Athletes’ Improve Performance with Extra Sleep

WESTCHESTER, Ill. – Athletes who get an extra amount of sleep are more likely to improve their performance in a game, according to a research abstract presented at the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).

The study, authored by Cheri Mah of Stanford University, was conducted on six healthy students on the Stanford men’s basketball team, who maintained their typical sleep-wake patterns for a two-week baseline followed by an extended sleep period in which they obtained as much extra sleep as possible. To assess improvements in athletic performance, the students were judged based on their sprint time and shooting percentages.

Significant improvements in athletic performance were observed, including faster sprint time and increased free-throws. Athletes also reported increased energy and improved mood during practices and games, as well as a decreased level of fatigue.

“Although much research has established the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive function, mood and performance, relatively little research has investigated the effects of extra sleep over multiple nights on these variables, and even less on the specific relationship between extra sleep and athletic performance. This study illuminated this latter relationship and showed that obtaining extra sleep was associated with improvements in indicators of athletic performance and mood among members of the men’s basketball team.”

The amount of sleep a person gets affects his or her physical health, emotional well-being, mental abilities, productivity and performance. Recent studies associate lack of sleep with serious health problems such as an increased risk of depression, obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
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Article adapted by MD Sports from original press release.
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Contact: Jim Arcuri
American Academy of Sleep Medicine 

Experts recommend that adults get between seven and eight hours of sleep each night to maintain good health and optimum performance.

Persons who think they might be suffering from a sleep disorder are encouraged to consult with their primary care physician, who will refer them to a sleep specialist.

The annual SLEEP meeting brings together an international body of 5,000 leading researchers and clinicians in the field of sleep medicine to present and discuss new findings and medical developments related to sleep and sleep disorders.

More than 1,000 research abstracts will be presented at the SLEEP meeting, a joint venture of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society. The four-day scientific meeting will bring to light new findings that enhance the understanding of the processes of sleep and aid the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders such as insomnia, narcolepsy and sleep apnea.

Boys and Girls misuse Anabolic Steroids to Achieve Muscular Body Image

University Park, Pa. — Girls and boys are now equally caught up in the social pressure for a muscular body image currently lauded in popular culture. A Penn State researcher contends those pressures are leading girls and boys down unhealthy avenues such as the misuse of anabolic steroids.

“Young girls have always had to struggle against the media stereotypes of stick-thin models or voluptuous sexuality, but with the rising popularity of women sports, girls are bombarded with buffed body images,” says Dr. Charles Yesalis, professor of health policy and administration, and exercise and sports science at Penn State, and editor of the newest edition of the book “Anabolic Steroids in Sports and Exercise.” “Now, young boys face pop culture musclemen like The Rock and Steve Austin, given the influence of professional wrestling shows.”

“The current film ‘Charlie’s Angels’ sports karate-kicking women in cool clothes,” he added. “Today’s children look with envy at the physiques of actors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Wesley Snipes, and Linda Hamilton, whose roles call for a muscular build. Hollywood stars are openly taking Human Growth Hormone (HGH) injections to combat aging.”

In addition, children are entering competitive sports at younger ages and many working families have children signed up in two or three sports. Parents, coaches and young athletes are facing growing violence in amateur athletics. The pressure to win at all costs continues to weigh heavily on children, Yesalis notes.

The concern is that many youths will take shortcuts to achieving a muscular build by using anabolic steroids. Female athletes also are pressured to achieve low body fat to excel in their sport. The Penn State researcher has seen evidence that the pressures are reaching down to young children. For example, the book cites figures from the Monitoring The Future Study, a national-level epidemiological survey conducted annually since 1975. Approximately 50,000 8th, 10th and 12 graders are surveyed each year.

The MTF data shows that during the 1990s, anabolic steroid use among 12 graders –both boys and girls – rose to an all-time high with more than 500,000 adolescents having cycled – an episode of use of 6 to 12 weeks – during their lifetime. And the percentage of girls alone doubled in the same period.

