(Dr. Dev Mishra‘s article on teenage sleep has been among the most popular since we launched the Youth Soccer Insider in 2007. The feedback has included parents appreciating coaches who help encourage healthy habits.)
I’m sure anyone who’s raised an adolescent or teenager can attest to the idea that teenagers don’t get as much sleep as they need.
For the adolescent or teenager a number of outside influences take place: more demands on time for homework, socializing, sports, music, or any number of other activities.
Let’s take a look below at some reasons why sleep patterns change, what the proper amount of sleep is, and how it can affect sports performance.
Why sleep patterns change in a teenager
Each of us — no matter how old — has an internal clock that follows roughly a 24-hour cycle. The internal cycle has a wide range of effects on many different body functions such as body temperature, release of hormones (human growth hormone is released in larger amounts during sleep than wakefulness), and amount of sleep required.
In younger children the normal body clock would have them fall asleep around 8 or 9 each night and wake up in the morning when they’ve had enough sleep. But in puberty the surge in different hormones produced by the body changes all of that and it becomes very difficult to feel sleepy often until after 11 pm. Throw in the required time on Instagram and you can see where all of this leads.
How much sleep does a teenager need and how many teens actually get that?
Most sleep researchers tell us that the typical teenager should have 9 hours of sleep per night. Right now many of you are saying to yourselves “get real, that’s impossible” for most teenagers.
With my own experience as a father of two teenage boys I’d have to agree. Several studies of teens have shown that about 90% get less than 9 hours of sleep per night and unfortunately 10% said they typically get less than 6 hours per night. The definition of “sleep deprivation” in teens is not completely clear but generally means that the teen is consistently getting less than 8 hours of sleep per night.
How sleep deprivation affects school and athletic performance
Anyone who’s sleepy can be awfully moody but there are many negative consequences beyond that. Being tired during class will obviously make it more difficult to concentrate or even stay awake during class, and there is evidence that being sleep-deprived leads to poorer school performance. And most tragically a sleep deprived teen driving a car can lead to disastrous consequences.
In a test of reaction times at Stanford University, people who were tired because of disrupted sleep performed about as poorly as subjects who were legally drunk. The study was the first to show severe impairment in people who have only mild to moderate sleep disturbances. This was an older group of people but it’s easy to see that it could be true for teenagers too. Would you like to face a high and tight fastball when you can’t react?
As for sports performance, research by Dr. Cheri Mah at the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic has shown that members of Stanford’s women’s tennis team, men’s and women’s swimming teams, and men’s basketball team improved performance by increasing sleep times.
Some practical tips for sleep and sports performance in teenagers …
There are many good reasons for teenagers to get more sleep than they do, but once again reality can get in the way of a good plan. So do the best you can to get as close as you can to 9 hours of sleep for your teen.
At the very least there are special situations when you’ll want to pay special attention to “sleep preparation” for performance. Do you have an important tournament or championship game coming up? How about a national team tryout? A college identification camp where you’ll be traveling east through several time zones? Here are some simple tips:
• Increase your sleep time several weeks before a major event.
• Make sleep as much of a priority as technical skill, fitness, and nutrition.
• Go to sleep and wake up at the same times every day.
• Turn lights off at night; use bright lights in the morning.
• When traveling from west to east for competitions try to get out to your new time zone several days in advance to acclimate to the new time zone and avoid jet lag.
FURTHER READING:
Sleep schedule plays a big role in your athletic performance
(Dr. Dev Mishra is an orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist in private practice in Palo Alto, California. He is formerly a team physician with U.S. Soccer, Stanford University, the University of California-Berkeley, and the Oakland A’s.)
You mean, you mean, more sleep improves one’s technique? Does it improve one’s outside of the pass…..As far as I’m concerned we have too many disciplines becoming involved in this sport , like more coaches , athletic coaches, psychiatrists, diethealth coaches ,video analysic coaches, and what not but the game has not improved nor is it more creativie, technically nor mentally…Don’t forget Johan Cruyff smoked a lot cigarettes when he played and it certainly hadn’t effected his game..
The fact that better sleep can improve one’s game, is a general comment which don’t need a professional to tell you that but then again ,players will rise to the occasion. But if you allow it to go to the extreme like not having slept for 24hours, that can possible effect one’s game, definitely…But to say in overal terms better sleep will make you play better, that’s is a very nebulous assertion…
You are correct. It is just a medical point. Might as well say staying healthy makes you play better.
Bob. I’m sure you’ve been to enough tournaments with the kids to know they don’t sleep much but perform fine the next game day..
I could tell by my son’s performance whether he was exhausted due to lack of sleep. In his travel soccer days, we had to invoke the “no sleepovers” rule on the night before a game. He was only ten years old and playing on a very competitive team. Knowing this idiosyncrasy, my son was playing in a D1 pre-season game v Michigan and, based on his play, I exclaimed to my wife that he looked like he was exhausted and hadn’t much sleep the night before. Sure enough, and to our astonished horror, we found out at the post-game team tailgate that his roommate, another player, was a sleep walker w night terrors. It took us over a month to change his roommate situation, and it cost my son dearly. A bad beginning to college soccer.
Philip, that was extreme in his case…But usually kids have so much energy to burn that some fooling around and getting a little less sleep during tournament time shouldn’t hurt….Stories from the dutch national team players of ’74 WC would sneak out of the hotel around 11pm and go to some bar and booze it up and come back around 3am and played fantastic….
Rinus Michels caught on andjj sat with his chair in the middle of the hall to catch anyone sneaking out…The guys like Cruyff , van Hanegem, etc would climb down the rainpipe…Suurbier one of the players a few years later playing for Sparta ,Rotterdam, snuck out in the middle of the night went to a brothel with a friend. Coming back, speeding and had a few drinks too many were stopped by the police. Both and his teammate jump in the backseat before the officer approached the car and stated the driver took off running away. The officer believed them and took them home…