Oakville Gymnastics Club's Men's Blog: 2010

Chronobiology studies are giving athletes and coaches valuable information on sleep strategies that could help ensure that an athlete's performance doesn't become a victim of too little sleep.

Athlete A or team X, the top performers in their sport, sometimes lose to less-adept competitors. Lower-ranked athletes or teams, at their peak, may perform better than top-ranked ones at their worst. Even elite athletes aren't always at the top of their game.

Variations in sports performance may reflect normal ebb and flow of biological rhythms. Marked differences between time of training and time of competition—as commonly occur in figure skating and football—also may dent an athlete's performance, noted Teodor Postolache, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Postolache served as guest editor of the June Clinics in Sports Medicine, which explores applications of body-time research to sports performance. (This issue was published as a book, Sports Chronobiology, by Saunders.)

Normal mid-afternoon drowsiness, jet travel, seasonal and menstrual-cycle variations in body rhythms, and lack of sleep can take the edge off athletic skills, Postolache said. Chronobiology lab findings can help athletes perform at their peak and reduce their risk of injury.

Psychiatrists and psychologists working in medical school psychiatry departments report their research in some of the book's 18 articles.

Psychomotor Vigilance Declines

Hans Van Dongen, Ph.D., and David Dinges, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, described studies assessing psychomotor vigilance performance after sleep deprivation. This skill involves reaction time and sustained attention. It is needed for not only sports performance but also everyday activities such as driving. It is highly sensitive to sleep loss, often experienced by athletes on road trips, particularly after they cross multiple time zones.

Such performance deteriorates markedly after 88 hours of continuous wakefulness, a duration comparable to staying up for three nights and long enough to show circadian patterns of alertness and sleepiness. Performance is consistently better in the day than at night, a reflection of humans' innate programming to stay alert in the day and sleep at night. Two-hour nap opportunities every 12 hours can blunt deficits in psychomotor vigilance.

Naps have a downside, though. Right after awakening, people often manifest performance deficits termed “sleep inertia.” They're foggy and clumsy. This effect intensifies with progressive sleep loss, especially at night, Van Dongen and Dinges found. Very short naps—roughly 10 minutes—may offer some recuperative benefit when people are sleep deprived, they said, without producing noticeable levels of sleep inertia.

`Sleep Debt' Snowballs

Chronic sleep restriction, widespread among American adults, has serious adverse consequences for physical and mental performance, asserted sleep researcher William Dement, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. The most important aspect of the body's homeostatic regulation of sleep, he said, is that sleep loss is cumulative. “When total nightly sleep is reduced by exactly the same amount each night for several consecutive nights,” he reported, “the tendency to fall asleep in the daytime becomes progressively stronger each day.”

Dement calls this phenomenon “sleep debt.” As he explains, the brain records as a debt every hour of sleep that is less than a person's nightly requirement. This snowballing debt may include an hour of sleep lost a week or month ago, as well as the hour lost last night, he speculated. A large sleep debt can be reduced only by extra sleep.

In a landmark 1994 National Institute of Mental Health study, subjects stayed in bed in the dark 14 hours every night for 28 consecutive nights. At first, they slept as long as 12 hours a night, suggesting they entered the study with sizeable sleep debts, Dement said. By the fourth week, their sleep stabilized at a nightly average of eight hours and 15 minutes—a figure interpreted to mean that most adults need this amount of sleep each night.

Does `Secret' Advantage Accrue?

When subjects slept until “slept out,” their mood, energy level, and sense of well-being as indicated on daily questionnaires all improved. Athletes who obtain all the sleep they need, Dement suggested, might have a “secret” advantage over their competition.

The adage “practice makes perfect,” long a truism of athletic training, has been modified by sleep and chronobiology studies in the past decade, according to Matthew Walker, Ph.D., and Robert Stickgold, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School. After initial training, the human brain continues to learn in the absence of further practice, they said. The improvement develops in sleep.

These findings have a direct application to athletes' training schedules, they asserted. Athletes who train consistently across the day and then cut short their sleep to get up early the next morning for practice might shortchange their brains of sleep-dependent consolidation and plasticity.

Studies of bright light's beneficial impact on mood hold relevance for the depressed athlete who experiences adverse effects from antidepressant medications or needs to avoid psychoactive substances entirely, said Postolache and Dan Oren, M.D., of Yale University School of Medicine. Bright light's antidepressant effects start sooner than those of most antidepressant medications, they noted. They suggest light exposure could be used to hasten antidepressant response.

“Athletes who obtain all the sleep they need might have a `secret' advantage over their competition.”

Injured athletes simultaneously may experience diminished feelings of competence and self-worth and undergo an abrupt decrement in light exposure due to reduction in outdoor training. Postolache and Oren recommended that sidelined athletes continue to get bright-light exposure, either natural or artificial.

The contents of and ordering information for Sports Chronobiology is posted at<www.intl.elsevierhealth.com/catalogue/title.cfm?ISBN=1416027696>.▪

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Gym Energy Invite Schedule

Hello Everyone,

Attached you will find our schedule for next Saturday, June 12, 2010.

