The correlation between sleep quality and performance in football athlete

Athletes are at risk of overtraining. Therefore, athletes need to build a strategy to get a better condition after training. If optimum recovery is achieved by good sleep, athletes can be engaged in other physical activities or increase the load of exercise in the upcoming days. Thus, we assumed that sleep quality is related to the performance of football athlete. To investigate if there is correlation between sleep quality and performance in football athletes, we undertook a cross-sectional analysis of 100 male football athletes. Sleep quality was assessed by Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index questionnaire, and athlete’s performance was quantified by oxygen uptake capacity (VO2max) measurement by bleep test, while resting heart rate and blood pressure were measured with digital sphygmomanometer. There was significant correlation between sleep quality and all performance indicators including resting heart rate, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, and VO2max (p < 0.001). In Pearson correlation, we found that sleep quality affects 14 of resting heart rate (r = 0.384) (p < 0.001), 17 of systolic pressure (r = 0.421) (p < 0.001), 21 of diastolic pressure (r = 4.69) (p < 0.001), and 16 of VO2max score (r = − 0.412) (p < 0.001). By Gamma correlation, we found that almost all of the participants with good sleep quality have normal resting heart rate, normal blood pressure, and either superior or excellent VO2max score (rheart rate = 0.768) (p = 0.002), (rsystolic = 0.773) (p < 0.001), (rdiastolic = 1.00) (p < 0.001), (rVO2max = 0.68) (p < 0.001). There was correlation between sleep quality and performance of football athlete. © 2021, Japanese Society of Sleep Research.