Research
Mixed
Reduced sleep duration (<8 hours) is associated with a significantly increased risk of injury in youth and adolescent athletes, particularly when combined with high training loads.
If you are a young athlete, ensure you get at least 8 hours of sleep per night. This is especially critical when your training load is high. The combination of high training and low sleep significantly increases your chance of getting injured. Prioritize sleep to stay healthy and available for training.
ModerateSupportsMEDIUM confidence
In a study of middle and high school athletes, Milewski et al. (25) found that those individuals who slept less than 8 h per night on average were 70% more likely to report an injury than those who slept more than 8 h. In addition, a recent study of 496 adolescent athletes... found that increased training load and decreased self-reported sleep duration were independently associated with an increased risk of injury. In fact, the greatest risk for injury resulted when training load increased and sleep duration decreased simultaneously
Why this rating
Based on retrospective studies and large cohort studies (Milewski et al., 496 athletes), but mechanisms are 'unclear' and mostly focused on youth.
Source
Sleep and Athletic Performance
Andrew Watson · Current Sports Medicine Reports · 2017
DOI 10.1249/jsr.0000000000000418
narrative_reviewCited 276×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
- Sleep extension (increasing duration from ~6.6 to 8.5 hours/night) significantly improves sprint performance, shooting accuracy, and reaction time in collegiate athletes.Moderate
- Sleep deprivation impairs endurance performance (time to exhaustion, distance covered) and accuracy/reaction time, but its effect on anaerobic power (peak/mean power) is inconsistent and less clear.Moderate
Related findings · Mixed
- Bariatric surgery (VSG and RYGB) is the most effective and sustainable treatment for obesity, producing marked and sustained weight loss that non-surgical interventions cannot match.Strong
- Severely protein-deficient diets (2–3% energy) induce lean body mass loss and metabolic imbalance, whereas adequate protein intake (0.66 g/kg/d minimum) is a prerequisite for maintaining muscle, bone, and physiological function.Strong
- For patients with Class III obesity (BMI >39.9 kg/m2), metabolic bariatric surgery (MBS) is significantly more effective than any currently approved medication, with BilioPancreatic Diversion (BPD) showing the highest estimated weight loss.Strong
This is one finding among thousands. Every one is graded and traced to its source, so you can see what the evidence actually supports. Browse the research →