Andrew Longley – Article 9 – The art and neuroscience of high-performance coaching

Andy is a team performance expert with a background in psychology & applied neuroscience, who will over the coming months share insights ground the art and neuroscience of high-performance coaching. Each article will share a little of the latest applied neuroscience plus give simple tips on how to practically bring it to life in your own coaching.

Great to be back with you. In my ninth article, I introduced you to another part of the coachup model of high-performance teams and coaches, which you can see below. We looked at Motivation via CARES with your athletes and teams.

The coachup.academy model of high-performing teams/coaches

Today, we’ll examine the importance of sleep and rest and why this is a key aspect of high-performance coaching. Of course, wellbeing is a very important and in-focus topic across our sporting landscape. However, it’s also a very broad topic, so for the purposes of today’s article, we’ll examine it through the lens of sleep and rest only.

I often get asked what the most important thing a coach can do to create a high-performance environment is. If I could choose one thing, it would be sleep. Encourage and ensure your athletes are getting enough quality sleep because this will have a far greater performance impact on them than any technical coaching you can do.

Now, let’s look at why sleep is so vital, not only for high performance but for health and well-being in general. Sleep and winning are different sides of the same coin. For us to perform at our best physically and mentally, we need at least 7 hours of quality sleep per night, ideally eight hours. If we’re getting less than this, our performance will deteriorate rapidly. Today I wanted to share with you both some of the cognitive and physical benefits to getting enough quality sleep.

Let’s start with cognitive impact. A lack of sleep has been linked to a whole number of negative mental consequences such as increased mood disorders and mental health issues like depression and anxiety disorders, reduced ability to concentrate, poorer decision making, reduced creativity and innovation, and being less able to learn from our mistakes. One in particular to highlight is the impact on our learning and memory. When we get good quality sleep, our brain can code and retrieve memories better and transfer them from our short-term to our long-term memory. Going a little deeper, research has recently shown that when we lack enough quality sleep (~8 hours), we have a 40% deficit in our ability to make new memories (Nature Neuroscience, 10, 2007). If we’re thinking about learning specifically, we need sleep before learning to help prepare our brain to absorb new information, and we need sleep after learning to help retain the information. So, the old habit of pulling an all-nighter before an exam is a terrible idea.

So now, let’s think about your team and athletes. Without our supporting them to rest and get enough quality sleep, we’re likely to be coaching athletes who make poorer decisions at the moment, are less likely to remember a move or game- -plan, are less creative when they need to be, are more prone to emotional outbursts, find it harder to build trust with their teammates, and are less able to learn from their mistakes. To me, this sounds like the opposite of a high-performance environment.

Now, let’s look at the physical impact. A lack of sleep has been linked to a whole number of negative physical consequences, too, such as reduced physical coordination, reduced reaction time, reduced reproductive health, increased risk of chronic diseases such as obesity and cardiovascular disease, a significantly reduced immune system, and a greater likelihood of developing cancer. In fact, in 2007, the World Health Organization designated shift work (due to sleep disruption and reduction) as a ‘probable carcinogen’ (IARC Working Group on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans [2007]). Sleep can even make us live longer! Research has shown that a sustained lack of quality sleep predicts all-cause mortality (lowers your life span). In fact, the evidence is so clear on the benefits of good quality sleep that the Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr Matt Walker, recently said, “Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity. It’s your life support system”.

I’m not trying to be bleak in this article, but I think it’s so important that we understand the huge health, well-being, and performance benefits of good quality sleep. So what can you do (and encourage others) to get better quality sleep? Aside from the known methods of limiting alcohol, caffeine and screentime before we sleep, here are the three best tips:

Regularity. Be regular with the times you go to sleep and wake from sleep, including the weekends. Sorry if you’re a fan of the weekend sleep-in! This is the single biggest promoter of good quality sleep, as it works with our natural biological rhythms.
Keep it cool. Our bodies need to lower their core temperature to initiate and stay asleep. A hot room is a real blocker of quality sleep. The suggested optimal room temperature is 18° Celsius.
I love the dark. We need a lot of bright natural light to kick start our systems in the morning (or whenever we wake up), but in the evening, we’re extra sensitive to light. Even a little light can start to wake us up when we’re trying to sleep, so try to minimise light where possible in the evenings (dim lights, turn off unnecessary lights) so we send the signal to our brains it’s time to launch our sleep processes.

So, if you’re a coach (or parent or leader), then a few high-performing habits you can focus on are:

Ensure athletes are well rested ahead of games and training.
As part of the team’s contract, establish ground rules for curfews with the team before matches or tournaments.
Encourage athletes to share with you when they haven’t been sleeping well so you can manage the team based on this information. This could be especially important if the whole team lacks sleep, and then you need to adapt your coaching plan with this in mind.
Encourage napping where appropriate. A nap should be 60-90 minutes to reach REM sleep and the point where decision-making is improved.
Check on sleep and rest levels with your athletes at training. This will reinforce the habit of reflecting on sleep’s importance and show that you care about rest levels.

So, there we have a little of the applied neuroscience behind sleep and rest. It’s important to note that not everyone’s the same, and different individuals will experience different performance impacts from quality sleep or a lack of sleep over time. But the evidence is unequivocal: enough quality sleep makes us better performers.

The tenth article in this series will focus on stretch learning and how to create a team environment that promotes this. Stay tuned.

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