Sleep Talk: Sleep Affects How We Move
Sleep is essential for optimal and efficient control of movement and performance— even walking.
By Karin Meessen
You may have heard the common wisdom that consistent bedtimes and wakeup times are ideal for sleep health, aiming for 8 uninterrupted hours of shuteye per night. But our busy, stressful day-to-day lives often get in the way of our best sleep intentions. Is playing “sleep catch-up” harmful, or beneficial?
We trainers are pretty hung up on your sleep— particularly your sleep habits, your overall sleep quality, and how you slept the night before your workout.
Sleep affects these four areas of fitness: weight management, sports and/or daily living performance, injury prevention, and behavior change.
Do you have days where you feel particularly clumsy or “off kilter”? It’s entirely possible that being sleep deprived is the culprit. Studies confirm that human postural control is negatively impacted by both acute and chronic sleep deprivation.
To aid our understanding of sleep’s merit, new findings show that sleep deprivation can affect how well we ambulate. Lack of sleep can decrease the efficiency of our overall movement and thereby increase clumsiness, as reported here.
Automatic vs. Controlled Cognitive Processing
Automatic processing does not require us to pay attention, nor do we have to deliberately put in effort to control automatic processes.
Controlled processing requires us to pay attention and deliberately put in effort.
Once, the act of walking was seen as an automatic process. But we now know that it is a controlled cognitive process.
This study analyzing the effects of sleep restriction on gait control was conducted by researchers from MIT in Boston and from Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil.
Among the 30 college students who participated in the study, those chronically lacking sleep performed worst on a treadmill test. If sleep deprivation so perceptively affects our gait, you can imagine what it does to our performance in the gym and when carrying out other tasks that require coordination.
Students with substandard sleep throughout the week, but who were able to catch up on weekends, fared better. This led to the conclusion that compensating for sleep loss can be a legitimate strategy for people who are missing out on sleep.
“The results show that gait is not an automatic process, and that it can be affected by sleep deprivation,” said study author Hermano Igo Krebs, PhD, principal research scientist at MIT. “Ideally, everyone should sleep 8 hours a night. But if we can’t, then we should compensate as much and as regularly as possible.”
In short, we can somewhat make up for lost sleep and move better as a result. While it’s not ideal, it beats being chronically sleep deprived. So if you’re not getting 8 hours reliably, squeeze in a nap if you can.
Regular exercise improves sleep for most adults!
