Evidence Strong
Compete better in Olympic weightlifting with travel sleep tips from Teresa van der Vossen
Some people, not necessarily athletes, but they think that if I take melatonin, I'm going to have a good quality of sleep. I'm going to go into a really deep sleep. And that's not really how melatonin works. Melatonin basically establishes this body clock for our body to go. Hey, it's time to go to sleep and it helps lengthen that period of time. So you want to sleep for longer as opposed to getting yourself into a really deep sleep really quickly. And that's often a really common misconception, especially amongst general populations, when it comes to melatonin supplementation. Okay, there you go. Welcome to Evidance Strong Show. It's my pleasure to have you. If you could please introduce yourself briefly. So, Tena Koto, I'm called to raise a van in Boston top going on, nor after here I am. And I'm here to give you the opportunity to do this. Tefakaku, here my height, so my name is Tereza van de Boston. I'm from a small town near Melloro Pehu in Altairoa, New Zealand called after he. I live in Papua or Palmerston North, where I work at T-Ucole Tepa Kinga, where I teach exercise sport science on our bachelor's degree. And I also teach an exercise course for high school students at Ucole Tepa Kinga. I'm also a competitive weightlifting athlete, and I'm also the president of the Manoa 2 Wonganoi weightlifting club here in the Manoa 2 Wonganoi region of Altairoa, New Zealand. Awesome. So, huge credentials in weightlifting and research. Today, we'll be talking about the study you have run as a part of your degree. Was it master's or PhD? I was my master's. Fair enough. So, your master's project on weightlifters who were travelling to learning Commonwealth Games in 2022, so we are excited to hear all about it. We started with the scoping review. We did a prism or approach for a scoping review. And the main purpose for that study was to establish, well, what do we know about weightlifting when it comes to sleep? And what do we know about sleep? What are researchers doing? What are we implementing when we're researching sleep? And what's actually been done in the last 10 years? We know that, like, sleep's becoming an increasingly interested topic, not only in research, but for recovery amongst coaches too. And I just wanted to establish, well, where are we and what do we know? What we've established from the scoping review is that, yes, research and sleep is really increasing. And within the last 10 years, it's really pegged in the last, you know, three, four years or so. So, that's really exciting. That's a huge interest point. We also found that from all of the research papers that we established into our scoping review, that only two studies had ever included weightlifting athlete of all of these studies. There's only been a total of six weightlifting athletes ever included across these two studies. So, we know that weightlifting is not ever really included, whether that's a participation uptake issue or whether it's lack of awareness of the growth of weightlifting itself. We're not really too sure on that yet, but we still don't know anything about weightlifting. And reading into one of the studies that did include weightlifting athlete, what we found was that, interestingly enough, peak power production doesn't seem to be interfered relative to the time of day of testing for weightlifters, but it has an interference for peak power production for different athletes such as rugby players or such as netball players with a timing of this testing it was undertaken. So, if we're looking at team base sports versus individual base sports, we already have these really unique considerations for weightlifting that may be different to other sport. So, we are a really unique athlete. So, how is that going to impact sleep? We don't know anything and that was a really cool thing to start off with and to establish into our study. What we seem to see is that because weightlifting is an individual sport, what we could see is that athletes tend to train at whatever time they want to or whatever time that they are used to. Also, when we compete, I'm not too sure how it works over in Australia, but the time of day that an athlete will compete, a respected to the weight class they tend to compete in, it will change for competitions on a regular basis. There tends to be a forever changing time where athletes who compete in weightlifting are required to produce high amounts of like peak power production and we have to get really good at that in order to be successful in our sport. And we tend to see that with individual base sport, athletes have higher levels of responsibility. They have, you know, higher self-determination levels. And as the amount of proprioceptive requirement come from that, so weightlifting is fantastic for, you know, balanced coordination, strength, power. So, when that becomes an either increasingly important factor, our mental execution and/or success becomes really important. So, we're highly independent athletes. We are really adaptable and we're used to working hard with whatever gets thrown at us, really. If you compare that to, I don't know, professional athletes and rugby in New Zealand, especially, you know, they have a set routine. They do this