Originally Posted by
carleton
What about rest? If I don't get good rest, I'm a wreck personally, professionally, and athletically. Just last night, we had high winds here so there were LOTS of branches falling and banging on things, garage door booming, etc... I slept, but didn't get any deep sleep. The result was that it was like I stayed up all night. I was tired, listless, forgetful, and found it difficult to focus on basic things all day. There was no way I could lift heavy in the gym today. I tried that once and failed a rep and dropped 300+ lbs on to the guard rails. I didn't get hurt, but it was a loud lesson.
Being that many of us (up to and including Olympians) have day jobs and families (with related obligations). I would think that the energy expended there would affect a workout or training block.
Rest is important, no doubt about that. We consistently saw higher Rates of Perceived Exertion when athletes had low quantity and/or quality of sleep. Injury rates have a pretty strong correlation with hours of sleep, too. Yann Le Meur (@YLMSportScience on Twitter) posted an infographic stating athletes sleeping less than 8 hours per night have 1.7 times the injury rates.
https://twitter.com/YLMSportScience/...09806636851201 (This is a pretty fantastic source of info, though it doesn't apply directly to cycling.)
With the data we collected, the amount of sleep "Normalized" out, or "averaged" out of the data. We had some athletes consistently sleeping 5 hours per night, while others consistently slept 9. So for every great session a player who slept 5 hours had, one who slept for 9 hours bombed out, and vice-versa. There were some sessions that were largely wasted, because athletes weren't recovering properly. Rest is a tricky variable, because it can work both acutely, and chronically. You can both feel bad for one session, if you don't sleep enough, and you can limit your ability to train with days, or weeks, of poor sleep strung together. I don't recall if we tried to look at differences between athletes who had equivocal rest quantities/qualities. That would be interesting, and I may pass it back to some of my old mates.
Also, to your last paragraph, we worked with collegiate athletes, so the stressors we were coping with were very different. We got lots of sorority drama, some homesickness for the internationals, and typical co-ed hijinks. I'm not convinced any of these are LESS stressful to the individual during the moment, but they're certainly not sweating an underwater mortgage, or getting henpecked at home, or whichever "adult" stereotype suits you.
