A School of Medicine study on the men’s basketball team published in this month’s issue of Sleep concluded that sleep extension — an increase in the time spent sleeping over baseline amounts — leads to improved athletic performance.
The research team measured sleep patterns during a two-week baseline evaluation, then asked 11 members of the team to sleep at least 10 hours a night over a five-to-seven-week period. Researchers then tested the athletes’ shooting accuracy and sprint times.
“[The traditional athletic-training regimen] has a lot of emphasis on the physical training: the conditioning, the workouts,” said Cheri Mah ’06 M.S. ‘06, first author and researcher at the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Laboratory. “When you get to Stanford, there’s a little bit more of the nutrition, obviously coaching plays a big factor, but in all of these emphases, there hasn’t been one on sleep and recovery.”
[…] At the study’s conclusion, free-throw shooting accuracy increased by an average of nine percent, three-point field goal accuracy increased by an average of 9.5 percent and average sprint times decreased by about five percent.