at this time. They then go in for conditioning based training, then they do tactical based training and then they're competing on the weekend. So, it's a lot more routine based and we don't seem to see that routine as much a weightlifting athlete. Okay, so this is what you established with a review. The research is needed and off you went to do some research. So, we're excited to hear about that. Yeah, so I turned around to one of my supervisors and I said, "Hey, I've got some friends who are going over to the Commonwealth Games. It'd be really cool to see how their sleep behaviours are over that time. And my supervisor said, "Yeah, we can do an ethics review. The committee's coming together next week. Have your ethics a proposal by next week?" I was like, "Ha, okay. Smash that out. Got that all done. Got on the phone with some friends from Weightlifting New Zealand and said, "Hey, I really want to do this research. Can we look at doing this?" "Yes, I'm waiting on ethical approval, but pending that can we please go out and ask some athletes?" And they said, "Yep." So, I approached athletes. We had some athletes already overseas, so I immediately excluded them from the study just because I wanted to have everybody on the same page for the research itself. We had four athletes from New Zealand. Of these four athletes, they all were elite weightlifting athletes, three represented New Zealand and one represented Tonga, because we have a lot of athletes in New Zealand who represent Alekmanuwatsu or Samoa or Tonga. That's a really common thing. So, we had the four athletes. This was all in the height of 2020-2021, so COVID was still around. New Zealand was still in a lot of lockdowns and restrictions at this point. So, prior to leaving New Zealand, none of them had been exposed to COVID, which was really cool, because we had everybody on the same boat with a study, which was a really cool thing. We got them to... All we wanted to do was establish, "Well, what are these sleep behaviours and how does this change for competition?" That's what I really wanted to understand from it. So, we used the athlete's sleep behaviour questionnaire, which was established by Matt Driller and a few others other colleagues. We used that questionnaire on a fortnightly basis. When it was established, it was recommended to use monthly, but I really wanted to track on a fortnightly basis how things changed. So, we looked at from that first point of data collection, which is as they were stepping on the plane, how did the previous two weeks look prior to leaving to New Zealand? Then, when they took the next one, it was, "How was it when they were in Sweden at the training camp?" And they got to train at the Aliko Center, which is so cool. And then they got to Birmingham to then compete at the Commonwealth Games. So, we got a two-week captured window there, and then how did it affect them travelling home? So, as you would know, anybody who lives down the southern hemisphere, especially in Australia and in Ireland or New Zealand, sleep is really impactful, but it really impacts us travelling home, especially with bound-based travel. So, we got eastbound-based travel, westbound, and then prior to competition, competition, it was really nicely captured, which I was really pleased about. The athlete sleep behaviour questionnaire has 18 questions, and it's just on a scale of one to five, how frequently did this behaviour occur? More or less, since it's been established by Matt Driller, another researcher came along and suggested another way to interpret the information. So, we actually approached it with both ways, because the questionnaires got re-established into categories of like sleep behaviour efficiencies, sleep quality, and sleep disturbance factors from those 18 questions. So, we could actually look really deep into these factors as to what was impacted more or less. So, we were supposed for a lack of a better way of explaining it. So, what you're saying is that there were two ways to analyse the data while you had them? Yeah, so, when you use the questionnaire, you score it on a one to five based on how frequently these behaviours happen, and based on that, you get a global sleep score. Matt suggested anything below 36 is considered a good sleep score, and I think over 41 or 42 is considered bad, so it's a very tight threshold. When Darren Dally came out, they suggested a bigger range. We went with Matt Driller's approach in terms of scoring it, so what was considered good or bad was based on his approach with us. What we found overall was that as the athletes left New Zealand, like I said, they hadn't had COVID yet, but the moment that they got overseas, COVID's really rampant overseas at the time, all but one athlete got COVID. So, that was really cool because when we were analysing the data, we could almost do an observational case study approach, and we could kind of compare a batch of this one person who didn't get COVID, and that was really cool from a research perspective, and they all got COVID at different times. So, someone got COVID at the training camp, and then someone got COVID just before competing, and then someone got COVID on the way home. So, that was quite cool, too, because it was all at different times. Yeah, that was quite interesting. So, from like COVID-related