Sleep is crucial for physical and mental health and significantly impacts the performance of handball players in training and competition processes. Monitoring sleep is as important as monitoring workloads during training and competitions, but this practice is not yet widely established in some sports. Sleep is often evaluated based on subjective assessments that lack an objective component.
The aim of this master's thesis was to examine the impact of various training and competition loads on the sleep quality of elite handball players. We also focused on analyzing sleep on the nights before and after competitions and on studying the relationship between objective and subjective assessments of sleep quality. We used the Oura ring to collect objective data, while subjective assessments were obtained through daily sampling via the ExpiWell application. This combination of methods provided a comprehensive insight into the sleep quality of elite handball players.
We found statistically significant differences in sleep quality assessments between various training and competition loads (all p < 0.02), except for calmness and sleep latency assessments. Handball players achieved the highest sleep quality scores on nights after matches, while they slept worst on nights after rest days (all p < 0.016). There were no significant differences in sleep quality on nights after one or two training sessions per day (all p < 0.02), except for sleep latency and calmness assessments. When comparing sleep quality on nights before and after matches, five scores improved significantly after the match: sleep score (+4 points), deep sleep score (+8 points), REM sleep phase score (9 points), sleep efficiency score (+5 points), and overall sleep score (+8 points) (all p < 0.02), while the optimal sleep time score worsened (-8 points, p = 0.02). We also found no statistically significant correlation between subjective and objective assessments of sleep quality (all p > 0.22), indicating poor agreement between measurements obtained with the Oura ring and daily surveys.
Objective sleep monitoring proved beneficial, as it highlighted the necessity to improve approaches to ensuring better sleep, especially on nights after rest days. Our research emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach in treating handball players, which includes more precise sleep monitoring and replacing subjective methods of assessing sleep quality (e.g., questionnaires) with objective approaches.
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