Effects of sports training on sleep characteristics of Asian adolescent athletes

Abstract

Adolescents are predisposed to poorer quality of sleep and experience shortened sleep durations, with these trends being more pronounced amongst Asians. Even though sleep is crucial for athletic recovery, there is a dearth of the literature on the sleep patterns of Asian adolescent athletes. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of different intensities of sports training on sleep patterns in adolescent athletes, and to describe novel sleep data and daytime sleepiness amongst Asian adolescents who were high-level athletes. Those athletes (age 14.8 ± 0.9 years) in higher-intensity sports showed significantly more deep sleep, less light sleep and waketime after sleep onset. Actigraphically determined bedtimes and waketimes were significantly delayed on weekends, when mean total sleep time was also significantly longer. There was a large effect for an increased daytime sleepiness in high-intensity sport athletes. These findings highlight the phenomenon of social jet lag in Asian adolescent student-athletes.

Keywords:

• adolescent
• athlete
• sleep
• daytime sleepiness
• exercise intensity

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Professor Michael Chee and Dr. June Lo from the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, for their unwavering support and thoughtful discussions in this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.