Sleep: The Difference Between Playing Your Best and Playing Your Worst (Podcast Episode 25)

Foreign basketball training podcast. Appreciate all you guys for tuning in and listening wherever you're at, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you might be. I really am thankful for every single one of you guys for choosing to listen to this episode. Today's episode is going to kind of build on a little bit of what we talked about last week in terms of last episode when we talked about the importance of nutrition. And although we're not really gonna dive into that, we're gonna talk about kinda the other side. You know, we talked about with training, right, you have your on court stuff, your weight room stuff, but then it's all about your recovery, right? So obviously your nutrition plays heavily into that in terms of what you're eating, when you're eating, but also thea major, major, major part of that recovery is your sleep, right? So we have to make sure that we're not hitting just the on court stuff, the weight room stuff and the nutrition, but also you got to make sure that your sleep is dialed in as well. Because if you're lacking in the sleep department, then it's really going to hinder your results going forward and ultimately it's going to prevent you from playing at your best when you need to be. Okay, we're going to hop into what exactly that means. But you know, sleep is extremely, extremely important for performance, for learning, for development of, you know, both your physical health and also, you know, it's important to your mental health as well. You know, some of the consequences for not properly sleeping can be, you know, you can perform worse in school. Your the way you react to things can be slower, can be more delayed, it can cause you to for a myriad of reasons, your recovery can, can be slower or not complete and ultimately it can cause you to get sick more often and ultimately just not be at your best. So we're gonna dive into that, gonna talk about why sleep is important, what you can do to make sure that you're getting enough sleep and you're maximizing the time that you are sleeping. You know, everything that I'm getting today is from the Gatorade Sports Science Institute. A lot of my stuff from last week was as well. They did a great study on a bunch of this stuff specifically geared towards basketball players as well. And it's really, really good. So I want to read a lot of stuff from that today. But you know, basically the importance when it comes to athletics, right, because sleep, what I just listed off to you guys, the reasons why it's important and what lack of it can do, but Also, if we just talk about, from a strictly athletic perspective, reductions in your performance, okay. Your decision making ability can be reduced as well as you're learning. Your retention and overall, a lot of your cognitive abilities are tied to how well rested you are, the amount of sleep that you get. So if you aren't getting sleep, it's gonna hurt you in those categories as well. Okay? Like I mentioned, your immune function. So being able to stay, stay healthy during the season, really during any time of the year, but especially when you're doing a lot of work, a lot of exercise, a lot of practice, a lot of workouts, sleep becomes even more important at those points. Okay. And it could also come to be susceptible to weight gain and not putting on the amount of muscle that you might like. Okay. Even if you might be eating the right things and doing what you're supposed to be doing in the weight room, not allowing your body to properly recover is gonna hinder you in that category as well. Okay. And when we talk about, for those of you guys who are middle school, high school age, that's even more important because as you're still not fully grown yet, sleep is even more crucial to your development. Okay? For all those reasons and of course because your brain is still developing, your body's still developing, all those things are tied into why sleep is something that cannot be overlooked or overstated the importance of it. But the obvious thing is that a lot of you aren't getting enough sleep and your quality of sleep probably isn't very good as well. Okay. So we're going to look at some of the consequences of that and more importantly, what you can do to put yourself in a better position to be at your best because of sleep. Okay? So there's been a lot of studies that have been, have been done on this. There is a study done by Riley and Dakin and they reported decrements in a range of psychomotor functions after only one night of restricted sleep. So essentially they proved that there were reductions in a person's ability, their physical abilities after just one night of reduced sleep. Okay. And what this study found, however, was that muscle strength, lung power and endurance running were not affected, but a lot of the other factors that you might have, specifically your reaction time and a lot of times your ability to function at sub maximal levels. Okay? So maybe your max speed was decreased, but your ability to run at a 9 out of 10, 9 out of 10 effort, that was reduced with a night of decreased amount of sleep. Okay. And what they also noticed is that, you know, gross Motor functions are less affected by sleep, but tasks that require fast reaction times, those are more affected when you have a reduced night of sleep. So in