Iirc I’ve heard Mark Allen (his Fit Body Fit Mind book?) say that when people do lots of training they actually require less sleep. I have also found this to be the case, but you could argue endurance athletes require more to recover. So which is it? Are we making the body/mind more resilient provided we don’t train to the point of exhaustion and particularly if our training levels are well within our capabilities?
You can manage on less sleep but use more. I sleep 7 hrs per night 6 days per week - can manage on 6hrs if I need to - could always use more - once a week I go for 9-10 hrs.
I was fine on less sleep until I started training for this marathon - the increased running really does it to me - training about the same number of hours as when I am in tri season (HIM and shorter) but need much more sleep
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Think that would be very difficult to answer. Less sleep than What?..if someone is overtrained they will have sleep issues. If someone is sedentary there sleep pattern will not be optimum. I was trying to find the study but could not, but after a couple hours sleep has more to do with what your mind needs than what your muscles do. In the test they found that muscles, actually recovered much quicker but that for various reasons your mind needs sleep for its own processes.
When it come to training the more sleep the better.
A colleague of mine researched the effect of over-reaching on sleep quality (deep sleep patterns) in endurance runners and found that the results were so highly variable between runners it would be misleading to report average changes. Apparently, the study design was flawed because the runners ran the same distance (500 km) in 3 weeks and the cumulative fatigue and leg muscle soreness were variable. Some had nights of deeper sleep while others had lighter, disturbed sleep, but their “good” and “bad” nights" were not consistent. The individual duration of sleep also varied a lot, between 5 to 9 hours.
Iirc I’ve heard Mark Allen (his Fit Body Fit Mind book?) say that when people do lots of training they actually require less sleep. I have also found this to be the case, but you could argue endurance athletes require more to recover. So which is it? Are we making the body/mind more resilient provided we don’t train to the point of exhaustion and particularly if our training levels are well within our capabilities?
That idea makes very little intuitive sense to me.
Lower quantity, better quality.
Iirc I’ve heard Mark Allen (his Fit Body Fit Mind book?) say that when people do lots of training they actually require less sleep. I have also found this to be the case, but you could argue endurance athletes require more to recover. So which is it? Are we making the body/mind more resilient provided we don’t train to the point of exhaustion and particularly if our training levels are well within our capabilities?
Are you sure you got this from Mark Allen??? He was pretty well known for sleeping 9-10 hr/nt himself. In fact, I recall quite clearly that, in his 1987-ish book on tri training, he said that he liked to sleep late and often had a hard time getting himself out the door to start his training before 1200 noon.
Also, in general most top athletes sleep as much as they can, generally averaging 8 to 11 hr/nt. Andy Potts reportedly sleeps 11 hr/nt.