perspective, what we did see is that COVID did seem to impact these behavioural factors, but it really affected sleep disturbance factors. That's not necessarily an unsurprising thing, and it's not necessarily, it's not really a bad thing, either. Well, I mean, if you've got a really sick or had flu-like symptoms, you tend to just want to sleep, and you sleep a lot. So, it wasn't that surprising that they all got very, very low scores or good sleep disturbances because they were sick, so then, you know, that makes sense. But interestingly, the person who didn't get COVID also had incredibly low sleep disturbance scores, and they had that right the way through. So, I went back to this effort and I said, "What were you doing?" Like, "How do you think you managed this?" And this one athlete throughout the whole study always had the best sleep, and they already had sleep hygiene practices in place. So, then we could also see, "Well, okay, potentially, if you're already establishing really good, like, sleep hygiene practices, it's going to be even better." So, that was quite cool, too, because we saw quite varied fluctuations for these other factors when we're considering the sleep behaviors, the sleep efficiency, sleep quality. They really varied for every other athlete who didn't have sleep hygiene practices. So, we're going, "Okay, cool. We already understand that sleep hygiene is important, but we're reinforcing for weightlifting athletes. Yeah, it's even more important, and it's going to be really effective, even if you're going to get sick or not." So, that was a really cool takeaway from that. Could we go through how the sleep was changing across these phases when they were troubling and then competing and then coming back? Yeah, so any trends you could say, "Oh, this is how the sleep behaves all." Yeah, so we did seem to say that their sleep behavior had to behave in sick factors, which were more psychological questions about thinking and worrying. Naturally got worse when they got closer to competition. For some athletes, it got better, which was quite cool. It would be really nice to do an even bigger participation study to see whether it's just that one athlete versus everybody else. But naturally, as you're getting closer to competition, more anxiety. But then it was really cool going back and talking to these athletes because one of them said, and others agree, that because of the restrictions with COVID, especially going into the athlete village, they were even more anxious about getting COVID because will they even be allowed to compete. So is this potentially getting sick or being exposed to things like COVID again, whether it's COVID or something else, is this going to create unnecessary anxiety for an athlete with what is already a really anxious, creating sport because you only get six attempts in one shot to do what you need to do? So that was really interesting in terms of additional psychological stress that could be mitigated. We did actually have a coach kicked out of the athlete village because they tested positive for COVID and they had to find some way to stay well and burn. So it wasn't just the athletes, the coaches were feeling this anxiety too. So that was quite interesting to think of. So they went there, you were measuring them every two weeks. The anxiety before the competition affected the sleep negatively, we know. Now, when they were coming back, how was the sleep coming back? I got worse and understandably because they travel westward as well. So understandably, it got even worse with jet lag when you're taking that into consideration. And it was one thing I wrote and like my limitations for the study was there aren't any questions related to jet lag, which really could be a really positive thing to add into the questionnaire later. But naturally, everybody's sleep got really bad. And that one athlete who tended to score extremely well, obviously got really bad too. As you know, what it's like coming to Aotearoa, this athlete also then had to travel down the country as well, which is an additional travel that other athletes didn't have to do. That's when their sleep deteriorated quite a bit. So that was quite interesting too. So until now, I'm hearing the sleep will be prepared. Yeah, be prepared, especially if you're having to travel back to Aotearoa. Or I mean, even if you're having to travel to Australia or to Aotearoa to compete, be prepared, it will probably be really shocking. And if you have done the trip, you know what we're talking about here, definitely. Influence of COVID. So the COVID made the sleep worse and it made it anxiety also worse. Yeah, and made some of the athletes anxious about getting COVID and not being able to compete, which was interesting because everybody had these rules relaxing overseas and sitting in New Zealand where the rules are still really strict, we would have thought there'd be a lot more leniency, but that wasn't the case. So that was really interesting. One more thing we have to discuss about the influence of COVID is the fact that sleep disturbances decreased. So my understanding is that the sleep got better while they were sick. Yeah, so that's absolutely correct. We saw that and that showed the greatest change across every one of these behavioral factors, sleep disturbance, just