Sleep is important for everybody, not just athletes. It affects sporting performance, but it also affects our health and well-being too.

Sleep affects no fewer than our:

• Body weight
• Blood glucose levels
• Strength, speed, and endurance
• Grumpiness
• Stress levels
• Hormones
• Memory
• Concentration
• Ability to think and speak
• Perception of pain
• Appetite
• Susceptibility to common cold

That’s just to name a few. Perhaps knowing who can walk to the shops fastest, or who can carry the heaviest shopping bag is less important for the average joe. But being able to do these things is still important. Just as everything else on that list is as important for us as it is for professional athletes.

But as professional athletes are paid handsomely to eat, breathe, and sleep performance, they’ve spent a lot of time doing some trial and error to find out what works best for sleep. The list it seems, is not full of fancy technology or training techniques, but foods that you and I can find in our kitchen cupboard.

The advice is as follows:

• Eating carbohydrates like pasta and potatoes at tea time could help us to fall asleep faster.
• Eating protein like meat, fish, and eggs throughout the day could give us deeper and better quality sleep.
• Eating lots of fatty foods throughout the day could make us lose a few hours of sleep.
• Eating small amounts of tryptophan containing foods, like turkey and pumpkin seeds, throughout the day could help us to fall asleep faster, with deeper sleep.

If you were looking for the solution to a better nights sleep, i hope you weren’t disappointed with the simplicity of the answer, because when it comes to sleep, no high tech innovation is required, just a shopping trolley.

Faye Prior (Researcher)

Source

Halson, (2014). Sleep in elite athletes and nutritional interventions to enhance sleep. Sports Medicine, 44, 13-23.