A 1998 study of 965 youngsters at four Massachusetts middle schools found that 2.7 percent admitted to taking illegal steroids for better sports performance. That included some boys and girls as young as 10 years old. “This year’s Olympic doping scandals and the epidemic of anabolic steroids in professional baseball just glorify and justify steroids to impressionable youths,” Yesalis notes. “The use of anabolic steroids has cascaded down from the Olympic, professional and college levels to high schools and junior high schools and now middle schools for athletes and non-athletes alike. ”

“Anabolic steroids are made to order for a female wanting to attain a lean athletic body. While most drug abuse has outcomes that tend to discourage use, females who use anabolic steroids may experience a decrease in body fat, increased muscle size and strength, and enhanced sports performance,” he says.

Girls and boys misusing anabolic steroids may win approval and rewards from parents, coaches and peers, but don’t realize there are long-term negative effects on their health, particularly girls, according to Yesalis. Young girls face potential permanent side effects of male hair growth or baldness, deepening of the voice, the enlargement of the clitoris as well as the known risks of heart and liver diseases.

Published by Human Kinetics, the book incorporates the latest research, experience and insights of 15 experts on the scientific, clinical, historical, legal and other aspects of steroid abuse and drug testing. New information looks at the effects of steroids on health, particularly that of women.

This year, trials of East German doctors, coaches and officials reveal records of systematic doping of young athletes without their own or parents’ knowledge. In 1974, officials’ plan to turn the tiny Communist nation into a superpower in sports included giving performance-enhancing drugs to all competing athletes including children as young as 10 years old. The indictments included 142 former East German athletes who now complain of health problems. In media reports, several female athletes report incidents of miscarriages, liver tumor, gynecological problems and enlarged heart, all showing up decades after the steroid misuse.

“Our society’s current strategy for dealing with the abuse of anabolic steroids in sport primarily involves testing, law enforcement and education,” Yesalis says. “But our efforts to deal with this problem have not been very successful. Unless we deal with the social environment that rewards winning at all costs and an unrealistic physical appearance, we won’t even begin to address the problem.”

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Article adapted by MD Sports Weblog from original press release.
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Contact: Vicki Fong
Penn State

Lack of Sleep clouds vision and judgement

Neuroscience researchers at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore have shown for the first time what happens to the visual perceptions of healthy but sleep-deprived volunteers who fight to stay awake, like people who try to drive through the night.

The scientists found that even after sleep deprivation, people had periods of near-normal brain function in which they could finish tasks quickly. However, this normalcy mixed with periods of slow response and severe drops in visual processing and attention, according to their paper, published in the Journal of Neuroscience on May 21.

“Interestingly, the team found that a sleep-deprived brain can normally process simple visuals, like flashing checkerboards. But the ‘higher visual areas’ – those that are responsible for making sense of what we see – didn’t function well,” said Dr. Michael Chee, lead author and professor at the Neurobehavioral Disorders Program at Duke-NUS. “Herein lies the peril of sleep deprivation.”

The research team, including colleagues at the University of Michigan and University of Pennsylvania, used magnetic resonance imaging to measure blood flow in the brain during speedy normal responses and slow “lapse” responses. The study was funded by grants from the DSO National Laboratories in Singapore, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the NASA Commercialization Center, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Study subjects were asked to identify letters flashing briefly in front of them. They saw either a large H or S, and each was made up of smaller Hs or Ss. Sometimes the large letter matched the smaller letters; sometimes they didn’t. Scientists asked the volunteers to identify either the smaller or the larger letters by pushing one of two buttons.

During slow responses, sleep-deprived volunteers had dramatic decreases in their higher visual cortex activity. At the same time, as expected, their frontal and parietal ‘control regions’ were less able to make their usual corrections.

Scientists also could see brief failures in the control regions during the rare lapses that volunteers had after a normal night’s sleep. However, the failures in visual processing were specific only to lapses that occurred during sleep deprivation.

The scientists theorize that this sputtering along of cognition during sleep deprivation shows the competing effects of trying to stay awake while the brain is shutting things down for sleep. The brain ordinarily becomes less responsive to sensory stimuli during sleep, Chee said.

This study has implications for a whole range of people who have to struggle through night work, from truckers to on-call doctors. “The periods of apparently normal functioning could give a false sense of competency and security when in fact, the brain’s inconsistency could have dire consequences,” Chee said.

“The study task appeared simple, but as we showed in previous work, you can’t effectively memorize or process what you see if your brain isn’t capturing that information,” Chee said. “The next step in our work is to see what we might do to improve things, besides just offering coffee, now that we have a better idea where the weak links in the system are.”

