QUESTION: How much does sleep affect my ability to ride and recover? I have a busy schedule and rarely get more than 6 hours a night. Do I need more? — Sarah M.
RBR ANSWER: Different people need different amounts of sleep in order to recover from the routine activities of daily life. If you’re also training or even riding recreationally, you’ll almost certainly need to sleep more.
A good rule of thumb: Try for 8-9 hours a night if you’re riding around 150 miles per week.
Of course, some people claim they do just fine on as few as 5 hours per night. They wake up even without an alarm. But if you make your bed in the morning and long to crawl back into it, then feel sleepy during the day and lack enthusiasm for training (not to mention work and daily chores), you definitely aren’t sleeping enough.
If you can’t extend your nightly time in bed, try for a short nap in the afternoon. Not possible? Then you may have to cut down on your riding. If you don’t, you’ll soon fall victim to stalled progress, or worse.
It’s not just quantity of sleep but QUALITY as well. Alcohol, stress, too much caffeine, even and computer screen time just before bed all can negatively affect sleep quality.
This answer is very dangerous, especially from someone who isn’t an expert on sleep. Most opinions from university scientists who study sleep state (FROM RESEARCH) that humans regardless of activity level need AT MINIMUM 7 hours of sleep. I don’t think we need research to understand that Americans are chronically sleep deprived. In fact, we are so sleep-deprived that we don’t even know what it feels like to be fully rested.
So when you state dangerous claims like “Of course, some people do just fine on as few as 5 hours per night”, you are encouraging (r making it seem normal) the very tragic American lifestyle of sleep deprivation that lead to shorter life spans, health problems, and faster aging.
Please delete this post.
Agree
Personally, I disagree with the blanket statements that all cyclists “need” at least seven hours of sleep as well as 8 to 9 hours for those who are riding 150 miles a week or more. I would not disagree with normative data, but to suggest that norms apply to every person is not simply fallacious but can make individuals with lower sleep needs start to feel a bit neurotic in their apparent “inability” to initiate or sustain sleep. Much as I, like most, enjoy uninterrupted slumber, I have rarely been able to sleep more than six or seven hours a night. I am almost 74, have been biking consecutively for 51 years with over 175,000 miles under my belt, have three advanced degrees, including a doctorate, have written numerous professional articles as well as two published books, have built camps, two story garages, and large sheds, and have almost never felt a lack of motivation, On my bike or elsewhere. Of course I could die tomorrow, but even so, being someone who prefers late day/evening exercise, I look forward all day long to working out after 5 PM, whether it’s in the gym, on the ice (I still play ice hockey), on Nordic skis and/or on the bike. Maybe my limited sleep accounts for my never having been able to compete with Lance Armstrong or his ilk, but frankly aerobic exercise has never been about that, even when I started with my first 10 speed back in 1974. Instead, cycling is pure enjoyment fueled by an aerobic high in comfortable, pleasant surroundings. Bottom line is that suggesting to all aerobic enthusiasts that they need eight or nine hours of sleep every night can set people up for unnecessary and potentially counterproductive, use of sleep aids in their misguided belief that less than eight hours means there’s something wrong with them which, if corrected, could lead to podium finishes.