Master the four stages of sleep and it can lead to a stronger, faster, happier you
Words JAMES WITTS Illustrations GUS SCOTT
Team Sky popularised the idea of sleep as the greatest recovery tool a rider possesses. A week in July wouldn’t pass without tales of a van pulling up outside a French Ibis and some poor driver offloading a team’s worth of bespoke mattresses and toppers so that Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome could have the same sleep setup as they had at home, which would hopefully result in a rapid ride the next day. Fast-forward to 2023 and the whole peloton is at it.
Mattress company Dorelan supports – literally – Mads Pedersen and the crew at Lidl-Trek; Latexco sponsors Soudal-QuickStep, while Jumbo-Visma aim even higher thanks to Australian company Box Altitude’s rarefied-air sleep systems. With a sprinkling of irony, Team Sky (now Ineos Grenadiers) awoke the competition to the benefits of greater shut-eye, and in the process inspired sports scientist Dr Sarah Gilchrist to dig deeper into the recuperative powers of sleep.
‘You mention Team Sky,’ she says when speaking to Cyclist. ‘My doctorate specialised in sleep and athletic performance so I was interested in what they were doing, but they really focussed on the practical side of sleeping. There was no data I could find on “athletic sleep”. I was working with British Rowing in the lead-up to the 2012 London Olympics and we were worried about recovery with the expected increase in media requests. We’d seen an increase in media demand in 2011 and we realised we didn’t have objective data on sleep.’
The gold standard
Dr Gilchrist has spent over 20 years working in the high-performance sport industry, latterly as technical lead for the English Institute of Sport and senior physiologist with British Rowing, and now runs her own consultancy Gilchrist Performance. But the frenzy of a home Games arguably proved one of the most fertile periods of her career, with napping one of the key interventions she introduced (see ‘Siesta for speed’ boxout for more on napping). It clearly worked, with Great Britain picking up nine rowing medals, four of which were gold.
‘We also looked at chronotypes of elite athletes to see if “larks” [morning people] were predisposed to being rowers, swimmers or canoeists because those sports demand an early start. As it transpired, you simply couldn’t draw conclusions because so many factors come into play with elite performance. But what’s clear for all levels of athlete, including recreational cyclists, is that there are myriad health and performance benefits of suff