basketball, being able to quickly move your hands, quickly react to the defense, those things you need to be able to do, that becomes worse and becomes slower when you're lacking sleep. Okay, so for a sport like basketball, the, again, the importance of sleep has to be recognized and we have to take it very, very seriously. Um, so the other thing they did is they, they looked at specific exercises, right? And looked at, okay, if we put guys through this exercise and they're running a sleep deficit, right, they're low on sleep right now, how is that going to affect them? Okay, what they did is they looked at three different exercises. They, they looked at maximal bench press, maximal leg press, and maximal deadlifts. Okay? So three compound movements, big time movements that, that require a lot of different muscles to be active, that require a lot of energy. And, and they found that when they tried to test the maximal load when they took somebody who was well rested, and then they compared them, that they compared that person when they weren't well rested, they found that in that sleep deprived state, they performed significantly worse on those maximal lifts. Okay. But again, what they also found is that on those submaximal lifts as well. So a step down, right, Almost at their heaviest, it was even more affected. Okay, so. And to a greater degree. So essentially what that, what the study aimed to prove is that as they did this more and more often, right? So they go from one day where, you know, you're not sleeping very much, two days, three days, as they continue to every night not get enough sleep, that performance and that the load they could lift became worse and worse and worse. Okay. So what they were aiming to prove is that the overall fatigue of multiple days of losing sleep has a bad impact and it will continue to cause you to decline. Okay. And it's going to get worse and worse and worse. In my last episode, we talked a lot about nutrition and specifically carbohydrates and the impact they have in your body as well as proteins as well. And there was a study that showed that when you're running on a lack of sleep, it's going to cause alterations in the way that you are able to metabolize carbohydrates. We talked about the importance of carbohydrates to kind of fuel the body, not only to fuel the muscles right through those glycogen storages, but also it's gonna fuel your liver, which is gonna allow you to kind of keep your blood sugar levels at a good rate, at a good standard, and also it fuels your brain as well, so you're able to be more alert. So if we put something, if there's something that alters that, that's going to cause a deterioration in not only our physical performance, but mentally as well. Our ability to focus and learn is not going to be there if we don't metabolize carbohydrates the same way. And they found that also affected your appetite, your food intake, and also lack of sleep affects protein synthesis. So we talked about protein synthesis in last week's episode as well, where essentially when you eat your protein, right, or you have a protein shake after you lift, protein goes through something called protein synthesis, right? Where essentially you broke down those muscles and just kind of give you the quick. You break down your muscles working out, and then you feed your muscles with that protein so they can build back stronger protein synthesis that's altered and negatively affected. When you're lacking sleep, your body doesn't have enough energy to be able to do that. Okay? So this, that all of a sudden is gonna affect what we do on the court and on the weight room. Ifif we aren't able to metabolize carbohydrates as well, we're not gonna perform as well on the court. And if we aren't able totoif we aren't able to go through protein synthesis effectively, as effectively as we can, then we're not going to build muscle as effectively as we can, and we're not gonna recover and be ready to go the next day as quicklyif protein synthesis is hindered by our sleep habits. So there was another study done that actually did the opposite of this. They took six basketball players, and for a couple weeks, they just were on their normal sleeping patterns. They were getting enough sleep, okay, but they weren't sleep deprived. But they also weren't getting more than enough. They were getting a good amount of sleep. And then those two weeks after they had those same six players get as much sleep as possible for those two weeks. And they found that when they allowed those players to get as much sleep as they wanted to as they could, that their free throw shooting percentage went up as well as their sprint times became faster as well. So what this essentially went to show is that increased sleep can significantly impact and improve your encore performance. Okay? So again, that's illustrating that not only does losing sleep negatively affect you, but when you gain extra sleep, it actually positively affects you as well. So all this Comes from not changing how we eat, not changing how we train, not changing, you know, what drills we're doing or exercises we're doing. All that entire change just goes back to how well are you sleeping, are you getting enough sleep? And if you are, then it's going to put you in a position to be able to be able to get. And if you are, it's going to put you in a position to be able to perform at your best. So