World No 1 Novak Djokovic recently revealed that he manages to get at least eight-and-a-half hours sleep a night. Photo / AP
It’s not just the Wimbledon elite who need more sleep – people around the world today are in an epidemic of sleeplessness – here’s how to get more of it.
Novak Djokovic, tennis world No 1 and arguably the greatest of all time, recently revealed that he manages his sleep, as he does nearly everything in his life – diet, schedule, match-focus, serve down the T – perfectly.
“I like to get at least eight-and-a-half hours of sleep a night,” he told a press conference at the French Open last month. “I’m a pretty deep sleeper. I don’t wake up during the night.”
Is it just me or does that extra half-hour on top of the perfect eight, which for so many of us remains a dream, a little annoying, fractionally smug? To be fair, though, the Serb was asked. And, in truth, “sleep well?” has become one of the most routine, and vital, inquiries in the top echelons of the game. Coaches and players now see sleep as one of the most powerful tools in their locker, almost the equivalent of a performance-enhancing drug.
Djokovic proceeded to show he had thought carefully about his rest. “Sleep is extremely important,” he noted. “Probably more important than any other recovery routines… I get everything done in those particular amount of hours that I’m looking for. REM sleep is the most important one, between 1am and 4am, so I like to be in deep sleep by then.”
Modern professional tennis is the enemy of sleep: constant, time-zapping travel; an uncertain schedule in which you might not know the time of your next match, the location, the city or even country; endless hotels; matches that can last two hours or five, or two days; and recently, evening “slots” that can continue into the small hours.
At the Australian Open this year, British three-time Grand Slam winner Andy Murray had a match that finished at 4.06am. After a warm-down, ice bath and refuelling, he was back at the stadium at 9.30am for treatment to his feet.
At the same tournament in 2022, the recent Netflix series Break Point caught a moment of spiralling tension between Ajla Tomljanović (Aussie, top 100) and her boyfriend Matteo Berrettini (Italian, top 20) as she negotiated to do an 8.05am TV interview in their suite.
“Go and get another room,” Berrettini suggested. “I have to sleep.” “I’ll say on air you kicked me out,” Tomljanović joked. Berrettini replied: “But they’re going to agree with me. I’m still in the tournament.” The couple split up a month later.
A decade ago, you heard of players using Rohypnol to offset jetlag at the Australian Open. Current players employ professional sleep coaches to extract every single advantage from timetables, trackers and every other trick in the book to give their charge the perfect chance of a good night’s rest.
We probably can’t exclude an element of kidology from some self-reported sleep boasts. Roger Federer used to say that he enjoyed 10 hours’ shut-eye. During Wimbledon, he would rent two houses, one for family and one for his staff; he did not sleep in the family house. Murray, meanwhile, is on record as regularly getting 12 hours. What is he – a cat?
If you’re a young challenger fretting the night before facing Murray or the GOAT (greatest of all time), just hearing about your opponent’s optimum sleep routine must be tantamount to “the Djoker” bursting into your room as you switch off the light to bellow: “SLEEP WELL! NO – SLEEP PERFECTLY!!”. So ending any chance of a good night’s rest.
What does one poor night’s sleep do to a player? There is evidence that under-slept players serve with 6 per cent less accuracy. Get less than six hours, though, and the following occurs, according to sleep scientist Matthew Walker, in Why We Sleep: “VO2 max [oxygen uptake] drops. Time to physical exhaustion falls by 10 to 30 per cent. Similar impairments are observed in limb extension force and vertical jump height, together with decreases in peak and sustained muscle strength.”
Almost as crucially, there is evidence that if you lost your last match, you will sleep worse before the next one. It’s a vicious circle.
Of course, it’s not just the Wimbledon elite who needs more sleep. Britons average a little over six-and-a-half hours’ sleep, and more than a third of the population gets by on only five to six hours. Causes range from stress, to over-work, financial worries, poor tennis form (just me?) and stressing about lack of sleep.
“It’s a feed-back loop,” says Peter Attia, US surgeon, in his recent bestseller, Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity. And the worst thing you can do about poor sleep is worry about it. He also adds: “Poor sleepers take a wrecking ball to their metabolism”, substantially increasing the risk of Type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular and coronary disease by 20 per cent.
Crucially, bad sleep also impacts our brain health.