suddenly improved for everybody. But the one athlete who didn't get COVID just stayed basically of never the whole time. We saw that when all the athletes got COVID and at the time of when they got COVID to their sleep disturbances went right down and they improved in their sleep disturbance, i.e. they slept a lot better and they didn't wake up at night. So we saw a good relationship there, which was really cool. And not like I said before, it wasn't that surprising because if you get really, really sick or you get the flow, I know when I had COVID, I was out like a light the whole time and I just wanted to sleep and I slept really long periods of time. So it wasn't that surprising to see, but we can obviously now say, yeah, and actually improve sleep disturbance factors there. With the quality of sleep efficiency. Well, what was the other the other category? Sweet, so I'll just put a poll at the sleep quality. So we saw that, okay, so athlete one, two, three, remember who was who? When athletes three got COVID, yeah, there was an improvement in sleep quality. When athlete one, yes, they also improved. Athlete two, when they got COVID, it also improved and then stabilized. So at the points where all of these other athletes also got COVID, we saw improvements in their sleep quality definitely, which isn't that so surprising. If I'm looking at sports related behavioral factors, so yeah, athlete two, it improved during the period when they had COVID, but then got worse when they would have been recovering. So the athlete athlete one and three. So when they got COVID, it got worse in terms of sleep quality, and sleep behavioral factors, their sleep got worse. And then athlete three, it stabilized. So it didn't improve in terms of their behaviors. Your behavior's pretty much got worse when they got COVID. So that's quite a bit of, could you remind us what behaviors are? Yes, so some of the behaviors in the questionnaire go back to things like alcohol consumption, stimulants that are being used when training, training at a late period of time, behaviors such as using sleeping pills or tablets to help them get to sleep. And what else would be one? Those are the main ones here, so taking after lasting two or more hours. So understandably, if we're looking at whether they're napping more, are they taking stimulants? Are they training late at night, alcohol consumption? And even things like a different variation in times that they're going to be. If you've had COVID, you know that immediately a lot of those things aren't getting worse too, because you do tend to have changes to your sleep patterns. You tend to start taking afternoon naps, which is going to naturally increase these global sleep scores, because the frequency of it happening would become more common. So it's obviously not good to be sick, but in terms of sleep and to some degree, at least we're forced to sleep more. Yeah, did you collect any data on performance? Did you try to correlate the quality or the global sleep scores with the performance? No, no, I didn't end up doing that. The reason why I didn't publish anything in terms of performance and numbers was to keep my athletes as anonymous as possible. That's obviously an ethical consideration I had to make. Okay, so time to extract all the goodness from your brain. Babes, what do you have for the athletes who are travelling to compete in a weightlifting? In the matter, let's say, so they have to change the time zone. Yeah, so that's a big thing, definitely. We know that waistbound-based travel really impacts your sleep cycle or with jet lag when we compare it to waistbound-based travel. So the direction you choose to head in can be really helpful or can be really negatively impacting your sleep. So think about which direction you're going to go. For those of athletes who are going to come to Australia and New Zealand, be prepared and definitely get some sleep hygiene practices downpack because it's going to hit you really bad. I think that if we're looking at the behaviours, if we're thinking about it like a nutritional strategy, we always say you should really practice it beforehand and get a, you know, competition day, nutrition plan sorted. Don't try anything new. Do it before you leave, practice it, go and travel somewhere. It's a good excuse for a holiday, I guess. But go travel somewhere across time zones and practice your sleep behaviours, I guess. But having something regular in a routine is really important, definitely. So did you say that which direction is worse? If we consider New Zealand or Australia versus Europe, which way it's worse? Yeah, so if you're heading westward, so in a west direction, so if you were travelling from, say, the UK and you wanted a head to Singapore, because I've travelled from there recently, so I flew from Switzerland, Zurich to Singapore to New Zealand, that was horrendous compared to when I left New Zealand, I left from New Zealand to San Francisco to the UK and that had very little impact on my sleep. I mean, of course I go head sleep jet lag, but it wasn't nearly as horrendous as travelling in the direction. So if you're going to head westward, that really established as something that will impact your sleep. What, why is that? I think it's because of the day time. So if you were travelling in an