 

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Article adapted by MD Sports from original press release.
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Contact: Mary Jane Gore
Duke University Medical Center

Other authors of the study include Jiat Chow Tan, Hui Zheng, and Sarayu Parimal of the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School; Daniel Weissman of the University of Michigan Psychology Department; David Dinges of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine; and Vitali Zagorodnov of the Computer Engineering Department of the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Peak Athletic Performance Related to Time of Day

Peak athletic performance may be related to time of day, suggests a University of Chicago study being presented to the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting, ENDO 2001, in Denver, Colorado, on June 22, 2001. The study shows that the response of the systems regulating energy metabolism and some hormones differs according to when in the day exercise is performed.

Subjects who exercised at night had much larger drops in glucose levels in response to exercise than at other times of day. Exercise in the evening and at night elicited large increases in the levels of two hormones important for energy metabolism, cortisol and thyrotropin. Exercise at other times of day had much smaller effects on these hormones. In contrast, marked increases in growth hormone levels in response to exercise were not effected by the time of day.

“The effects of exercise we observed may explain how some times of day could be better than others for regular exercise or athletic performance, as we might expect from anectdotally reported variations in peak athletic performance,” said Orfeu Buxton, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow in endocrinology at the University of Chicago. “We found strong evidence for substantial changes in glucose metabolism and an array of hormonal responses to 1-hour, high-intensity exercise, dependent on the timing of the exercise. Circadian rhythms, generated by our 24-hour internal clock, appear to play an important role in the complex response to exercise.”

For the study, conducted in the Clinical Research Center of the University of Chicago, 40 healthy men, between the ages of 20 and 30, were divided into five groups. Four groups exercised vigorously for one hour on a stair-stepper in the morning, afternoon, evening or night. A control group did not exercise. A standard marker, the timing of melatonin secretion, was used to determine the timing of each individual’s daily rhythm, his circadian “clock time.”

When not exercising, the subjects rested in bed with constant glucose infusion to avoid fluctuation in their blood sugar levels caused by intermittent meals. Blood levels of the “circadian hormones,” melatonin, cortisol and thyrotropin, and the levels of growth hormone and glucose were compared to blood levels for the same time of day in the resting control subjects.

The importance of timing for hormonal secretion and energy metabolism is demonstrated by the distinct 24-hour patterns of secretion for each hormonal system. One hormone may be actively secreted in a complex pulsating pattern while another may be in a resting phase.

Many circadian rhythms, such as heart rate, oxygen consumption, and cardio-pulmonary function play a role in athletic performance. Rhythmic patterns of hormonal secretion provide internal temporal organization essential to the coordination of physiological processes. Physical exercise is associated with marked metabolic changes and can elicit a variety of neuroendocrine responses. Although these metabolic and hormonal responses to morning exercise are well-documented, few studies have examined the effects of exercise at other times of day.

“Our study covers new ground, demonstrating variation in the effects of exercise at four different times of day, with circadian time precisely quantified, with a practical duration of exercise, and with a high intensity designed to elicit maximal effects” said Buxton.

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Article adapted by MD Only Sports Weblog from original press release.
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Contact: Jeanne Galatzer-Levy
University of Chicago Medical Center

Co-authors on the study include, André J. Scheen, M.D., Division of Diabetes, Nutrition and Metabolic Disorders, University of Liége, Belgium; Mireille L’Hermite-Balériaux, Ph.D., Laboratory of Experimental Medicine, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium and Eve Van Cauter, Ph.D., Department of Medicine, University of Chicago.

This work was supported by grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and from the Department of Defense. The University of Chicago Clinical Research Center is supported by a National Institutes of Health grant.

Pep Talk Influences Athletic Performance Better Than Hollering

When it comes to coaching, the pep talk is better than the locker room tirade, University of Florida researchers have found.In a project that applied methods previously used only in classroom settings, a team headed by Professor Robert Singer found that changing people’s attributions, or how they think about themselves, influenced their performance in sports tasks they sought to learn.

“How we think about how we will do and how we’ve just done can very much affect our persistence, our attitudes and our achievements,” said Singer, chair of UF’s department of exercise and sport sciences. “It’s not only a belief in what you can do, it’s also an understanding of thinking more objectively.”

