Sleep is really important for athletes to help them recover and do better in their sport (Samuels, 2008). When we sleep, we’re not paying attention to what’s going on around us and our body is relaxed (Carskadon & Dement, 2011). Scientists can measure different things like brain waves and muscle movements to tell how deeply we’re sleeping (Carskadon & Dement, 2011). There are two main types of sleep: non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM) (Iber et al., 2007). NREM has three stages, with the third stage being the deepest sleep. During NREM, we don’t move much and our eyes move slowly, REM sleep is different because our brain is very active but our body is still (Iber et al., 2007).
Carskadon, M. A., & Dement, W. C. (2011). Monitoring and staging human sleep. Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine, 5, 16-26.
Iber, C., Ancoli-Israel, S., Chesson, A., & Quan, S. (2007). The AASM manual for the scoring of sleep and associated events: Rules, terminology, and technical specifications. Westchester, IL: American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Samuels, C. (2008). Sleep, recovery, and performance: The new frontier in high-performance athletics. Neurologic Clinics, 26, 169-180.