Browsing by Author "Pohjakallio, Katri"

Sleep has been shown to be important for human health due to its renewing and restoring effects. Sleep can be thought to be particularly important to competitive athletes because their main target is to reach body’s optimal performance. Out of single methods sleep has been suggested to be the best way to help the athletes’ recovery despite that many athletes feel that they do not have the means to improve their sleep quality. The purpose of this review is to introduce sleep quality and quantity of competitive athletes, the effects of sleep to physical and cognitive performance, recovery and the immune system. The review also gathers together factors that affect athletes’ sleep either in negative or positive ways and reflects how these factors should be considered when planning the everyday life of an athlete so that the effects of sleep to the training would be as optimal as possible. The method of this review was an integrative literature review. The articles chosen for the review answered to the research questions considering quality and quantity of the sleep of competitive athletes, sleep’s effects to performance and interventions improving the sleep of competitive athletes. Sufficient and good quality sleep is important to athlete’s performance. Some athletes don’t sleep enough according to recommendations, but it is still unclear if the amount of sleep is different between athletes and the general population. For athletes a common issue was low sleep quality. Multiple, but not all, research found sleep to be beneficial to physical performance. Sleep deficit negatively affected to cognitive performance of athletes such as memory, attention and reaction times. It also deteriorated more skill-specific actions such as throwing and serving accuracy and made athletes experience movements more difficult than normally. Sleep deficit lowered athletes’ overall mood and increased the prevalence of injuries, musculoskeletal pain and infections. Early morning or late evening practices and high training load influenced athletes’ sleep negatively and should therefore be considered in the everyday life. In turn sleep counselling, naps, melatonin use and mindfulness positively affected athletes’ sleep.