Sleep prior to and following competition in professional rugby league athletes

ABSTRACT

Purpose: The importance of quality sleep for elite athletes is becoming widely recognized. However, objective studies describing the sleep patterns in the lead up to and following competition are currently limited.Methods: Nine elite male Rugby League (RL) athletes performed 3 nights of sleep monitoring on six separate occasions during the RL season. The 3 nights included the following; 1) night before the game (G-1), 2) night of the game (G), and; 3) next night after the game (G+1). Sleep monitoring was performed using wrist-actigraphy.Results: There were significant differences (p < 0.05) between nights for total sleep time during the match periods (mean h:mm; 8:38, 4:53 and 6:42 for G-1, G and G+1, respectively). This was associated with a very large reduction of total sleep time on G in comparison to both G-1 (d = − 2.36) and G+1 (d = − 1.31). Sleep efficiency was also lower on the night of a game when compared to G-1 (d = − 1.58) and G+1 (d = − 1.20).Conclusion: Following RL matches, sleep onset is later, TST and SE are reduced, and sleep patterns the following night are also affected.

KEYWORDS:

• Sleep restriction
• recovery
• actigraphy

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the participants for taking part in this study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

 Supplementary Material

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