Sep 5, 2016Monitoring Sleep is Golden
Although its role in recovery is still not entirely understood, making sure athletes get enough sleep can help focus their training efforts. For Keenan Robinson, Michael Phelps’ strength and conditioning coach, this meant getting Phelps to incorporate a sleep monitoring system, as reported by Fortune,
“When we first had a sleep monitoring system available to us, Michael was skeptical,” Robinson told Fortune. “We know sleep is important but until recently, the way to pull objective measures and apply to sports training has been limited.”
Over the course of the year leading up to the Olympics, Phelps averaged just over 7.5 hours of sleep per night. This gave him a target to reach when he was in Rio. Although Phelps’ use of the monitoring system wasn’t perfect, he and Robinson were able to predict his capability for completing pool workouts in his weekly training schedule.
Along with using the sleep monitoring system through Under Armour, Phelps used MyFitnessPal, which is also owned by the company. This helped him track his caloric intake as he tried to add more weight prior to the Olympics.
