Sleep Deprivation Training for Ultramarathon with Chiara Gattoni PhD | Koopcast Episode 131

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast it is about a topic that is going to be near and dear to anybody who has done a multi-day race or has done one of the more recent 200 mile races that is popping up it is how we can utilize sleep deprivation training or let me let me rephrase that a little bit how we can potentially utilize some type of sleep deprivation training in order to combat it during the race itself this is an area that as a coach i am quite miffed and befuddled with i don't know how to actually prescribe sleep deprivation training or if it is beneficial for athletes all too often what i try to focus on when i'm working with athletes is the period of time in advance of an event to where they can bank sleep and also the sleep strategies during the race itself it's unknown to me and it's unknown to a lot of the research community out there that if any sort of sleep deprivation training is in fact beneficial for athletes and if it is when using a sleep deprivation training protocol how deleterious or detrimental

is it is it to the actual training process which you need to go through anyway and so on the podcast today i have one of the researchers that can provide some answers to this very mysterious question and chiara gatoni chiara is a researcher in a strength and conditioning coach she holds a bachelor of science in exercise and sports sciences from the university of rona a master's degree in sports science and training methodologies from the university of rona a master's in sports and health sciences from the university of exeter she also has completed her PhD program at the school of sports and exercise sciences at the university of kent and for those of you not in the know the university of kent right now is an absolutely baller exercise science program they are producing some of the best research and some of the most intelligent minds in the field right now i wanted to bring bring on chiara to talk about a very specific case study that was recently published that is titled sleep deprivation training to reduce the negative effects of sleep loss on endurance performance and although this is a single case study and i want to take the time to emphasize that this is one person that went through a sleep training a sleep deprivation training protocol i do think that there is something to this you long-time listeners of the podcast will know i don't mind bringing on people with novel solutions to problems onto the podcast if they can tell me what the physiological underpinnings are and we caveat what

we find in that type of research or in those types of novel solutions with the entire context of a training program and i what i found through the throughout the conversation that i had with chiara is we could do just that we could take apart what she found out in the single case study we can take it for what it's worth we can wrap it around the context of the entirety of the training program and there seems to be some sort of physiological underpinning with the intervention that this single case study subject actually undertook so with that as a little bit of a backdrop buckle up drink some caffeine here is my conversation with chiara gatoni all about if sleep deprivation strategies will actually work in an ultra marathon context i appreciate you coming on all the way from london um right out of the gate why why are you in london because that's not where you're where you've been based out of recently is that correct um actually well i i'm italian for some but i've been living here in the uk for nine years now um i used to work at the university of kent i did my PhD there uh and then i stopped working there as a research assistant and the first and then research associate after uh with uh under the supervision of professor samarcora and then i uh and then you know covid came and a lot of things changed and i found a new job here in london

so i'm working as a research fellow at ucl um at the department of orthopedics and musculoskeletal science but i'm still part of the of samarcora's um research group so i'm working with him too i think i think covid kind of messed up everybody's quote-unquote home base because some people that were like planning on being you know wherever they were going to be for like 18 months they ended up being there for three or four years and it sounds like you kind of fell into that uh proverbial trap as well yeah yeah you're right indeed um you have a you have a really interesting educational background that i was uh not entirely familiar with until you sent it over to me so so the listeners can get to know you a little bit better can you just go over that background so that we can kind of appreciate the perspective the different perspectives more importantly that you're coming from in terms of how you can look at not only athletic performance but also human performance yeah sure uh so i started my um university uh journey in italy i did my bachelor degree and my first master degree in uh at the university of verona uh and then uh i worked for uh three years as a strength and conditioning coach for the under 23 um football team in uh which is uh kievo verona now it doesn't exist anymore since last

year um they had huge uh financial problems but at that time they used to be in seria so it was like a really a really good experience to me and uh i always set in my mind to do a PhD so after these three years i decided to to go abroad um and i did a second master first i didn't feel really ready to be in the uk you know my english wasn't that that that good at that time and i wanted to learn more uh also the way you study in the us and in england is uh in the uk is slightly different from how we study in italy so i thought that doing a second master was was a good idea for me to start in a new country and i did a master in sport and health sciences at the university of exeter and then i applied for a PhD uh the university of kent and actually i i won the scholarship over there and i like the topic that's why i applied for that because i thought it was something different from um all the other topics that i found around uh because uh yeah i focused on um the effects of mental fatigue and sleep deprivation on endurance performance and also we tried to develop new forms of uh training to to further improve performance so i thought it was something

new and it was and i love the topic uh and then from from there i kept working with samarcora uh i don't know if you know him but it's uh it's great he's a great researcher he's a professor um he created this uh a psycho-biological model um i strongly believe in that so uh i kept working with him uh as a researcher and now you know uh covid came uh um he went he went back to italy and uh i decided to stay here so i found a new job here in london so it's a new adventure to me something uh slightly different from what i do but i try to keep working on my first topic um too yeah and and just like in the u.s and the uk we tend to exploit our military personnel for a lot of the research that you do they make they're one of the few subject groups that actually that that makes good and readily available guinea pigs to study sleep deprivation and uh and sleep restriction so i can definitely appreciate that because here in the u.s much of that research comes out of our military branch or at least originates in our in our military branch and it seems to do the same in the uk yeah yeah yeah yeah so we're we're going to talk we're going to talk a lot about sleep restriction

