Sleep by Nick Littlehales

Author:Nick Littlehales
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

Building a Sleep Kit

In 2009, Shane Sutton, the head coach of British Cycling at the time, put me in touch with Matt Parker, the head of marginal gains. The academic and clinical expertise on sleep they had looked into had proven too intrusive and impractical to use, so I worked very closely with Matt, drawing upon the techniques and interventions I’d established over the years, to see where recovery gains could be unlocked. I then presented our redefined approach to mental and physical recovery to the performance director, Dave Brailsford, and his extensive team of the best coaches and sports science professionals from across the globe. The reaction was simple: “This could really make a difference.”

It was an exciting time to get involved in cycling. Sky’s significant investment in British Cycling—the country’s governing body—allowed them to launch a professional team, signing up some of the best riders, including Bradley Wiggins, with the ambition of putting a British rider at the top of the podium at the Tour de France.

To this end, the team was addressing everything from the obvious things like the bikes, fitness, and tactics to the less overt such as psychology, avoiding viruses (there’s no point in showing up at the grueling Tour de France with a nagging cough), and, of course, sleep. All of this was part of their “aggregation of marginal gains” approach, in which they sought to take every individual component involved in the sport and better it, even by just 1 percent, so that when it all came together the improvement could be significant.

I laid out the Key Sleep Recovery Indicators and showed not just the riders but every member of the staff the importance of sleeping in cycles, the necessity of using recovery breaks, and how to maintain their environment at home, educating them in the R90 program. But I knew that I could have more of an impact.

The key to the approach in other fields was consistency. The riders were on the same nutritional plan all the time, riding the same bike, and wearing the same gear—but they were sleeping in a different hotel room, on a different bed, every night when they were riding on a tour event. So I designed and produced the R90 sleep kit for the riders to enable them to sleep on the same custom-designed surface every night.

The sleep kit is basically a portable single-size bed. It is composed of two or three layers, depending on the rider, of viscoelastic memory foam—essentially two or three mattress toppers—with a pillow-top pad on top. This is wrapped in a removable machine-washable outer cover, combined with a shallow pillow and combination comforter and bedsheets. All of this is housed within a specially designed backpack, so it can be folded in half, zipped up, and carried out in a matter of seconds. To use it again, simply carry it into the room, unzip it, and put it wherever you need it—either on the bed base (we’d move the existing mattress out of the way) or right on the floor.

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