Now with having a proper diet and prioritizing my sleep,
I can bounce back quickly from an injury.
– Nick Dompierre
sleep and skateboarding.
In this article we're going deep into sleep and skateboarding. We'll go over how you’re probably not getting enough of it, how it can either make or break your skating, and well your whole life too, and then 5 tips to enhance your sleep skills
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how much sleep do you actually need?
So the recommend amount of sleep for the average adult is about 7-9 hours a night, with 6-10 maybe being enough for some people too. I would love to be able to say that you don’t need to sleep as much as this but a huge amount of research has been done, and it's pretty clear that if you’re after optimal health and to skate as good as you could you’ve really got no other choice than to get that amount, and actually skaters might even need more than the average person (which I'll go over in next week's article)!
A lot of people believe they can run on less than that (I used to as well) but for 99.9% of people it just won't be the case and you’re going to be sacrificing some part of your health as a result, and maybe without even realising. A lot of people just get straight up used to the feelings of lack of sleep and they don’t even know what it’s like to feel good anymore.
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how much sleep do you need?
green block: recommended amount for most people
grey block: amount that might work for some
adapted from www.sleep.org
how will sleep help your skating?
So how will sleep help your skating? Well, young Garibold I’ll tell you. So much physical recovery occurs whilst you sleep – a massive amount of muscle growth and repair, injury repair, along with a load of other restorative effects as well. Getting enough good sleep will also improve your power, endurance, reaction time, coordination, and just make skating seem like it takes less effort.
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But sleep is also massive for the mental realm and will directly helping you learn and remember more which will help you lock in more tricks. As you go throughout your day trying new things, receiving new information, touching new things with weird textures, etc. your brain is processing all of these experiences, but it’s whilst you sleep that it catalogues them and stores them in long-term memory and relates them to the rest of your memories. You ever had that situation where you’ve been trying a trick one day and only landing a few, then next day you’ve got it every go? Yeh? Sleep’s ya answer! On top of this sleep clears out a load of crap from your brain that accumulates throughout the day that keeps you feeling sleepy. This process also decreases the development of brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and if you’re looking to remember new tricks, that’s definitely something you’re going to want to avoid.
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sleep debt.
Missing out on some hours of sleep for one night isn’t the end of the world but the more you go without enough sleep the more the negative effects will start to accumulate resulting in something called “sleep debt” and the more you miss out on, the more you’ll have to pay back to the Sleep Gods. It was found that a lack of sleep for a few nights in a row generates the same effects as pulling an all-nighter. If you lose an hour Monday – Friday that’s already 5 hours debt by Saturday, all of which you need to pay back. People try sleeping in at the weekends to pay back their debt and although this can help, it isn’t the best fix as it will probably mess with your routine and make it harder for you to sleep Sunday night.
The more regularly you miss out on sleep the slower you’re going to recover, the slower you’ll learn. Your focus and coordination is also going to drop which is going to increase your chances of getting injured. Your creativity can drop which will drastically decrease your chances of getting trending on Instagram. Lack of sleep also messes with your mood resulting in mood swings and increasing the chances of you punching your dog, which just isn’t cool and is only going to make you feel dreadful after. Your immune system also takes a blow and they found that the less you sleep the higher your chances of getting sick; those sleeping less than 6 hours were 4.2x more likely to get sick. Going from 7 to 5 hours sleep a night even increases your chance of death by almost 2x. Basically sleep is essential!
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the art of sleep.
Struggling with insomnia? Looking to improve your sleep? The way we live these days is completely out of sync with nature and how our body evolved to sleep and this makes it so much harder for us to sleep well. Check out these 5 tips that you can start doing tonight to make sleeping easier, get you falling asleep fast, get you more in line with your natural sleeping rhythms, and get you waking up feeling hyped to go skate.
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