Until recently, sleep in elite populations has been taken for granted and poorly controlled. It has since come to light that sleep strategies can be used to enhance areas of performance such as recovery and training adaptation. Similarly, poor or inadequate sleep can be detrimental to performance; affecting aerobic and anaerobic endurance, strength and power, cognitive function and suppressing immune response. A variety of technologies are currently emerging designed to capture sleep data. These range from the highly invasive and expensive Polysomnography (PSG) through to simple, subjective self-reporting (usually included in daily wellness and monitoring questionnaires). More recently, Actigraphy has been used to estimate sleep quality and duration. Actigraphy has a high agreement and correlation with PSG (91% and 0.92 respectively), and its value is enhanced when combined with subjective reporting. Following a review of the SportDiscus and Medline databases, a total of forty-two publications were included for the review. Whilst our understanding of the relationship between sleep and performance is limited, there are some guidelines for strength and conditioning practitioners to follow to ensure that inadequate sleep is not restricting performance. It is recommended that athletes achieve between 7-9 hours` nightly sleep (more in periods of high training loads), and naps (limited to 30 minutes) can be prescribed to enhance recovery (3). For practitioners aiming to track or monitor sleep in athletic populations, actigraphy may provide a relatively cheap, accurate and non-invasive tool. Ensuring sufficient sleep to meet training loads might provide strength and conditioning practitioners with an additional tool to navigate the precipice between optimal performance and overload.
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