stevej wrote:
devashish_paul wrote:
I think this is just data overkill. If you can focus on getting 56 hours of sleep per week (lying down time start to finish daily added up over 7 days), this is all the macro data you really need. What people need is something to drive their behaviour towards treating sleep like a must do task (just like training) rather than something to be sacrificed. All the gadgets in the world are only useful if them help drive towards that macro goal of 2900-3000 hrs of sleep per year (I bet you never saw it referred to in that way, but that's what drives your general health in a positive aggregate direction). A year of sleep deprivation and you're getting sick all the time and training quality goes down and output at work goes down and your irritable around family and friends.
I agree with you in general.
I'm on a special assignment for work (been doing it since last September) where I commute a little over an hour each way to work. My sleep has definitely been sacrificed in order to get in my training. Fortunately, I do not feel like I have hit the sleep deprivation wall yet. I do feel like I'm riding a thin line more than ever so I wanted something to track my sleep that does all the counting for me and is quick to reference. I'd also like something that takes your resting HR while you are sleeping so I can compare day to day and week to week. The resting hr when you first get out of bed or throughout the day, is not really your resting hr. I just need something to tell me right away, hey.... you aren't getting enough sleep.... you are really tired. I'm one that will ignore the initial signs of sleep deprivation (years and years of waking up early for swim practice) and will just toughen it up until it's too late.
I think all these tracker are putting you in the trees rather than looking at the health of the entire forest. One or a few trees does not matter at the micro level. What matters is the overall health of the forest. I am a bit dismissive of the tracking devices, because a century or more ago before widespread proliferation of artificial light, the average human slept a lot more. We're working against nature here in the western world and then we need all these devices to tell us what sunrise and sunset were already asking us to do naturally.
I have to travel quite a bit overseas for work typically on 6 to 12 hour jetlag for the last decade and have to perform in a high pressure environment at work overseas and on top of that i am trying to cram in training. Quality of individual nights or blocks of time in that night are less important than day over day "horizontal rest totals". I can tell you if you just had crappy sleep for four days but were sleeping for 36 hours, you'd be way better off than 4 days where your tracker says you had "good quality" sleep, but only had an aggragate of 24 hours. While I agree the brain needs rest, there is a finite amount of time that the organs need to just rebuild your body from daily stresses.
9 years ago I asked my athletes to start reporting their total sleep in their training log. I don't really care if they take rest days with no training and claim to be rested when they only had 40-45 hrs of sleep. The guy doing 20 hour training week and 56 hours sleep is likely going to be more rested than the guy doing 10 hours of training and 42 hours of sleep. The latter athlete is getting better workouts, more training, almost never getting sick and alert at work. I got the logs of all these guys and the sleeper crew really rip up the performances. I had athletes that I could not convince to track their sleep, but they were the ones missing most of the workouts, getting sick and having sub optimal performances.
Seriously you don't need a tracker, just sleep enough. If you can't sleep enough during the week ensure you catch up on weekends. That's what I have to do coming back from overseas travel, but even then I never catch up. 7-14 days later, the power/paces are all a bit lower until I catch back up and let me body rebuild.
Now I realize this is hard with young kids...really hard especially if the kids are not great sleepers.