Body composition and human sleep

Abstract

It has been reported that fit atheletes have more slow wave sleep (SWS), sleep longer and have shorter sleep onset latencies than unfit individuals. However, we have shown that these differences are not a direct consequence of physical fitness. This suggests that the effect is due to more enduring characteristics of individuals. We report two experiments designed to test the hypothesis that individual differences in sleep are related to differences in body composition. The hypothesis was tested in two different experiments, each comparing independent groups of fit athletes with unfit non-athletes. In each experiment both sleep and a number of anthropometric variables were measured. Twenty-five fit and 22 unfit subjects were run in Experiment 1 and 17 fit and 17 unfit in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1 percentage fat was estimated from a skin fold method, while in Experiment 2 lean body mass (LBM) was estimated from 24 h. urinary creatinine. The results showed that percentage LBM was negatively related to SWS in fit subjects, while the amount of LBM and weight were negatively related in the unfit groups. When all subjects were combined within each experiment, significant negative correlations were found between SWS and both LBM and percentage LBM in Experiment 2. The results suggest that body composition influences SWS levels, but not other components of sleep.