How to sleep like a pro-athlete

by Tia

Paris 2024 will see 10,500 athletes from all corners of the world take part in 16 days of world-class competition across 32 sports. Training programmes that began four years ago will now be put to the test, with getting enough sleep being 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. Places he has slept include cow sheds, ice caves, 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. He 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. The proper amount of sleep can boost an athlete’s performance as much as 30 percent. There are lab studies that show that if you’re an eight-hour sleeper and you get just six hours of sleep, that two-hour difference can impact your performance so that it 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 obviously need their sleep if they’re going to bring home the gold.

Sleep experts Bed King, have experimented with different sleep solutions to help people find the right mattress and pillow for their body type. In 2018 they introduced pressure mapping technology, originally used in the healthcare sector to help patients find comfort in wheelchairs and hospital beds and introduced it into their stores as the Comfort Solutions Lab. The goal is to help customers find a mattress and pillow that not only provides comfort but also the right 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.

Having a mattress and pillow that facilitates good sleep is easier when an athlete is in their home environment, but what if they need to 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. His career has focused on public safety threats posed by fatigue, circadian misalignment and untreated sleep disorders. To give athletes an extra edge at an Olympic training facility in Torino in 2006, he redesigned their hotel rooms to support optimal sleep. He first looked at the  environmental factors of the room such as light, temperature, and noise. The rooms needed to be sufficiently dark and so were fitted with black out curtains; temperature needed to be cooler than warm, ensuring blankets were readily available and brought 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 with extra pillows and cotton linen. The third thing he looked at was an alarm clock that the athletes could  trust to go off, and encouraged them not to push the snooze button.

Unfortunately not all athletes are so lucky to have their rooms modified while travelling and so when you can’t control your sleep environment, Bed King suggests taking along your own pillow. Not only does it guarantee you comfort from home but also give you the support you are used to. Depending on if you are a side or back sleeper you should get pillow-fitted to make sure you’re sleeping on the right pillow. 

At the Paris 2024 Olympics, athletes are sleeping on cardboard beds as a way to go greener. They still have a normal mattress on them along with a good quality quilt but other factors such as noise, temperature and light are what most athletes are not looking forward to which is why many pack their own black out curtains, fans to block out noise and to keep the room cool. 

For all high performance athletes, especially Sandes, who will compete at the Ultra Trail Mont-Blanc, a 170km race in France later this year, sleep training is as critical as fitness and strength training. “I try to practice good sleeping habits daily, regardless if I’m in training. In that way I am always ready to compete. When I travel, I try to arrive at least one week early at my destination to recover from the jetlag and I tend to start my bedtime routine slightly earlier in the evenings. I also like to use eye covers and keep a regular exercise routine. I then aim to wake up at the same time every morning,” says Sandes.

Controlling your sleep environment may not be easy when traveling but understanding your sleep position and selecting a pillow designed to support that you can travel with will go a long way in getting the sleep you need to perform at your peak.

To find out more please visit Bed King at https://www.bedking.co.za/pillows/ and to follow Ryan Sandes please find him at https://www.instagram.com/ryansandes/?hl=en

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