During a good night’s sleep, as you cycle effortlessly through deep sleep (NREM) and lighter (REM) sleep, proteins associated with neurodegeneration, such as amyloid beta and tau, are washed from your brain. During REM (dreaming), processes involving emotional healing, problem-solving, creativity and procedural memory – learning new ways of moving the body; vital for athletes and musicians – occur.
The good news is that sportspeople have led the charge on better sleeping techniques, and we can all learn from their example. With a minor snoring problem and an issue of waking up at dawn, I set out to get the advice of a leading British sports sleep coach. In the process, I hope to improve my general fitness, not to mention my serve percentage, which is currently languishing at 22 per cent.
Nick Littlehales was one of the first people to apprehend the crucial role of rest in professional sport. He approached Alex Ferguson in 1992 to ask what was being done about how Beckham, Scholes et al slept. (In the press, he became known as the man who “tucked Becks up in bed at night”).
Going on to work with Real Madrid FC, various Olympic associations and the LTA, Littlehales became the coaches’ sleep coach and has detailed his methods for us all to follow in his 2016 book Sleep.
When I speak to Littlehales, he won’t reveal the name of any individual he has coached, bar Cristiano Ronaldo, so we will never know if his ideas have shaped Djokovic. But the main difference between athletes and members of the public, he will reveal, is commitment. Professionals will follow his “R90″ sleep programme to the letter. Amateur Joes will give it a couple of days and drift off (but not in a good way).
The R90 programme is certainly – and rather satisfyingly –complicated. No one claims that sleepology is easy and science hasn’t found a “sleep-switch” yet. The programme is based on 90 periods, as corresponds to a single sleep cycle, and our circadian rhythms. But refreshingly, it begins at the other end of the problem: the start to our day.
“We can’t control what we do when we sleep,” Littlehales points out, “but we can control everything we do leading up to it and afterwards.” Number one, he warns not to look back at a bad night’s sleep and keep my wake-up point, or “sunrise”, relatively consistent. And then build the rest of my day from there in perfect blocks of 90 minutes, 11 of them.
Happily, the month between the French Open and Wimbledon coincides with a three-week stay at my mother’s, where there is nothing to do, except work and sleep. But there is a tennis club over the road, so I decide to implement Littlehales’ advice and see if I can improve my serve with added alertness.
Ideally, I start my day quite slowly, methodically and meditatively. Then it’s out into the daylight. I’m allowed to drink coffee, but not more than one cup, then after each 90-minute period, I’m meant to take a Controlled Recovery Period (CRP), in other words a break. (I tell him the perfect CRP – outdoors, mind-clearing, meditative, pleasurable – was once an office cigarette break. Not surprisingly, he does not endorse smoking.)
In my own experiments, I find this orderly start to the day the hardest bit: modern life, or perhaps it’s just my normal household, doesn’t do slow, contemplative awakening. After this storm has passed, I find the break bit comes very easily; I may be a natural at break-taking. The period from 11am-12.30pm is the best period, apparently, for brain work.
After lunch, meanwhile, is best for napping. “The power of naps can’t be ignored”, says Littlehales. Again, I find I am a talented nap-taker. Late afternoon is better for exercise, so I drag myself over to the tennis club for 30 minutes every day to practise my serve.
From 6pm, it’s time to wind down. No blue-light devices; drink minimal alcohol; finish eating three hours before bed.
Then all the usual sleep hygiene stuff, with the exception that if you’re right-handed, sleep on your left side (atavistic security measure). If you sleep with a partner, you need a super-king bed minimum, but, basically, lose the partner. And now you have the best chance of the perfect night’s sleep. But if you don’t manage it, just make up your quota in CRPs on another night.
One way or another, most serious sleep advice now resembles the R90. Summarising the modern scientific approach, Attia says “the overarching point here is that a good night of sleep may depend on a good day of wakefulness: one that includes exercise, some outdoor time, sensible eating, with no late-night snacking, minimal to no alcohol, proper management of stress, and knowing where to set boundaries around work and other life stressors.”
The programme works. I am now sleeping an hour later than dawn and I’m also missing fewer serves and my first service has also improved by 28 per cent, possibly from the practice.
Admittedly, it’s still a work in progress, but even my snoring has improved. I’m not sure if it’s the quiet at my mother’s, the absence of my wife, or of WiFi, but after two weeks, I’m already managing to sleep better and I also feel fitter, more alert, more purposeful.
Even at age 38, the world No 55 is a huge drawcard for the Auckland tournament.