When I WHOOP’d my athletes to sleep

Thanks to a few research grants, we were able to purchase about 24 WHOOP devices (http://whoop.com) to use for research.  The first goal was to examine data during summer conditioning for football.  Unlike most research, the goal was not to manipulate anything in particular, but just to examine the results that came with normal wear, sleep, recovery, strain (exercise effort), heart rate (resting and exercise), heart rate variability, calories burned and the answers to some subjective questions.  Because the athletes got some feedback on the app, I was curious to see what they were learning about their need for sleep as a recovery tool.
 
College students are typically sleep deprived.  They don’t always have a consistent schedule, their social lives typically involve later nights and for student athletes, training is many times in the early mornings. For these athletes, four days a week they had conditioning that began promptly at 6am.  The first week with the devices I asked one of the guys what time the WHOOP App “suggested” that he head to sleep… 7:30pm (he typically beat me to the field at 5:30am).  When I asked if he listened, he just laughed.  Of course that wasn’t a reasonable suggestion, but it did give some insight into how important an early bedtime becomes when you are training hard.
 
Why is sleep so important for athletes?  You grow in your sleep (no, sorry, vertically challenged folks and gnomes, you won’t get taller).  During sleep we release growth hormone… yeah, that stuff that has made its way through the bad list for pro athletes.  When you are conditioning, especially weight training, the muscles are breaking down and in order to complete the process, building them back up, you need the human growth hormone that is secreted during the sleep cycle.  So, yeah, if you sleep, you will grow big and strong.
 
Sleep also helps with recovery from the tough workouts.  The device gives a recovery score, but most athletes also just know when they aren’t recovered.  One of the athletes remarked that when he didn’t feel recovered, he started checking his sleep.  When he added more sleep he felt more like himself and up to the challenge of summer conditioning.
 
As student athletes, they were taking summer classes and still needed to focus on learning.  Sleep helps with that as well.  When you are sleep deprived you are less likely to understand and retain the information learned.  Summer classes come fast and furious (for us instructors as well as the students), so sleep is important for the student part as well as the athlete part. And while I don’t know individual grades, the team summer GPA was a 3.0, so my 20+ guys obviously held their own.
 
Sleep also slows reaction time, which was one of many things the coaches train during the summer.  The guys need to learn to react as part of their sport… and then follow-through in games.  This may not have been the best time to gauge reaction time (no missed tackles, no dropped passes), but it should be noted.
 
There were Mondays when some of the guys would report in to me about how much they had slept over the weekend.  “I got like 11 hours on Saturday… wait until you see it!”  “Man, I had such a good night’s sleep last night, you will be impressed.”  By the end of the 6 weeks, even if they weren’t getting more sleep every night they were more aware of how they responded when they did get enough rest. In fact, when we took the average hours slept, it was under 5 hours a night, with a maximum of 10 and a minimum of less than an hour (for all you stats nerds, the standard deviation was 1.75 hours). That is still not what they need, but considering the early morning wake-ups I’ll take it.
 
Some “lab rats” are probably cringing at the fact that I let my participants make changes while I am collecting data, but that is part of what happens when using real time data. And that is okay with me because ultimately the goal is to get better performance, which sometimes means changing things up during training.
 
We gave the guys about a week break from the devices before practices started in August. When I went to hand the charged devices back, a few of the guys remarked (when asked), that they really missed having their stats ready for them.  There were a few who didn’t want to be bothered anymore and that’s okay… I needed a break, too, from having technology at my fingertips. But I am excited to finally see what the season looks like from the physiology perspective.