With everything you’ve got going on in life, it can be hard to hit the recommended seven-plus hours of sleep each night. But new research suggests that regularly getting poor sleep may raise your risk of running injuries. And, you may need significantly more than seven hours to bring that injury risk down.
Of course, running injuries are complex and it’s a stretch to say that the reason you’re having IT band issues or knee pain is because your sleep has been subpar lately. But doctors say there’s something to this seemingly random connection between sleep and getting injured. As a result, “sleep should be treated as a performance priority, and not as an afterthought,” lead study author Jan de Jonge, PhD, a work and sports psychologist at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia, tells SELF.
Here’s what the study found, plus why doctors say logging better sleep can help lower your running injury risk.
The study found a strong link between poor sleep and running injuries.
For the Applied Sciences study, Dr. de Jonge and his research team surveyed 425 recreational runners on their sleep habits and injuries. The researchers discovered that runners who said they slept the fewest hours each night compared to others, had lower sleep quality, faced more sleep problems, and were 1.78 times more likely to report injuries than those who got seven to nine hours of high-quality sleep a night. Poor sleepers also had a 68% chance of getting injured over a 12-month period.
The team found that those who consistently had good sleep duration and quality reported having fewer injuries. Because recreational runners also juggle things like work, school, home life, and personal responsibilities, Dr. de Jonge says they may be better off being at the upper end of the recommended range of seven to nine hours of sleep a night.
“This underscores how multidimensional ‘sleep health’—not just hours slept—plays a critical role in injury prevention,” Dr. de Jonge says.
What’s behind this?
The study didn’t look into why this might be the case—it simply found a link between poor sleep and a higher risk of running injuries. But doctors say there are likely a few things behind this.
“When you sleep less, your body’s ability to recover from a workout is diminished,” Joshua Scott, MD, a primary care sports medicine physician and co-director of Non-operative Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Orthopaedics in Los Angeles, tells SELF. While you sleep, your body releases human growth hormone (HGH), which stimulates muscle repair. It also increases blood flow to deliver nutrients to your muscles, helping to heal micro-tears that are caused by exercise, Dr. Scott points out. But when you don’t get enough sleep, you don’t reap as much of these benefits.