Can more sleep improve your running?

How much sleep do you need?
Every individual is different and has a different requirement for sleep. Factors including stress and other workloads (physical and mental) all play a part in how much sleep an individual needs. Also, just because one runner can run fast times on a few hours less sleep per night than you enjoy, it doesn’t mean that it’s a one-size-fits-all panacea. Without doubt an increased training load requires more sleep to facilitate sufficient recovery. The marathon runner, running very high weekly mileages and/or high intensity interval sessions will require more sleep because they are likely to be stressing their body compared to a recreational runner who enters the occasional fun run.

Find your personal sleep requirements
The ideal solution is to sleep until you wake naturally, rather than try to arrive at a magic figure. For most people with work and family commitments, this approach is impractical, so try and generate your own ‘ rule-of-thumb’ which will serve as your personal sleep template. Generate a sleep chart or diary, recording the time you retire, the time you wake up, how long you slept, whether your sleep was broken, how soon you felt it was before you dropped off and importantly how refreshed you feel in the morning.

Also factor in your training and over a period of weeks, you should be able to identify a pattern. If your comments are along the lines of ‘ really tired, dragged myself out of bed, slept through the alarm’, etc, then it is likely that you need more sleep. Balance it against your training loads and you should eventually arrive at your personal sleep requirements. To make the data from the diary effective, complete it daily and as accurately as possible, over a typical representative period of several weeks. For example, completing it whilst on a two week holiday will not give you the true picture of the majority of your time.

The elite runner and sleep
Arguably one of the most relevant indicators to the relationship between performance and rest can be found from elite athletes. For example, Paula Radcliffe famously sleeps for nine hours each night, supplemented by a further two hours in the afternoon. This strategy is supported by a quote from the legendary marathon runner Bill Rodgers: ‘no-one who works a 40 hour week will ever beat me’. So, what conclusions can we draw from these two world beaters?

Part of Paula’s sleeping strategy is aimed at rebuilding stressed and damaged muscles faster. In addition to any sleep benefits, human growth hormone in the body has been found to be secreted approximately 20 minutes after falling asleep, so by sleeping twice a day, she gets a double whammy from the hormone, which accelerates her recovery.

Similarly, with Bill Rodgers; he’s saying, yes, you can do exactly the same quantity and intensity of training that I do, but the difference is that you have to fit your training in and around a working week. Compared with the elite runner, something has to give and it’s probably going to be your quota of sleep. He doesn’t have to compromise – when he isn’t training he can rest. Rest could mean sleep or just periods of inactivity and low stress, periods that will contribute to his overall recovery and recuperation, such that he can put in repeated quality workouts day in, day out, without risking injury or breakdown and illness.

Training gains
A key point to consider is when you make your training and racing improvements. It is common to run a quicker time over a distance either in training or in a race and report that you’ve improved there and then. That is incorrect. The tangible measure of your improvement is shown in the faster time that you have run but physiologically, the improvements have occurred some time earlier, following previous training sessions. During training, the body is stressed and subsequently it recovers, rebuilding stronger, so that when it is stressed similarly again, it is better prepared to cope with the intensity. Hence the improvements actually occur before the training session or race where you record a faster time, not during that specific session.

Pre-race sleep
A regular diet of good quality sleep will support your running but during the lead-in before a race, a sleepless night doesn’t mean that your chances of a PB have vanished. Getting your full quota of sleep in the days coming up to the race will ensure that you don’t toe the line overtired, even if the night before left you a little short.

Is more better?
It is extremely difficult to isolate a single factor in a runner’s lifestyle and identify if a sole change in that factor is completely responsible for any changes in performance. Training volume and intensity, nutrition, stress, domestic and work responsibilities, personality, on-the-day conditions, mood, motivation and a myriad of other factors all play their part. By taking an extreme example, achieving a PB on a diet of a one hour sleep each night simply isn’t going to happen, so clearly sleep is important. Every runner is unique; evaluating your personal requirements through a sleep diary is the best route to finding out how much sleep you as an individual need.