Kirschen, G. W., Jones, J. J., & Hale, L. (2018).

The Impact of Sleep Duration on Performance

Among Competitive Athletes. Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, 1. Doi:
10.1097/jsm.0000000000000622

This article gives a detailed overview of much of the literature in the sleep in athletes
field. It begins with the broad summary that athletes need more sleep to improve their
performance and that often athletes have more sleep disruptions because of their training. More
specifically, sleep deprivation contributes to weaker immune function and muscle repair as well
as reduced glucose metabolism. The main question to be answered is directly how sleep affects
athletes’ outcomes and performances. The authors chose 19 studies through a detailed selection
process to further review. Their findings included that none of the studies showed a negative
correlation between sleep duration and performance. They also found that aerobic exercise is
more affected by sleep duration than anaerobic. Lastly, they concluded that long-term sleep
deprivation has a larger effect than more acute observation.
This current source, written in 2018, is also authoritative. All three authors work at Stony
Brook University and their emails can be easily found on that site. It also has broad and deep
coverage. First, it is broad because it covers a multitude of sleep effects on athletics, including
muscle recovery, immune response, metabolism, aerobic vs. anaerobic activity, etc. It is also
deep because it goes into such detail in each of those subjects. For example, when discussing
immune function and sleep, the authors write, “natural killer cell activity, which aids the host’s
response to viral pathogens, decreases with loss of total sleep time and decreased sleep
efficiency.” It is also accurate because it uses information from 19 scholarly, accurate
articles/studies to draw accurate conclusions from those. Also, one specific corroboration is
when this article includes, “tennis serving accuracy and basketball shooting were both improved
by long-term sleep extension interventions,” which aligns with the study “The Effects of Sleep
Extension on the Athletic Performance of Collegiate Basketball Players” (my most recent
annotated bib). Lastly, the purpose of this literature review is to inform the science and athletics
community on discoveries about the correlation between sleep quality and quantity and athletic
performance. It fulfills this purpose by contributing to that world of knowledge.