We will also be splitting the groups for awards as follows:
Interclub 1, Age 8, 9-12
Interclub 2, Age 8-10, 11-13
interclub 3, Age 10/11, 12, 13+
Interclub 4, Age 9+
Provincial 1, Age 8, 9-11

Thank you for all your patience.
See you next Saturday!

Lucia Hunt
Gym Energy Meet Director

Friday, May 14, 2010

Gymnastics Energy Invitational

We will be attending the Gymnastics Energy Invitation on Saturday June 12th, 2010.

This competition is open to all of our Flares, Developmental, Pre-comp, Interclub and Provincial Level 1 boys.

The registration fee is $60 for all Interclub and Provincial Level 1 boys and $50 for all Flares and Developmental boys.

Please register with the front office (Agnes) by Thursday May 20th.

Friday, April 30, 2010

Provincials this weekend

Good luck at Provincials this weekend! Levels 3,4 & 5 compete tonight.

No training on Monday May 3rd

All competitive groups are off this Monday.

Good luck to all competitors at Provincials this weekend.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Being on Time

While we understand that all sorts of factors affect your ability to arrive at training on time, it is very important that you do.

Warm-up and conditioning are done at the beginning of the training and set the tone for that training session. In the case of younger gymnasts, we do not have to ability to run individual supervised warm-ups every 10 minutes. Your son will feel rushed and will not have had a thorough warm-up.

Regular conditioning is vital to acquiring new skills and allows the gymnast to maintain the required body tension to successfully perform not only individual skills, but to also have the endurance to perform a routine.

It doesn’t take long to lose the physical attributes of strength and flexibility. Doing the correct action with good form for the required number of repetitions regularly will lead to increased results and therefore better gymnastic with a reduction in injuries.

Attendance

Gymnastics is a very complex sport that requires many repetitions over many days, weeks, months, etc to solidify skills. Once these skills are ready to be put in combination with other skills, the combination of skills must also be repeated regularly over time. Several combinations strung together become a part of a routine which have to be be performed regularly until the timing, positions and endurance required to put these complex body actions together. When all goes well, a routine is born and it too must be repeated regularly to solidify the movement patterns and to build the endurance required for the demands of competition; training days, general and specific warm-ups all while performing the routine under stress at competition.

Gymnastics in not a simple sport. It is arguably the hardest sport on the planet. Most sports are extensions of natural movement; running, swimming, etc, and training is design to increase speed and / or endurance. Gymnasts must learn complex movement throughout their entire career and still squeeze in time for routines and competitions. After an extended layoff (winter), returning to biking, swimming, running , etc is not so much about remembering the movement, but enduring the pain.

Regular training / attendance is very important to improving a gymnast's skill repertoire, strength, flexibility, confidence and endurance. While it may seem that missing one practice is not a big deal, depending on where that practice falls in your son's training cycle, they may miss up to four days of training. Four days is a significant gap in the training cycle. They will have to work on getting their timing back, some strength will have been lost and, especially in the case of growing boys, they will have lost flexibility. If they were in the middle of learning a new skill, they will have to take a few steps back in order to go through some of the learning process again.

Please try to attend all trainings and communicate with your son's coach regarding any absences.

Provincials

The 2010 Provincial Championships are in less than a week. Not much different from the other Qualifiers as far as parental preparation goes. The benefits of having a local competition are that everyone will get to sleep in their own bed and if your son forgets something at the gym, it isn't that far out of the way.

Unlike the Qualifiers, the award categories will be by Level and Age Group only. The larger groups will not be separated into groups of 20.

Remember; the day of the competition is not the time to experiment with new pre-game meals, energy drinks, etc.

Also, this is not the time to shift the focus from a performance centred approach to a results based approach. Results cannot be controlled by the gymnast; there are too many variables. If the gymnast changes their focus to achieving a particular result, they will most likely err. They must be focused on their performance. If all of a sudden the gymnast, coach, and / or parent changes the focus to achieve a certain result, the gymnast will be distracted and not perform to their full potential.

As always; cheer them on, congratulate their performances, ask them if they had fun and go out for a treat afterwards.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Provincial Championships Schedule

Congratulations to all that qualified!

Durham Invitational Schedule

Saturday, March 13, 2010

March Break

Modified training for Monday march 15 to Friday March 19. Regular training resumes Monday March 22nd.

All Groups

Saturday, March 13: No Training
Sunday, March 14: No Training
Saturday, March 20: No Training
Sunday, March 21: No Training

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

2010 Ontario Winter Games

Michael Buczkowski is representing Oakville at the 2010 Ontario Winter Games in Muskoka.

Six teams will be competing for the Winter Games title. There is no individual or event competition.

This is one of Michael's rare opportunities to compete optional routines as he competes compulsory routines in the Argo HP category during the regular season. At OWG, he will compete under National Youth rules.

Opening ceremonies are on Thursday night and the competition is Friday morning at Muskoka Woods.