“I’m serious. I treat sleep with as much respect as I treat food, or my training schedule, or my rivals. It’s that important” – Novak Djokovic
The “Big 3” for active people and serious trainers:
- Exercise
- Nutrition
- Sleep
Choose any two of these elements and your exercise, your results, your performance and your enjoyment will diminish significantly and quickly.
So what is the science behind the “sleep” component of the Big 3?
Here is an excerpt from and article by Andrew Watson, MD, MS Division of Sports Medicine.
Sleep is an essential component of health and well-being, with significant impacts on physical development, emotional regulation, cognitive performance, and quality of life.
Along with being an integral part of the recovery and adaptive process between bouts of exercise, accumulating evidence suggests that increased sleep duration and improved sleep quality in athletes are associated with improved performance and competitive success.
In addition, better sleep may reduce the risk of both injury and illness in athletes, not only optimizing health but also potentially enhancing performance through increased participation in training.
It is crucial to note that the Quality of sleep is regarded by the experts as just as important as the duration of sleep.
So what interferes with quality sleep? Easy, waking up – or coming out of “Deep Sleep” prematurely.
Your Muscular System and your Respiratory System recover from exercise during sleep, or more specifically, during Deep Sleep or Level 3 Sleep.
For more information on Levels of Sleep click here
On average we spend 13 – 24% of our time asleep in Level 3 Deep Sleep – as active people who are looking for maximum recovery we need to spend as much time as we can in this Deep Sleep as this is when our body releases growth hormone and muscle tissue is repaired.
How can a Mile 27 mattress improve the quality of your sleep?
The two elements which are guaranteed to shorten your time in Level 3 Deep Sleep are:
- Pressure Points. Areas of high pressure between the angular & “lumpy” parts of a human body and the sleeping surface. The obvious examples are shoulders an hips which can become painful due to the bodyweight being pushed through these areas into a mattress. The discomfort this brings breaks the sleeping cycle as the sleeping position needs to be adjusted to relieve the aches and pains.
- Overheating. Approximately 39% of people in the UK report to become too warm during sleep – disrupting their sleeping patterns. In reality the problem is not “heating up”, it is the failure to cool down. When we enter Level 3 Deep Sleep our body temperature needs to be 2 degrees cooler than it is while we are awake, so if we can’t cool down we don’t sleep well.
A Mile 27 mattress has solutions to both of these issues, both of which lie in the nature of the sleeping surface – Pure Gel.
Pure Gel acts to disperse pressure points, to spread the pressure over a much larger surface and therefore to dramatically reduce and remove the associated aches and pains. This pressure mapping image shows how the correct sleeping surface eliminates serious pressure points. The image on the right having none of the Red Spots which show the high pressure areas.
The Pure Gel is also, crucially and “Open Cell” innovation. This means that it is not made up of bubbles like memory foam as these bubbles store body heat, act like an insulating layer and prevent to temperature reduction required to move into Level 3 Deep Sleep. The structure of Pure Gel is “criss cross” structure which can’t store heat. The heat from the sleepers body moves through the Pure Gel, through the springs and out of the mattress allowing efficient temperature regulation.
Summary
People who exercise put their body, their muscles, their respiratory system and cardiac system under stress – that’s the purpose of exercise and the first step in becoming fitter. It is also often a requirement in the process of practise and skills development for sports.
Once your body has been stressed it either recovers and becomes stronger, fitter and adapts to the stress, or it breaks down leading to injury and overtraining.
For your body to recover thoroughly you need-
- Good nutrition. Balanced macro and micro nutrients
- As much time as possible in Level 3 Deep Sleep
While there are numerous components to restful sleep none are more important than the mattress that you sleep on and, in our opinion and experience, there is no better solution to improving sleep quality than a Mile 27 Mattress.
*Go the Extra Mile