Original title: Relationship between measures of sleep quantity and quality with performance variables in collegiate female soccer players.
Researchers tracked sleep before matches for eight college soccer players. They compared each player’s best and worst nights for sleep length and for sleep quality, meaning how much of their time in bed they spent asleep. After better-quality sleep, players spent less time exercising above 85% of their maximum heart rate and had a lower high-effort running measure, but they made more sharp slowdowns. Sleep length alone was not linked to differences in the performance measures they tested.
Imagine a soccer player trying to pace herself through a long match. It is hard to tell whether a steadier match comes from a longer rest or from a more restful night. In this paper, the rest is the player’s sleep, and the match effort is measured through intense running and sharp slowdowns; the better-quality nights were followed by less time at extreme effort but more sharp slowdowns.
For female college soccer players and their coaches, sleep may relate to how effort is distributed during a match—not simply how long a player sleeps. The study suggests sleep quality may matter more than sleep quantity, though its small group means the finding needs caution.
The study included only eight NCAA Division I female players and examined sleep the night before matches. It does not establish that sleep quality caused the performance differences, or that the findings apply to other players or settings. The abstract also reports no significant overall MANOVA differences for the physiological and physical variable groups.
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Relationship between measures of sleep quantity and quality with performance variables in collegiate female soccer players. — Beau Greer, Marisa Abegg, Michael Ormsbee et al. — International Journal of Strength and Conditioning — doi:10.47206/ijsc.v6i1.667
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.