Two Hours of Extra-Sleep Before Sleep Deprivation Minimize the Performance Decrements Due to 24h Sleep Deprivation
If you want to practice "vorschlafen" you may have to set your alarm-clock to tell you when to go to bed. "Vorschlafen" is the German term for getting extra sleep the nights before an event of which you know that it will leave you sleep deprived. Sounds stupid? Well, there are studies which show that increasing sleep duration for around one week may influence cognitive performance during a subsequent sleep loss period, but aside from a study on the accuracy of tennis serves (Schwartz. 2015), their practical significance for athletes is obviously limited. Why? Since your ability to focus during cognitive tasks is - as important as it is - not a reliable marker of exercise performance... or at least a very unreliable one. Against that background it's good that in a new study from the Université de Lyon , Instead of testing cognitive performance markers such as the attention span of an individual, the researchers set out to "assess the effect of 6 nig...