Dreaming of gold: How sleep has become a key part of Olympic prep for Team USA

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Olympic athletes are famously meticulous. Their workouts are carefully structured, their diets carefully balanced – every move designed to maximize athletic potential, with nothing left to chance.

And sleeping is no different.

While nobody can nap their way to an Olympic medal, sleep has become an important frontier for elite athletes – an opportunity to both rest their minds and rebuild their bodies. And the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee treats it as such.

In the years leading up to the Tokyo Olympics, senior sport psychophysiologist Lindsay Shaw said hundreds of summer sport athletes have tracked their sleep in consultation with USOPC staff, looking for ways to sleep better between training days or competition. For a select few, this means confronting insomnia, sleep apnea or other chronic issues. For most, it's just a matter of getting to bed a little bit earlier.

"I would say more than 80% of the work is helping athletes understand that they usually need a little bit more sleep than they currently get," Shaw said. "We just try to figure out, given their training demands and their athletic goals, how can we generate a sleep plan that will support them?"

The mere idea of drafting up a "sleep plan" might sound over-the-top, but given the mental and physical stress that comes with being an Olympic athlete, a good night's rest can make a world of difference.

Sleep plays a critical role in the physical recovery process, as the body repairs and builds muscles. Shaw wrote in a 2016 paper that insufficient sleep after training is almost analogous to not eating protein after lifting. It's also key for what she described as "memory validation" – essentially giving the brain a chance to digest everything it experienced and learning during the day's training.

"You’re working so hard during the day to make usually these really minor alignments in your technical execution, or some pattern that you’re working on with your teammates, or some small change in your elbow angle," Shaw explained. "You’re doing all that daytime work. You need to give yourself the opportunity at night to (process it)."

Shaw said the USOPC has partnered with a company called Sleeprate since 2014, to allow athletes to track their sleeping tendencies using heart rate data. Sensors track the amount of milliseconds between heartbeats to provide sleep information through an app, and athletes input information about their training to create a "sleep-related training readiness score."

Some athletes are more passionate about tracking their sleep than others, Shaw said. Many try it for only a few weeks, or during specific periods of training – at altitude, for example, or during particularly high-intensity stretches, to see how their body is reacting.

Fields said he sleeps 11 or 12 hours during periods of heavy training. Shaw generally recommends that athletes commit to spending a certain amount of time in bed – usually nine or 10 hours – even if they're not actively sleeping for that entire stretch.

The same is true for travel and time zone changes. Before boarding their flights to Tokyo this month, for instance, Team USA athletes will have access to jet lag management plans crafted by the USOPC, based on their normal sleep schedules and the details of their flights.

Shaw said the plans will include specified blocks of rest at specific points during an international flight, to mimic the athlete's normal bedtime and ensure that they don't get too much or too little sleep before landing, easing the transition to a new time zone.

"Some of (the athletes) will follow them to a T," she said. "Some athletes just want general guidelines."

Sleeping during competition is a whole different challenge, particularly when it comes to the Olympic Games, Shaw said.

There's the nerves and anticipation on the eve of an event and sometimes a quick turnaround from one day to another. In swimming, for instance, some athletes will compete in a preliminary round in the evening, fulfill their media obligations, take a drug test, eat a meal and then have to find time to rest before competing in the final the next morning.

Shaw said it's important, at times like these, to remember that sleep is cumulative. And while it can certainly help a performance, a rough night's sleep is also something that Olympic athletes can overcome.

"The caveat of the Olympic Games is it’s a wildly thrilling experience. No one sleeps their normal (amount) in the village," she said. "So we adjust expectations to say ‘if your sleep is great, then you’re doing great. And if it’s not, let’s make sure that you go into the Games as well-rested as you possibly can be."