I toss and turn in bed and once again this week the quality of my sleep is not of the best.  Many things pass through my head and I find myself involuntarily making plans and organising the day that waits for me in the office in a few hours.

I can’t keep my legs still even when in bed, as if the training session which finished just a few hours ago is in reality is anything but finished.  I feel weary, tense, restless.

Despite the fact that my brain doesn’t want to switch itself off, I know very well that, in spite of the situation, I am tired and I need to sleep.

For the last few days, this has been the chronicle of my night’s rest, which has indeed been far from restful.

The problem is that I know that a good night’s sleep is essential to perform at my best in the office, but above all, to permit me to respect the training tables that are waiting for me this week, already programmed by my coach.

This is not so much a supposition so much as an assertion, supported by several scientific studies that have shown how much sleep enables the optimisation of the training stimulus and its transformation into something productive at the organic level, taken from the perspective of sports performance.

For a long time athletes have known that an elevated level of growth hormone in the blood improves performance.  The release of this important hormone happens right in the REM phase of the sleep cycle.  This for an athlete means being more or less able to recover properly from the previous day’s training session.

Biochemical changes derived from poor sleep, however, don’t stop just at GH.  Insufficient sleep leads to an increase in the consumption of glycogen.  In humans, glycogen is an energy reserve stored mainly in the liver and the muscles and our body goes to it once it has used the sugars available to it in the blood.

The result of all of these metabolic changes is that you get up feeling more tired and you definitely end up feeling more hungry during the course of the day.

A recent study, carried out on some basketball players by researchers from the School of Medicine for the University of Stanford (USA) and published in the journal Sleep, showed that to improve sporting performance you need to sleep for 10 hours a night.

Having said all of that, this week, if sleep doesn’t present itself to me soon, I’m going to be worn out, and I certainly can’t expect great things from my training sessions and races.

Goodnight everyone!