Are you sleeping enough? Are you sleeping well?!

With a busy holiday season ahead, busy academic schedules, and for some of us, even busier athletic training and competition schedules- our focus on sufficient and proper recovery has never been more important...

Reducing the likelihood of burnout and fatigue is a top priority, but how does good recovery take place? What does it look like?

While active-recovery methods like yoga, low-intensity spin cycling, de-loaded resistance work, foam rolling, and other mobility exercises should always play an important part in our approach to recovery, often, the most-neglected and yet, most influential factor in effective recovery for athletes is sleep.

So what does good sleep look like?

The National Strength and Conditioning Association recently released a publication on the importance of sleep for athletic performance.

Along with the article, which highlights the importance of sleep duration and quality for the sake of improving athletic performance, reducing injury risk, and improving the overall quality of a training session, the NSCA also published this cool info-graphic, which does a great job of simplifying what good quality sleep looks like for an athlete!

Check it out! How many of these recommendations are you currently following? Is there anything you can do right away to improve the quality of your sleep? And as a result, your athletic performance??

Happy training,

DV