the question always becomes, how much sleep do I need? And I think we need to start off by looking at how much sleep on average people get. According to a poll that was taken in the United States, the average self reported sleep duration for healthy individuals is 6.8 hours on weekdays and 7.4 hours on weekends. Okay. And there have been some studies that have kind of taken that and compared it to what it looks like for elite level athletes. And they actually found that the average time that a person is in bed, right, whether they're awake or asleep, they're just in bed for the night. The average non athlete was about eight hours, a little bit over eight hours, but eight hours and seven minutes. And for the average athlete, it was a little bit over eight and a half hours. So they were getting, they were in bed for longer. But what they found was that it took the average athlete longer to fall asleep and the overall impact of their sleep was actually less than the non athlete. Okay. It was called a lower sleep efficiency where essentially they weren't getting the same quality sleep as the non athlete was getting. Okay. So basically what this means is that athletes are having a tougher time falling asleep and staying asleep and getting good quality sleep. And there's a lot of reasons that that could be. And it's actually been proven that that that is true for a lot of athletes. And this was actually taken in just normal training. This wasn't even around, you know, competition times. This was just in normal training part of the year. So think about the offseason, right? You know, players are having issues sleeping and it's the offseason. Like they don't have to worry about games or anything like that. It's just the offseason, okay. And what they found is that a few of the reasons for this was, number one, if there was some sort of competition that you were worried about that you were looking forward to, a lot of times that was enough to cause hindrances in falling asleep. And sometimes it could become, you know, during normal training, just poor habits. Whether that might mean that your time that you're training is setting you up to not sleep well, whether that means that, you know, you're taking giant naps throughout the day and so you couldn't fall asleep at night, whether it means you aren't eating as well as you could be, or you're drinking too much caffeine, whatever it might be, basically effects you get from your normal kind of training schedule was also a reason why this was. And also, you know, a big thing now is the like cell phones, right? Social media. It's been proven that the blue light on your phone is actually really, really bad for you when it comes to you trying to fall asleep. So, you know, light from televisions, from your phones, from your computer, all those things can cause you to kind of throw off your circadian rhythm a little bit and not be able to fall asleep as quickly as you might want to be. Okay? So there is definitely a lack of sleep and it's definitely an issue not just among non athletes, but especially with athletes, which you wouldn't really think. You think, oh, you know, guys are getting a lot of exercise, like, probably a little tireder, but more tired. But when we talk about the amount of sleep that you should be getting every night, typically the literature that's out there would recommend about nine hours of sleep is a good target to get. Okay. Especially for, again, for those of you guys in middle school, high school, even guys who my age, like college age, probably a really good idea to be getting around that nine hours of sleep per night if you want to be at your best every single day. And the research shows that in studies that they've done the average, again the average person between 12 and 18, probably a little bit older than that as well, it's about seven and a half to eight and a half hours per night. So most, most people aren't getting that nine hours of sleep. That would be ideal. Okay. And again, understandably, there's a lot of things that go on, but that nine hours, right, where we talked about how that can be the difference between you being able to perform at your best and you being slightly worse. That's where that sweet spot right there, it's about nine, nine plus hours, really. Um, the average amount that when they took adolescence, so, you know, the average 12 to 18 year old, they found that they slept for about 9 hours and 15 minutes, so about 9.25 hours per night when they were allowed to sleep as long as they wanted to. And while there's obviously going to be some individual differences, individual preferences, it's pretty clear that Just look. Looking on those average numbers at seven and a half to eight and a half, a lot of people aren't getting the required amount of sleep that they probably should have. One thing that I recommend to you guys is you check out a sleep app. And this is something that I use on my phone. I'm trying to think of the name of it. It's called Sleep Cycle. So essentially what it is is it's like an alarm. And you can set your alarm for whatever, but it basically is going to track your sleep. So, uh, it's gonna, it's gonna be able to tell, you know, when you wake up during the middle of the night. Cause a lot of times you're gonna wake up in the middle of the night. You don't even remember it at all. Okay? It's going to see how restless you are in your