Neuroscientist & Sleep Expert Matthew Walker Explains Why All Star Athletes Sleep 10+ Hours a Day

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Transcript: So sleep is probably the greatest legal performance enhancing drug that few athletes are abusing enough. And you see it in some discreet athletes. Roger Federer claims to sleep around about 12 hours. He does that with about 10 hours at night and about a two hour nap during the day. Usain Bolt the famous sprinter slept somewhere between nine and a half to 10 hours a night.

And he takes naps strategically during the day. And one of the world records that he broke. He'd only been awake for about 35 minutes beforehand after sleeping and then came out and broke a world record. They all know the power of sleep and they use it. The basketball player, LeBron James sleeps 12 hours as well. And we work with all of these athletes.

So it's not just that sleep enhances your performance on the day. I think where most sports teams neglect sleep, but starting to gain some aware of it, awareness of it before the game or the performance it's after sleep. I'm sorry. It's after performance where sleep is critical because that's where you need recovery and restitution of tissues.

So when you're performing at that high level, you typically have chronic inflammation within the body. And sleep is fantastic for reducing that chronic inflammation. So your speed of recovery is, could be improved when you get sleep after a performance and most sports or Daisy chaining, one game after the next.

So it's not just about performing on one single event. It's about recovering and making sure that you can make it to the next game and the next game of the next game. That's why sleep after every performance is just as important as sleep beforehand. We also know that when athletes start to short change on their sleep, bad things happen to them.

So if you're sleeping six hours or less as an athlete, your time to physical exhaustion is dropped by 30%. So in other words, let's say you're training for a 10 K run, and then you have a bad night of sleep before the run. You're now going to get exhausted by kilometer seven, rather than kilometer 10.
Next, your peak muscle strength decreases. Your ability to expand or exhale, carbon dioxide decreases your ability of your lungs to inhale oxygen decreases even your body's ability to perspire effectively and cool itself while performing is also decreased when you're not getting enough sleep.

So just about every metric that we've looked at in the sports arena, decreases markedly in a linear fashion with less and less sleep. And the final thing is injury risk. We looked at a study where we took a group of athletes across a season and what was their injury risk? And we've been tracking their sleep.

And then we bucketed those athletes into the amount of sleep that they we're getting nine hours, seven hours, six hours, five hours. And there was a linear relationship. The less sleep that you had, the higher, your injury risk when you were sleeping six hours or less, you had an 80% chance of getting injured during the season.
If you were sleeping nine hours. A night, you were only, I think it was a 15 to 20% injury risk. So a marked difference.

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