Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Date of Graduation
5-2022
Semester of Graduation
Spring
Publish
yes
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science (BS)
Department
Department of Kinesiology
First Advisor
Trent Hargens
Abstract
Purpose: People can experience sleep fragmentation for many reasons. The negative effect this has on a person’s daytime function and sleepiness has already been studied extensively, yet there is little on the effect it has on a person’s aerobic athletic performance. Many athletes experience frequent wake-ups in the middle of the night, due to nerves and other factors, which could potentially affect their performance.
Methods: For each of the eight subjects, testing began with a VO2max test and a familiarization trial. Following this, subject’s then participated in two experimental trials, where they were randomly assigned either a night of sleep fragmentation or a night of normal sleep. During these trials, they did a 20-minute warm-up and a 3-km time trial on a cycle ergometer.
Results: Peak VO2 and peak METs were significantly higher after undergoing one night of normal sleep. Despite not reaching statistical significance, there was a six second slower mean finishing time after experiencing a night of sleep fragmentation. Average power output was approaching statistical significance, with a decrease in the mean wattage during the sleep fragmentation trial.
Conclusion: Sleep fragmentation caused significant decreases in the subjects peak VO2 and peak METs, potentially due to subject’s increased fatigue. None of the other variables looked at reached statistical significance. This could be explained due to the poor sleep quality of the subject pool that was used, causing the number of awakenings to be too similar for both sleep conditions. Further research with more subjects is needed to further study the effect of sleep fragmentation on aerobic exercise performance.
