7 Sleeping Tips for Student-Athletes
November 5, 2019
Henry Ford Health System
Many athletes seem to believe time spent not training is time wasted. But, on the contrary.
The time athletes spend resting and sleeping is actually just as important. Take the world’s best female skier, Mikaela Shiffrin, for example. Shiffrin reportedly not only sleeps nine hours each night, but naps at least an hour every day.
So, what does sleeping have to do with her success? When asleep, the body not only has time to recover, but the information that was taken in during the day goes from short-term memory and becomes long term.
“Being an elite athlete is a 24-hour profession, and sleep and recovery are integral to optimal performance,” says Meeta Singh, M.D., a sleep medicine specialist at Henry Ford Health System.
Here are seven tips to help your student athlete catch some Zzzs during the season:
1. Limit caffeine. Caffeine is a popular ingredient in many pre-workout drinks, and many athletes choose to use it for an energy boost. However, having caffeine late in the day may make falling asleep and staying asleep difficult. But, everyone reacts differently to caffeine, so athletes should try logging their intake to determine what time to stop consuming and how much is okay to consume.
2. Maintain a regular sleep schedule. The body has an internal clock that’s largely affected by environment. Going to bed and waking up at approximately the same time each day can add a natural rhythm to the body’s internal clock, which can cause people to feel more awake during the day and fall asleep easily at night.
3. Workout early. Often times, working out later in the day gives people a burst of energy that can keep them up late into the night. For example, exercising after 9 p.m. can boost body temperature, making sleep difficult. However, research shows morning workouts can help achieve deeper sleep, and working out in the afternoon can help reduce insomnia.
4. Unplug. Nothing can keep one up at night like a buzzing smartphone. Additionally, the blue light a phone emits may slow the production of melatonin, making sleep difficult. Advise your children to leave electronics out of reach while they’re sleeping. And as an added bonus: If their phone is their alarm, it will force them out of bed in the mornings.
5. Use essential oils. Essential oils have seen growing popularity in recent years, and this is in part because scent helps trigger memory. Oils can be diffused, rubbed on temples or drops can be spread on pillows. Popular oils for promoting sleep are lavender, valerian root and roman chamomile.
6. Focus on breathing. Focusing on breath can help steady heart rate and relax the body. A popular breathing technique is the 4-7-8 exercise, in which one inhales through the nose for four seconds, holds their breath for seven, and exhales for eight.
7. Keep it dark, cool and quiet. Having the right environment is an important part of falling asleep … and staying asleep.
Ultimately, when it comes to enhancing athletic performance, getting proper sleep, resting and recovering can be just as important as training or hitting the gym.
“Since sleep can modulate reaction time and accuracy, it’s important to ensure an athlete gets his or her Zzzs,” Dr. Singh says.
See also: Is Your Teen Sleep Deprived?
Want to learn more? Henry Ford Health System sports medicine experts are treating the whole athlete, in a whole new way. From nutrition to neurology, and from injury prevention to treatment of sports-related conditions, they can give your athlete a unique game plan.
Visit henryford.com/sports or call (313) 972-4216 for an appointment within 24 business hours.
NFHS Voice: Find Answers at Youth Level
November 13, 2019
By Karissa Niehoff
NFHS Executive Director
Are there long-term solutions to increasing the number of participants in high school sports and improving parental behavior at high school contests? The answer to both questions might start at the youth sports level.
The NFHS hosted a first-ever meeting of about 25 leaders of National Governing Bodies and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee last week to discuss common concerns and opportunities to align and work together.
Within the youth areas of these organizations, the issues are familiar ones to high school leaders – decline in participation, parent behavior, coaches education and minimizing the injury risk. Clearly, however, reaching parents with appropriate educational messages on sportsmanship, injury risk and the values of participation is a top priority for leaders at all levels – youth, middle school and high school sports.
Recently, the NFHS formed a Middle School Committee in an effort to build interest in education-based sports at that level and to share the proper messages with parents before their kids reach high school. However, as we learned last week, middle school may even be too late!
Those educational messages will be enhanced if the process starts in out-of-school youth sports. If messages about the values of multi-sport participation, playing for the love of the game, and limiting contact in sports like football are consistently shared and demonstrated at the youth level, the education-based concept should be firmly in place by the time students reach high school.
Coaches education is another common concern. While the NFHS has created an outstanding online education program for interscholastic coaches through the NFHS Learning Center (www.NFHSLearn.com), there is no standard requirement to coach at the youth level. There should be some type of required certification for anyone to walk onto a field or court to coach. And while knowledge about teaching the proper tackling form in football or the proper defensive positioning in basketball is important, those are not the most important prerequisites for coaching.
Similar to the NFHS’ online Fundamentals of Coaching course, youth coaches should be required to take courses that help them learn how to coach the kids more so than the sport. And since many of the coaches at this level are parents of players on the team, these individuals – and all youth parents – should be presented materials similar to what is presented at preseason meetings at the high school level. This would include, among other things, the non-negotiable requirement to positively support their child while letting the coaches coach, and the officials officiate.
Lofty goals, for sure, without a collective governing organization over youth sports. However, these concepts can be endorsed and promoted within the youth areas of sport-specific NGBs. These fundamentals of education-based athletics are essential for the 2-3 percent who play sports beyond high school as well as the majority who apply the values learned in high school sports in their chosen careers.
The skills will eventually fade – even for those individuals who play sports beyond high school – but the values learned from playing sports, beginning at the youth sports level, will last a lifetime.
Dr. Karissa L. Niehoff is in her second year as executive director of the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) in Indianapolis, Indiana. She is the first female to head the national leadership organization for high school athletics and performing arts activities and the sixth full-time executive director of the NFHS, which celebrated its 100th year of service during the 2018-19 school year. She previously was executive director of the Connecticut Association of Schools-Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference for seven years.