One of DRIVN’s more popular features is the Trackers, which provides coaches and athletes a way to monitor, record and chart data to help maximize performance.
Are a couple of the team’s athletes more fatigued than the others? Is muscle soreness an issue within the team? Is the stress level higher at one point in the season than others? It’s easy to understand how those factors can be important to the performance of an individual or team.
But what about sleep? The amount of sleep your players are getting is also measured through DRIVN’s trackers. Is sleep really that important?
PerformaSleep.com, which does not sell mattresses, has studied the issue extensively.
“The more we study sleep quality, the more we realize how integral a restful night’s sleep is to a productive day,” PerformaSleep writes in an article titled Sleeping Habits of Elite Athletes. “This is especially true for athletes who need additional rest to recover from their demanding sports. Research continues to find that athletes can increase their performance, focus, and even career longevity by simply getting more high-quality sleep.”
The writer asked elite athletes – Lebron James, Roger Federer, Tom Brady and others – how much sleep they need each night to perform at the standard they’ve set.
“If I don’t sleep 11-12 hours a day, it’s not right,” said Federer, the 20-time Grand Slam tennis champion. “Sleeping has become quite important. I believe it’s really the sleep that gives you energy again down the road.”
Given the demanding nature of their sports, Brady and James find sleep essential.
“Sleep is the most important thing when it comes to recovery,’ said James who says he needs 12 hours a night and cites the rigorous NBA schedule as a reason. “And it’s very tough with our schedule. Our schedule keeps us up late at night, and most of the time it wakes us up early in the morning. There’s no better recovery than sleep.”
Brady tries to get eight-and-a-half to nine hours a night.
“I think sleep is so important because I break my body down so much with my sport,” said the five-time Super Bowl winner. “It’s the only place to get the recovery that I need.”
With DRIVN, athletes can input the amount of sleep they get each night on their phones and the information is charted for future use. Coaches and players can look back and see a point in time when they were performing well or performing poorly and see if sleep was a contributing factor.
Combined with other influences like stress, fatigue and soreness, players and coaches can use valuable objective data to give them a competitive edge.
Sign up for a free DRIVN demo and see what else we can do for you.