eastward direction from New Zealand, at least you're, we're already a head in the time zone. So it just feels like a very long day for us and you kind of land on the exact same day. So I think I left on a Sunday and I arrived on a Sunday when I went to the UK, where as you are travelling from an eastward direction, you're having to catch forward on time. And so it just, it just messes with your whole circadian rhythm, basically. And like you said, I mean, I sat on a plane for 48 hours, essentially, and travelled for 48 hours just to get home, plus my plane trip in New Zealand to get home. So, I mean, we were travelling for an astronomical amount of time and we didn't know what day or month or year it was anymore by the time we did get home. So it's really hard on people, for sure. If you travel, especially in New Zealand, anything, the other size, one perfect west country in the world. You know, like in your garden, you know, going back home is really, really hard. But it's interesting because of the same distance, let's say, wow, it feels so much, so much different. Yeah, I mean, even if it's what 11 o'clock in the morning for you now, and it's the afternoon for me, and it's only a short few hours flight, but it has a completely different impact on the time, essentially. Yeah, for sure. What tips would you have for healthy sleep routine? So we know that an adult sleep cycle is about 90 minutes. So when you are going to sleep, you go through different cycles and these sleep cycles last for about 90 minutes. Give or take, we say with the healthy adult human that they should be sleeping between seven to nine hours. But because of the stress that athletes have and the amount of recovery they're requiring, there's some research saying up to 12 hours of sleep might be optimal, which, you know, is really interesting. But also the reality, at least for non-paid athletes who are at the elite level, they have to work a job too. That's not necessarily realistic. So napping can be incredibly effective, but the length of napping is really important. So you don't want to go over 20 to 30 minutes, because then you start sleeping into the deeper part of your sleep cycle, and if you wake up, say 45 to an hour, minutes into your sleep, it can really disturb that sleep cycle. So keeping them short and sweet is really important. Why it is bad to sleep 20 minutes? Becoming knowledge is deep sleep is very important. So why your advice is not to get into deep sleep while you're napping. So the rationale behind that is because if you're moving into a deep sleep, you want to have the entire deep sleep. And so if you start secreting all of these hormones to help with recovery and you start that recovery process and you randomly wake your body up, I don't know, with an alarm or something, that can disrupt that cycle and your body just kind of freaks out and goes, "What are you doing to me?" And in those times, you know, you might have experienced that we have a short sleep and you wake up an hour later and you're like, "I don't know what month or year this is anymore." We want to avoid that as much as possible compared to shortening it for a quick light sleep. And that light initial stage of sleep, not quite REM sleep and not the deep sleep stage either. That tends to have less of an impact on the person themselves if they're just having a quick 30 minute. But we also say that the closer to your bedtime, we want to manage that need for napping as well. So if you need to be napping at 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon, that's going to then affect how you feel for bedtime. So potentially napping and the warning's really effective, but the closer you get to bedtime, let's maybe see if we don't nap and just go to bed earlier and get a really good night's sleep if that's possible. But obviously, depending on the situation of the athlete, that might not be possible. So a nap still might be really effective. There also is the strategy that they call sleep banking, which has been shown to improve performance outcomes coming into a competition. So nap actually is you're getting ready, you're reloading anyway from training. So let's sleep in, bank up and kind of put some sleep in the tank. And it may assist with that recovery even more and then you're feeling more refreshed coming into competition day too. It's quite a new idea from what I'm understanding in the research. But I mean, it has some thoughts there where, yeah, that could actually be really effective for athletes to consider too. The most important thing is having this established routine to keep your circadian rhythm going as to how it should be. And we want to manage, obviously, the quality of your sleep, but also the quantity of your sleep. So it's not just being in bed for 12 hours. It's, well, can I be in bed for 12 hours and get the best possible sleep, humanly possible, really? You mentioned a few times a routine. What exactly would be at least a few components or a good sleep routine? Yeah, that's still being really established at this point in time. So we talk about, oh, optimal sleep hygiene tactic. Sleep hygiene is just the practicing behaviors that someone does or does not do in order to get a good sleep. Like, that's really what sleep hygiene is. And because the understanding and the interest in