A very simple tip can improve sports performance in astonishing proportions.
Top athletes prepare for months to be at their best at the fateful moment. However, certain simple methods are still rarely applied, and one of them has proven its effectiveness. By changing a single detail in their daily lives, top athletes have seen their performance greatly improved.
Athletes fully optimize their smallest habits to perform, but certain details are sometimes overlooked even though they can make a big difference. By applying a specific recommendation for 5 to 7 weeks, university-level basketball players, for example, improved their performance dramatically. Most notable: athletes increased their shooting accuracy by 9% on average, which can allow each player to score several additional baskets per game. Just one small change had impressive effects on physical and technical performance.
The method is simple: maximize full recovery time, with a goal of at least ten hours per night. Pure physical performance was also greatly improved during this experience. Thus, their sprint time went from 16.2 to 15.5 seconds on average. We already knew its importance in sport, but this method of prolonging physical recovery could provide even greater benefits than we might have thought.
By increasing their recovery time from 80 to 120 minutes each night, the basketball players also optimized their cognitive performance, since reaction time was improved by almost 12%, going from 310 milliseconds to 275 milliseconds on average. A difference which can prove decisive in basketball but especially in other sports where alertness is fundamental, such as athletics, shooting sports, boxing… Moreover, the study also shows that this method is effective in very different sports. The same experiment was in fact carried out with swimmers, who experienced similar improvements in their reaction time, their rotation time between two lengths and their sprint time over 15 meters.
Other studies have shown that athletes, even very high level athletes, often neglect the importance of sleep and its impact on performance. This new study, carried out by scientists from Stanford and San Francisco universities (Mah et al.), confirms that the longer the rest, the better the performance, even beyond 10 hours of sleep per night.