Sleep is one of those tricky things in life that everyone knows is important, but it’s often pushed to the side to get other things done. Effectively that means that we treat an extra hour of doing whatever it is we feel that we need to get done as being more valuable than that extra hour of sleep.
But what if it isn’t. What if that extra hour is actually more valuable, we just aren’t that good at judging it’s worth relative to our goals.
Sometimes the harsh reality of numbers can help put things in perspective. That’s what I’m hoping this week’s study can do for sleep as it relates to injury risk in elite performance.
The study is called “Too little sleep and an unhealthy diet could increase the risk of sustaining a new injury in adolescent elite athletes.” Here’s what the researches did.
They looked at a group of elite athletes in Sweden’s national development program and mailed them a questionnaire during the fall semester and another during the spring semester. The questionnaires looked at stress, nutrition, self esteem, sleep and injury.
The researches then took that information and look at which of those factors was related to a new injury. Here’s what they found.
Sleep Well and Eat Your Veggies
Sleeping more than 8 hours per night was associated with a 61% reduction in the risk of injury!
Eating the recommended amount of fruit (1 serving per day), veggies (1 serving per day) and fish (2x/week) was associated with a 64% reduction in the risk of injury!
What This Means for Musicians
Here’s how I interpret this study. People striving for elite performance, in a stressful, competitive, injury prone environment (sound familiar?) ask a lot from their bodies. In this study, those who gave their body what it needed (quality food and sleep) were able to handle those challenges.
Those who didn’t were more likely to not be able to handle the challenge and experienced an injury.
Another way to say it, by way of the water and the cup analogy, is that It’s not about how much you put into the cup as long as you can effectively drain it.
Obviously the study was done on 16-19 year old athletes, so the comparison to musicians is not perfect, but I think it’s worth thinking about.
tl;dr
Sleeping >8 hours a night was associated with a 61% reduction in injury risk. Eating enough fish, fruits and veggies was associated with a 64% reduction in injury risk.