 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, et cetera. There is clear and impressive evidence that those who maximize their sleep win more games.