Sleep: The Best Recovery Tool for Lacrosse Players

-February 20th, 2020-

Much of the focus of training for lacrosse revolves around increasing intensity, pushing yourself past your current level, and forcing the body to make adaptations to that increased workload.

There’s discussions about what supplements can help increase your work capacity like Creatine, BCAA’s or a pre-workout with 5000% of your daily Vitamin B etc.

But the best way to be able to train hard, is to focus on recovery. After all you can’t train hard in a workout if you’re still beat up from the day before.

The most common things people try for recovery is a protein shake after a workout to refuel, stretching/yoga, rolling out etc. Maybe ride the bike to “flush” the muscles.

However the most often overlooked is the simplest and easiest and cheapest: SLEEP.

Sleep is by far the best recovery tool for the mind and body. Lack of sleep (less than 8 hours) has been linked to higher rates of injuries in athletes.

Sleep is also when the body repairs. It is when you release testosterone and growth hormone. Legal Steroids! The more you sleep, the more you produce.

It’s also not just the length of sleep but also the quality of sleep. 10 hours of interrupted sleep isn’t as good as 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

The 1st intervention I try to make with athletes to keep it simple is to just put your phone down 30 minutes earlier than normal and go to bed.

The more in-depth way to improve sleep is:

• Go to bed at the same time every night (the earlier the better. Every hour you sleep before midnight counts as 2 hours)
• Have the temperature at 68 degrees or lower
• Extremely dark room
• Read before bed, no devices for 30 minutes before lights out

A Magnesium supplement and Vitamin D (especially for us here in Canada that don’t get enough sun in the winter) are also great ways to help improve your sleep.

It’s simple, but not easy. Put as much effort into your recovery and you’ll see just how great your training can be when you don’t feel sluggish, have good hormones pumping in your body, have a clear mind, and are well rested.

Here’s a long but good article on the importance of sleep and the NBA if you want to read more about the importance of sleep.

Tags: growth hormone, injury prevention, injury reduction, lacrosse training, recovery methods, sleep, testosterone