sleep, and it's gonna give you like a score, like a percentage and how good your, your sleep was. Okay? So if you didn't, if you only slept for five and a half hours, it's gonna be able to tell you, okay? Because it's gonna know when you woke up. It's gonna know when you first fell asleep and then when you got to wake up. So you might say, oh, you know, I went to bed at 10 and I woke up at 7. That's nine hours. But maybe you didn't fall asleep till 11. And maybe, you know, you woke up a bunch of times. Maybe you only ended up sleeping for, you know, 6 hours and 45 minutes, right? Where you're like, oh, wow, like, I thought I slept for way longer than that. That's kind of an extreme example. But maybe you think, okay, you know what? I feel like I get nine hours every night and you go for a week and you realize, oh, I'm only getting like seven and a half hours every night. Okay, that's really a great way to be able to kind of assess this for you. And also what it's going to do is, we talked about earlier with athletes, a lot of times the actual quality of their sleep isn't great. Okay. And Sleep Cycle can also rate you on your quality of sleep. So it's gonna see how often you're moving around, how often are you waking up? Are you really getting into that deep sleep in your REM cycle and staying there for a while to ultimately be in a place where, you know, your body can kind of release growth hormone recovery? That's where youryour best recovery is gonna happen, in that deep sleep. So are you actually Getting there. Because if you aren't getting to your deep sleep, then that's a problem for you. And kind of another thing that they talk about when we talk about the nine hours, right? So you think, oh, you know where that nine hours come from. But it's also shown that with sleep, you go through cycles, okay? So at parts of the cycles, you're gonna be a little bit lighter as a sleeper, you're gonna be a little bit deeper in your sleep. That's why, like, if you go and you take a nap, right? You go, you come home from school, you take a nap, and you get woken up at the wrong time, you just feel so tired, right? You feel like, oh my gosh, I can't. Like, I feel more tired than when I got home, okay? And that's because someone would have woken you up while you were in your deep sleep, right? If someone wakes you up when you're in that lighter part of your sleep, it's gonna be a lot easier for you to kind of get up and go, okay? So these, these cycles typically last about an hour and a half, and the experts essentially recommend about five to six cycles per night at least. So that would about seven and a half to nine hours of sleep if we go on that hour and a half cycle. Okay? And what this is gonna allow you to do is get into that deep sleep state enough that you can get all of your recovery, your body can do all it needs to do, and then you wake up and you're ready toto go at 100% the next day, okay? And so what the sleep Cycle app can do is it will tell you if you're actually getting to that deep sleep part, okay. Or if you're. You keep waking up when you're in your lighter part of your sleep and you gotta go back and get back to that point and then, oh, you know, you only got a deep sleep three times last night, right? So maybe that is why you feel kinda tired or you feel like you aren't performing at your best. Okay? So that's a great way for you to track that. The app is called Sleep Cycle. I'm not sure if it's a paid app anymore, because I got it back when I was in high school and I still have it now. So I think they, I think they do have a free version, but I'm sure if you look around, you'll find something that's gonna be similar to that. If that's not, or if you want to dish out whatever the two or three bucks it is, I think it's well worth it just to be able to, again, maximize your performance. But highly recommend you guys do something like that. Just kind of see where you're at. And also just being able to see the numbers, it's going to make you want to have better habits. You're going to say, you know what? I feel like I want to wake up and see, hey, yeah, you know what? My sleep was really, really good last night. I want to see that. This past week I slept for an average of nine hours a day, right. Or I slept for eight, you know, at least, you know, somewhere in that seven and a half to nine hours. Okay. And the kind of. The last thing that I'll talk. Shall talk with two more things about this out. I love this app. Okay. They're not paying me at all. If they want to sponsor me, I'll take it. But I just. This is a really great app and. But essentially what it can do is it will. There's another part of it actually, I think this might be. Hold on, let me see if I can find it. Yeah. So essentially you can set your alarm in the morning to wake you up in a certain range, right? So let's say you set your range to be between 6 and 6:30. Okay. It's gonna wake you up during that time period whenever you're in your lightest part of sleep. So when you start to move around a little bit, it's gonna sense like they're lighter part of sleep, and then it's gonna wake you up. So it's gonna catch you at your lighter part of sleep, meaning that it's not gonna hit you when you're in your deep sleep. And then you're gonna wake up and you're gonna feel just dead because you were just in deep sleep and now you're not. It's gonna wake you up when you're lighter, when