PERFECT 10.0 Tips to Keep Your Optional Healthy This Season
By Brandi Smith- Young, PT
Perfect 10.0 Physical Therapy
#10 ) SLEEP: LOTS OF GOOD SLEEP
Sleep is necessary for the mind and body to heal and recover. Carve out down time for your athlete before bed time so they can begin to shut down. Find something mindless for your athlete to do to shut off all of their mental monkeys and fast pace life. For some athletes this may be watching a cartoon, for others reading a fun book, for some it may be crotchet, and others it may be just listening to easy light music. When having trouble sleeping do to your athlete thinking about too many things from what they need to do for school to skills in the gym, try having a note book next to their bed where they can write down their worries and deal with them the next day. For the athlete having trouble calming down to go to bed, try deep breathing exercises or a meditation CD.
One medication CD I have tried which can be great to learn how to relax which is not only helpful prior to going to bed but also the technique can be used to calm down before a meet or prior to saluting for beam, try the Body Scan Meditation founded on Guided mindful meditation by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Young athletes should get approximately 10 hours of sleep a night or 70 hours a week. See this 2-minute video Adolescent Athletes and Sleep about what some athletes are doing to get their sleep in http://www.centreforsleep.com/adolescent-atheltes-and-sleep/.
If your athletes are waking up exhausted try using the SLEEP CYCLE app on the iPhone. It helps to track your sleep cycles and wakes you up when your in a light sleeping phase preventing the feeling of grogginess which can occur if your alarm wakes you when your in a deep sleep.