sleep is still really rapidly growing and still relatively new, there isn't this step. This is what you should be doing. This is proven to be the best thing that you should be doing, which I think is really cool because here is this opportunity of information we could be getting. But what we do kind of know is that the things that you should be doing is managing your environment. And whatever's going to work for you is what you should be doing. So some research seems to be saying that we want to keep the bedroom space itself nice and cool. We want to have it in a quiet space and nice and dark. So that's going to help secrete our melatonin a lot better to help improve our circadian rhythm. And it's going to help you being a much more sexual place to go to sleep and get your body ready to sleep. And we really want to avoid creating these external distractions or noise or light. And especially with the temperature, we don't want people waking up in the middle of the night too hot or too cold. So managing the room and the bed temperature can be really effective. There has been some research saying that about 18 degrees is optimal, but I think that honestly will depend on the person and where they live and what they used to. If I went to Sydney, I'd probably find that really hard. I mean, and you know what, it's like in Dunedin in New Zealand, it's really cold there, 18 degrees is really hot for them. So that might not be a good temperature for athletes down in Dunedin. So that's definitely in terms of environmental considerations, things we need to consider. We always talk about using blue light technology and how that affects our melatonin secretion. So yeah, being in front of screens and having these technology pieces, and it's not just your phone, it's the computers, it's the TVs, watching TV at night, we'll be missing this blue light. And the reason being is that it kind of slows down melatonin being secreted and melatonin is our sleep woman. So it's really important to get that secreting. So we start wanting to go to sleep. So, a more common misconception is that it makes us sleep better and people will supplement with melatonin to get a really good quality sleep, but it actually just helps set the length and the sleep cycle into place as opposed to improving the sleep quality. So we really want to prevent this blue light from coming in so that our body starts producing melatonin and telling our body, okay, it's time to go to bed now. Some other things that worthwhile considering just a couple of other things at least. Yeah, so we know that blue light side can really interfere with that melatonin secretion. Actually getting outside or being in terms of light brush exposure during the day is really important because it does the opposite effects and helps to secrete serotonin to wake us up too. So being inside in this dark space or day can actually keep secreting that melatonin and prevent serotonin from being secreted too. So being outside, going for a walk, you know, enjoying the sunshine, I mean, you from the Gold Coast in Australia, so you'll get plenty of sunshine. That's absolutely fantastic, right? So being outside is really good too. Another thing we need to consider is caffeine consumption. So caffeine keeps us awake. The closer to our bedtime, it's going to interfere with our sleep too, so understandably. Avoid caffeine. Some research saves up to six hours before bed, but it really is individual to the person. I mean, personally, I don't have any caffeine of any kind. Anything after 11 o'clock, unless I have to stay up and then I'll stay awake definitely. But that's caffeine is really important. And then lastly, your relaxation strategies. So things that the athlete does, or the individual does before going to bed to make them relaxed, it feels calm and ready to go to bed. It's really impactful because when they go to bed, the time that they'll take to go to sleep will become reduced. So managing your worries or anxieties or doing some meditation before bed or doing the stretching that we know we should do, but nobody ever does do. It's actually going to help get the body ready for bed to go to sleep. I felt personally called out. It's all right. I'm calling myself out too. Thank you so much. You are very proud. I think the last two questions, the first one is what is your favourite colour? Blue, I've been worrying about this question for ages, but I think it's blue. I'm so sure that I think it's blue. Do you have any particular shade of blue you like? Oh, at least just stick with blue. Okay. I'm sorry, I'm near you. All right. How people can find you if they want to follow your work or ask a question. So, I mean, I'm pretty unnolined. So, I mean, I have Instagram, which is how you found me. So, yeah, I mean, people are welcome to request to follow. My private page there. I'm it's TV, VDP, underscore fitness. It's not really anything research related. It's more just me and my friends getting together, weightlifting and talking rubbish to each other. So, whether it's research related to something else. I mean, I am on research gate, but I have no citations and I just more use it to read other people's research, but I am on research gate as well. Thank you so much for today. Hey, thank you so much. There's been really lovely. (clink) [BLANK_AUDIO]