you're almost about to wake up naturally, then it's gonna get you and you're gonna feel much, much, much better. Okay? So that's another great feature this app has. And you can kind of customize that time too. If you want it to be between 6 and 7 o', clock, you can do that. If you want it to be between 7:15 and 7:30, you can do that, whatever you wanna do. But it's a really great part of that app. And then kind of to add onto that, napping has been proven to be a big part of, you know, sleep as well, especially for athletes. Right. Because you might wake up in the Morning and you might have a workout at 6am and you know, then you might go to school after that and then you might have a practice and then you have to do, you know, you get home at 6 then you know, you got to do your homework, maybe you watch a little basketball on tv, you watch NBA finals, and then you go to bed, all of a sudden it's 11:30, you got to work out at 6, so you got to get up at 5 the next day. So now you're sleeping for five and a half hours. Right. Which obviously is not what we want to do, but what we can do to kind of, you know, again, ideally we're going to get that nine hours, but if we can't get it, taking naps during the day is also shown to be very, very helpful. And what they did is they, they took a group of sleep, sleep deprived athletes, right? And I believe they had slept for four hours that night. So very, very sleep deprived. And they had them all testing, going through their different sprinting especially. And with these sprints, they had everybody go and they split up the two groups. They had one group that just kind of waited a little bit and they had the other group take a 20 minute nap. Okay. And after they retested everybody's sprints, they found that the group that took that 20 minute nap actually performed better on their sprints and the other group didn't see any changes. Okay. So that a nap throughout the day, even if it's only for 20 minutes, is something that can be very, very helpful. And actually there's another app that goes along with. Let me see if I still have this on my phone. I haven't used one in a while. I do still have it, but it's called power nap. And essentially what this does is it allows you to take a nap for a certain amount of time. Right? So basically what gives you like three different options in terms of what, like how long to take naps for? There's essentially like your quick little power nap, which is going to be about 15 or 20 minutes. And this is going to be like, okay, if you want to take a nap, you're going to wake up and you're going to feel energized, then this is the one to take, right? I'm sure a lot of you guys have experienced that where you take a quick nap, a quick 10, 15 minute nap, and you wake up and you just feel way more energized, even if it wasn't all that long. That's what this, that's what this does. Okay, so there's that. So then they have what's called a recovery nap, where you're gonna have to for up to 45 minutes, okay. And this is gonna allow you to get a little bit more sleep, but not get into that deep stage yet, okay? And then they're gonna give you one sleep cycle, okay? So you're gonna sleep for anywhere between 90 to 120 minutes. So one and a half to two hours. And what this is gonna do is allow you to get all the way through one of those deep sleep stages, okay? Because within that 90 minutes to two hours, you're gonna get through that, that entire stage of your REM cycle, okay? And so basically the reason that they pick these times is because if you were to sleep for an hour, right? If you fall asleep for an hour, chances are you're gonna be in your deep sleep stage at around that time, okay? So instead of sleeping for an hour, it'd be better to sleep for 45 minutes. That will be before you get to that deep sleep stage. Or it'd be better to wait until at least an hour and a half or two hours when you're out of that stage. Okay. And again, it's gonna give you kind of a range. So, you know, for that power nap, you're gonna be able to kinda sleep for up to 20 minutes. So, you know, you won't be in yourin. You're in your deep sleep cycle yet, but it's still going to wait till you're at a little bit of a lighter phase. So maybe you sleep for 18 minutes and it wakes you up. With the recovery part, maybe you sleep for 35 minutes and it wakes you up. And then obviously with that last one, it's between 90 and 120 minutes. Maybe you sleep for 105 minutes and then it gets you up. But really, really good stuff to use. So again, highly recommend. When I was in high school, I used this stuff all the time. Anytime I took a nap, I was basically using this and then pretty much every night too, I was using the sleep cycle app. Really? Really. Again, they're not paying me for this, but I think it's really, really helpful and something you guys can take up and use. But kind of on a side note there, but again, just kind of going forward, if you guys want something that can really help you with your sleep and be able to track, you can be able to see what can I do to adjust this? That's something that you should be able to, that you should take a look at. Just kind of leave you guys with a couple other things you can do to try and maximize the sleep that you get every night. The one thing you want to do is you want to kind of maximize your time before you sleep. Okay, so I talked about the phones already, right? I