Archive for June, 2011
Even during the playful days of summer we must encourage our children to get plenty of sleep. In this endearing video Andrea Bocelli sings Elmo to sleep in spite of Elmo’s pleas to stay up. I hope you enjoy this. If so, please let me know in the comments below.
Best Wishes for Peaceful Sleep,
Patty
I just read where the Stanley Cup hopefuls, Vancouver Canucks have incorporated serious sleep work as part of their championship training program. In addition to diet and fitness training they have been using advanced monitoring technology to track and adjust their individual sleep habits to maximize their performance potential.
What their coaches and advisors know is that physical recovery times are greatly reduced when a body is being supported by the sleep that it needs. Reaction times, attention and decision making skills, as well as shot accuracy have all been shown to improve with increased sleep times.
The average adult requires 7-9 hours of sleep. Hard training athletes may require more to allow the additional time their bodies need for repair, restoration and rebalancing.
Tennis great Roger Federer says he needs 11-12 hours of sleep to be at his best. Lebron James also prefers 12 hours of sleep. Apolo Anton Ohno says he averages 8 to 81/2. Interestingly, Tiger Woods reports getting only 4-5 hours of sleep per night. There have been studies linking sleep loss to a decline in moral judgment, but that’s for another story…
The Canucks have been wearing special wristbands called accelerometers. These watch-like devices report levels of activity and can produce reports with data such as average sleep per night, time to fall asleep and sleep efficiency. It even reports the average bedtime and compares it to the team curfew hour of 11:00 pm. Naps are also recorded. Quite a few professional athletes swear by 30-40 minute naps on game day, especially if they are operating in foreign time zones.
As the Canucks continue their amazing assault on the Cup in this week’s finals, consider if you will that the extra zip, zing or pizzazz you see in their game may be the result of some extra “zzz”s at night!
Best Wishes for Peaceful Sleep!
Patty