and sleep deprivation and the impacts on performance but since you've been researching this i'm going to kind of ask you the million dollar question like right out of the gate and then we're going to get to why the answer to that question can be can be true or false so in your in your observation and through your research do you think that sleep deprivation training irrespective of what the protocol can actually be or the intervention can actually be do you think that that can positively impact and we'll stick to endurance because i know you have a broad uh background in in this do you think that that can positively impact endurance performance when sleep deprivation is part of the performance context so that the event lasts over 24 hours or something like that okay that's an interesting question um if you ask my opinion i would say yes but of course uh in science you cannot um you cannot only trust on opinions you know so we need to be careful uh i would never suggest uh sleep deprivation uh before doing a proper randomized control trial so as you uh rightly said we did a uh we first did a case study on a single subject on a single athlete and it seems to be well tolerated it was well tolerated by this athlete but uh of course we need to do uh more studies and by a randomized

control study i mean like having two groups of athletes or military personals depending also um where you find the fundings you know from military personnel if the i don't know mod or other um groups are interested uh of course you need to test that type of subjects of population but uh yeah you need to have two groups and see whether uh whether the sleep deprivation training will add something to the already done physical type of training yeah sorry to like hit you with the loaded question right ahead of the gate but i think that that's the initial hook for the listeners because i think it's it's it's fairly well understood and some people will contend that it's extremely well understood that sleep deprivation or sleep restriction impacts performance in a myriad of different ways whether we're talking about skill like a shooting type of deal like a like pistol shooting or even free throw shooting which has been very well studied and also endurance performance and also strength performance as well and we can kind of like line all of those up there's been a number of meta analyses that have started to compare this so it's very very it's very clear that it impacts performance to like different degrees the intervention side of it is a whole different kettle of fish because to use an english phrase since you're in the uk right now um because it's one thing

to know that yeah of course right if you go without sleep for 48 hours everything's going to be impacted and we can estimate what the impact is but how to circumvent that or how to prepare for it is a completely different question and it's the one that the athletes in this audience is going to be more interested in so we're going to explore that a little bit using the conduit of this case study that you have alluded to earlier so you can add the caveats into this case study as you you know as you wish because it's your it's your work but can you go and describe what what the intervention was for this individual and then what you found out after you went through that intervention yeah of course so basically um what we do what we did was to uh we thought you know that uh we train our body and uh um to generate some physiological adaptations and to therefore increase our performance because that's the main a final aim for an athlete and we also recently tested uh brain endurance training which is another type of training that we developed with uh some what was initially developed by summer cora and then we further develop it throughout these years and we saw that by uh concurrently training uh body and brain

you can further improve your endurance performance okay so we said uh uh since sleep deprivation is a state that anyway generates cognitive fatigue it's a mental state it generates a lot of effort a lot of stress uh why can't we uh why can't we train it why can't we see like uh sleep deprivation as a in this case as a positive thing to improve performance as an adaptable system essentially that's the way i've kind of viewed it's an adaptable system in your in your estimation or why can't we view it as an adaptable system yeah exactly exactly and so we decided to basically uh try it on a single subject just to just just to start uh we did a six weeks of sleep deprivation training which consisted in uh not sleeping uh once per week and uh while continuing uh training uh from a physical perspective as uh the athlete would have normally done you know so he kept doing the normal um training sessions and he added an extra night of sleep deprivation per week um and we tested him before and after the six weeks uh we also created a new thing that to the best of my knowledge i've never seen in uh in in the literature to be honest because uh

ultra endurance athletes are are not so much tested unfortunately so we we created a multi-day lab test in order to to test him and what we did um well the multi-day test consisted in five days testing in which in the morning the athlete had to run uh two hours on the treadmill at a constant pace and at the same time we were alternating nights of uh sleep and sleep deprivation sleep and sleep sleep deprivation and sleep again so basically he had two nights of sleep deprivation in the middle and uh uh of course we were monitoring him we tested him from an actual physiological perspective also we measured the electroencephalography um we gave him uh several questionnaires in order to understand uh uh uh uh the mental uh well the the workload perceivable from a mental and physical perspective the effort perceived uh uh throughout the training uh period uh he was monitored with a gps uh with um other several questionnaires to check his mood and to check uh uh if he you know we were a bit worried um we wanted to check uh uh and to be sure that he didn't reach any sort of overreaching functional