believe on iPhones, I know this for sure. I know there's apps on Android, so if you have a smartphone, you can actually turn the blue light off on your phone. So on Apple it's like a setting where I can set it. So every night I think at 7, it turns to the blue light filter goes on. So it takes out all the blue light on my phone. So I just have like a little yellow screen basically. And it's way, way easier on you and it doesn't mess up your, all your, all your circadian rhythm and stuff like that. But also kind of TV does that. So if you want to go to bed at 10, it can be a really good idea for you to turn off all your electronics at nine and then, you know, eat something, whatever, eat something light, ideally, you know, brush your teeth, take a shower, whatever, read a book for a little bit maybe and then you're gonna feel nice and primed and go to bed. Okay? That's a good, that's a really good habit to pick up. Just being able to kind of unplug from things the hour before you want to go to bed. And that's gonna put your brain in a much better position to be ready to sleep when you want to be asleep. Okay. The other thing I'll say is it's really important to pick a time to wake up and a time to go to bed and kind of try and stick to that, right? So for a lot of you guys, you know, you have school where you might have to be at school at 8 every day. So you gotta wake up at 6:30 to get ready. And then the weekend comes, you don't have to be anywhere, so you sleep till 4 o' clock in the afternoon, right? Well now when you have to go back to school on Monday, your body just for two days was going to bed at, you know, 2:00 o' clock in the morning and waking up at 4:00pm well now on Monday when you got to get up at six, your body is staying up till, till two. So now you're gonna get four hours of sleep. Whereas suppose you would have said, you know what, I'm gonna give myself a little bit extra time, I'll wake up at 8:30 on Saturday and Sunday, right? I'm gonna go to bed on my normal time, I'm gonna go to bed at 10 o' clock and I'll wake up at 8:30. Okay. So I'm still very well rested, but I'm not gonna sleep for, you know, 14 hours. And oh, by the way, those 14 hours are 2:00am to 4:00pm, right? So it can be really, really beneficial for you guys to pick a time to wake up, a time to go to bed and try and stay around that time the entire week. It's gonna allow you to be more consistent with your sleep and not have giant crashes where, you know, you feel great on Saturday and Sunday because you got to sleep for 12 hours, but you feel terrible Monday, Tuesday, because now you got to adjust to only sleeping for five hours now because your, your, your, your rhythm's all off. Okay? So that's, that's kind of a couple things you can take to, to really improve your sleep. But again, just the importance of understanding what sleep can do to you, that the difference between you performing at your best and you not performing at your best is not about what you do on the court. It's not about what you do in the weight room, it's not about what you eat. It's ultimately about how you sleep. Okay? You're either going to be able to have an advantage over people because again, most people aren't getting enough sleep. So, so this can either be your advantage or you can remain at a disadvantage because you struggle in that area. So again, I highly recommend you guys check out those apps, just kind of see where you're at. Right? See, man, I'm only sleeping for seven hours a night and it looks like I'm not doing a great job of making sure that I'm getting good sleep. So maybe I need to stop drinking coffee at 2 o' clock in the afternoon because caffeine has been proven to interrupt your ability to get into deep sleep. Okay, so maybe that's something you need to worry about. Maybe, you know, you watch, you're playing video games till midnight every night and then you wonder why you can't fall asleep till 2:30. Well, could be because, you know, your brain is been flooded with all that blue light, so it's thinking, oh, it's daytime out, right? But in reality it's midnight. Okay? So those are things you can start to dissect for yourself in your own life. What am I, what am I doing? What can I do to maximize my ability to get to sleep? And if you do that, ultimately you're going to be in a very, very good position to take advantage of that. And again, the benefits of it are huge. You're going to be able to react faster, run faster, be stronger. Ultimately, you're going to be able to be the best basketball player you can possibly be. So to me, that's something that if you can get a habit of doing it, it's gonna become easier and easier and easier and it's gonna just become a part of what you do. Okay, so hopefully this helps you guys out. Hopefully it was informative to you guys. If you guys have questions for me, as always, DM me on Instagram visiondrivenbasketball. If you don't have any questions for me, just go ahead and give me a follow. Anyway so you see what's going on posting on there every week on my story almost every day. So go ahead and check me out, give me a follow, stay what's up? Whatever, leave a comment. And again, any, any questions, suggestions and appreciate all you guys. Again, if you guys are on Apple podcast, really appreciate you guys to drop a review for me. If you guys are on YouTube, drop a like subscribe. I'll talk to you guys later. Peace.