By Temo Mpodi
Sleep is necessary for every living soul but is also a cornerstone of peak athletic performance. According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, sleep is as essential for good health as diet and exercise. Good sleep improves your brain performance, mood, and wellness. Reaction times, decision-making, and overall stamina are crucial for outpacing the competition.
Paris 2024 is seeing 10,500 athletes from around the world participate in 16 days of world-class competition across 32 sports. Training programmes that began four years ago will now be tested, with getting enough sleep at the top of their list as they adjust to sleeping in a new sleep environment. Ryan Sandes is a South African trail runner who is no stranger to sleeping in awkward places. In 2010, he became the first competitor to have won all four of the 4 Deserts races, each a 6/7-day, 250-kilometer self-supported footrace through the Atacama Desert in Chile, the Gobi Desert in China, the Sahara Desert in Egypt, and lastly Antarctica. He has slept in cow sheds, ice caves, on rocky mountain cliffs, and sandy river beds. Sandes’s training programme can sometimes include up to 30 hours of running and mobility cross-training a week, and part of that training is improving his sleep quality. Ryan says that to maintain his peak performance, he aims to get eight hours of sleep every night, with consistency being the key.
Sleep is crucial for recovery. Proper sleep can boost an athlete’s performance by as much as 30 per cent. Eight hours’ sleep is optimum for peak performance. There are lab studies that show if you get just six hours of sleep, that two-hour difference can impact your performance, which equates to how you would perform if you had a 0.05 blood-alcohol level. World-class athletes like Sandes and those competing in the Olympics need their sleep if they’re going to bring home the gold.
Sleep experts at Bed King have experimented with different sleep solutions to help people find the right mattress and pillows for their body type. In 2018, they introduced pressure mapping technology, initially used in healthcare to help patients find comfort in wheelchairs and hospital beds. They introduced it into their stores as the Comfort Solutions Lab. The goal is to help customers find a mattress and pillow that provides comfort and the proper support, customised for their body shape. The bed in the Lab has 1600 built-in pressure sensors to target the body’s pain points, creating the optimal sleep code. This is then matched to three of twelve different mattresses and pillows, all designed and manufactured locally, to complement each sleep code.
A mattress and pillow that facilitates good sleep is more straightforward when an athlete is in their home environment, but what if they must travel to compete? Mark R. Rosekind of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the USA is a former NASA scientist and sleep and fatigue expert. He redesigned their hotel rooms to support optimal sleep and give athletes an extra edge at an Olympic training facility in Torino in 2006. He first looked at the environmental factors of the room, such as light, temperature, and noise. The rooms needed to be sufficiently dark and were fitted with black-out curtains; the temperature needed to be cooler than warm, ensuring blankets were readily available and bringing in fans and sound machines to block out any potential background noise. Next, he focused on the beds. The mattresses were plush-top with box springs, they had extra pillows and cotton bedlinen. The third thing he looked at was an alarm clock that the athletes could trust to go off, encouraging them not to push the snooze button.
At the Paris 2024 Olympics, athletes are sleeping on cardboard beds as a way to go greener. Bed King suggests taking along their pillow. Not only does it guarantee comfort from home, but it also gives the support athletes are used to. The beds still have a standard mattress on them and a good-quality quilt. Still, other factors such as noise, temperature and light are what most athletes do not look forward to, so many pack their own black-out curtains.
Controlling one’s sleep environment may not be accessible when travelling, but understanding one’s sleep position and selecting the right pillow designed to support it go a long way in getting the sleep they need to perform at peak fitness level.