The technique is known as attribution training, which involves using people’s self-perceptions and the extent to which they feel they can control their own behavior to help them succeed at various tasks. Those who believe they can control and change how they feel about themselves are said to have constructive attributions.

In the study, scheduled to be published in March in The Sport Psychologist, Singer and UF colleague Iris Orbach divided 35 college-age beginning tennis players into three groups, each of which was given different instructions regarding personal failure. The first was told they could control their attributions and effort and could change their performance. The second was told their failures were due to a lack of innate ability. The third group was told nothing.

In four trials, the first group scored consistently better in performance, expectation, success perception and emotional control, Singer said. For example, on a test to measure feelings of personal control over behavior, the first group scored twice as high as the control group, while the second group scored below the control group.

In a related study in 1997 that focused on basketball time trials, the first group improved their final time between the first and fourth trials more than twice as much as the control group and more than nine times as much as the second group did.

“When it comes down to it, the primary thing is that you really have to understand what helps you to achieve and what’s under your control,” Singer said. “What has been observed is that those individuals who tend to have more constructive attributions tend to persist longer and tend to achieve more than those who do not have constructive attributions.”

Most studies associated with attribution training techniques have been conducted in the area of education, with the goal of raising the standards for children who are underachievers in the classroom. Singer and Orbach were among the first in the world to apply the techniques to sports.

“Why not try this in a sports setting?” Singer said. “The typical design is to train one group with an attributional orientation that reflects that if you try harder and you try smarter, you’ll have a greater chance of doing well. You’ll learn the skills better and think better things will happen.”

Although it is a common perception that believing in yourself can lead you to success, Singer said his study could have a significant impact on the way people teach and learn athletic activities.

“A lot of times in sports, there’s a negative attitude and a lot of criticism that goes on,” he said. “Probably many athletes and coaches don’t realize the significance of what we’re talking about and the relevance of how people think … I believe that if there’s a better understanding by coaches as to the kind of feedback they give to athletes and how stuff is delivered to them, it could make a difference.”

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Article adapted by MD Only Sports Weblog from original press release.
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Contact: Kristin Harmel
University of Florida

Poor athletic performance linked to vitamin deficiency

Active individuals lacking in B-vitamins – including college athletes and other elite competitors — may perform worse during high-intensity exercise and have a decreased ability to repair and build muscle than counterparts with nutrient-rich diets, according to recent Oregon State University research published in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism.The B-vitamins include thiamin, riboflavin, vitamin B-6, B-12 and folate. These micronutrients are necessary during the body’s process for converting proteins and sugars into energy, and are used during the production and repair of cells, including red blood cells.

For active individuals a marginal deficiency in the nutrients may impact the body’s ability to repair itself, operate efficiently and fight disease, said Melinda Manore, researcher in the Colleges of Agricultural and Health and Human Sciences. Manore analyzed the athletic performance of several elite and collegiate athletes in her research, as well as less competitive individuals.

The stress on the body’s energy producing pathways during exercise, the changes in the body’s tissues resulting from training, an increase in the loss of nutrients in sweat, urine and feces during and after strenuous activity and the additional nutrients needed to repair and maintain higher levels of lean tissue mass present in some athletes and individuals may all affect an individuals B-vitamin requirements, said Manore.

“Many athletes, especially young athletes involved in highly competitive sports, do not realize the impact their diets have on their performance,” said Manore, who is also an Extension Service nutrition scientist. “By the time they reach adulthood they can have seriously jeopardized their abilities and their long-term health.”

Current national B-vitamin recommendations for active individuals may be inadequate, and athletes who follow the recommended daily allowances set by the U.S. government may be receiving lower amounts of nutrients than there bodies need, said Manore. Athletes who restrict calories or limit food groups like dairy or meat have an increased chance of deficiency. Such athletes are often concerned about maintaining a low body weight for sports like gymnastics and wrestling.

“The most vulnerable people are often the individuals society expects to be the healthiest,” said Manore. “There’s a lot of pressure on women in particular to look like an ‘athlete.’ Unfortunately for some people that means skinny and petite, rather than healthy and strong.”

The B-vitamins are in whole and enriched grains, dark green vegetables, nuts, and many animal and dairy products. Manore suggests athletes and individuals with poor or restricted diets consider taking a multivitamin or mineral supplement.

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Article adapted by MD Only Sports Weblog from original press release.
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Contact: Melinda Manore
Oregon State University