overreaching or overtraining because you know we don't know how he could have reacted to uh uh six nights of sleep deprivation in in six weeks um what we found out interestingly is that first of all as i mentioned before he well tolerated the the training and he didn't reach any sort of overtraining or functional overreaching uh and also uh something really interesting is that throughout the six weeks his uh sleepiness level um his subjective sleepiness level decreased so basically he we gave him a questionnaire in which we asked him uh his level of sleepiness and uh at the end of the six weeks it was much lower than uh what the the one was when he started basically indicating that there is some sort of adaptation that was going on during that training period just to kind of like encapsulate that for the listeners yeah the the intervention right that you're using or the intervention protocol that you're using is a a six-week period where the athlete is foregoing sleep entirely for one night it was on sundays per week and then he was maintaining he or she i don't know if the anyway the athlete was

maintaining their normal training program throughout that entire time and then you put them through kind of a testing process which consisted of these two-hour submaximal runs for several days in a row yeah it was a sub maximal run uh who did it for five consecutive days pre pre-training and uh post-training um it is um average intensity average uh run speed of this uh previous couple of races let's say and um apart from that before the running testing we also measure his uh um electrical activity at the brain level so we measure electroencephalography as i said in order that we did a test who's a validated one to measure objectively uh sleepiness sleepiness level so together with the questioners we also had a more objective measure of sleepiness and that's another interesting result because compared to the baseline so compared to the first measurements done before the training program the training program the training period after the training period so after sleep deprivation training the results of the electroencephalography indicated uh less levels of sleepiness which is

something interesting too and uh another thing that we uh that we noticed and that we uh saw is that perception of effort during running slightly decrease after sleep deprivation training together with uh effort perceived and uh mental uh demand perceived and the the the testing protocol that you mentioned is something that you kind of made up right you're they're running for five consecutive days of two hours and there's two days of complete sleep sleep deprivation what so what was the timing of it is like two and then one and then two and then one or like how did the how did that get spaced out you mean the nights of sleep deprivation yeah correct yeah um so basically uh first night sleep second night sleep deprivation third night sleep of fourth night sleep deprivation then sleep again got it so not a different i mean a lot of athletes out there that are listening to this are like that's almost like a 200 mile race i mean the running periods are obviously very much shorter but in terms of how you would sleep during a 200 mile race for those of you not watching the youtube video you've got a good grin on your face because it's probably something that you're thinking about but take me through if there was anything else behind that behind coming up with that type of testing protocol because as you mentioned it's novel right it's something that you guys just essentially decided to do for this uh case study

yeah well regarding the test itself it's totally novel and we decided to try it because i checked in the literature there's nothing on that there are a few studies in which they did maybe three days of testing in a row but it was not related to ultra endurance it was not done to test ultra endurance performance so we thought there's nothing in the literature it would be uh really nice to have something uh some material you know some some tools so that we can use with this type of population with ultra endurance athletes of course it needs to be validated and we need to see if it's a reliable type of test before using it uh properly that's this case study was a really a novel a novel study we tested several things several new innovative things so let me try to encapsulate this a little bit for the for the audience and you can add to it or or correct as i'm or correct me as i'm seeing it the first takeaway when i looked at this was that the sleep deprivation intervention so the training intervention is what we would normally think about you do strength training intervention you can do an intensified you know uh training intervention where you increase mileage or increase intensity or whatever in this case the intervention is the sleep deprivation and uh intervention of six weeks

first thing that was well tolerated by the athlete which is something we're always concerned about when we're actually coaching athletes is is is the intervention going to be tolerated by the athlete and not be deleterious right you're avoiding the you're avoiding the negative in that sense and then the second thing in terms of its actual impact on uh on well there is some underlying physiological impact that you can measure via the test that you were putting the athlete through pre and post those two things are kind of what i what i take away from it it's it's still a question of is that ultimately going to impact or improve their performance right that's the thing that we're at at the end of the day is as coaches and athletes but in terms of the intervention being well tolerated at least by this person you can check that box in terms of seeing some sort of uh some sort of physiology that's underpinning a potential performance improvement i can kind of like check that that box as well is that how you see it or would you add any caveats to it oh okay yeah is that how i see it um i would like to add a few things like first off we've already received a lot of uh criticisms uh from uh um yeah from some of uh some colleagues of us from other research groups um apparently saying that this type of training is dangerous uh and ineffective uh uh i understand the the the concerns

the the the the the the other people and athletes can have and indeed we are not suggesting to to do that right now uh we're just proposing something new uh but i i'm a bit uh when i hear this uh such strong statements you know i'm a bit um shocked in a way maybe shocked is a strong word but like i don't understand how someone can say that it doesn't work it's dangerous and ineffective if it's not being tested already right so um we need to be careful and of course uh i am the first one to say uh the athletes not to use it at the moment uh to wait for more proper studies experiments and let's see what happened but uh from what we found out and we spoke also with this athlete uh it it looks like that um it's uh it's not a bad thing and we tried uh when we decided how to to create uh uh and to uh generate this type of training uh we uh on purpose decide to use uh um sleep deprivation once per week yeah because of course we all know that sleep is really important for recovery in training especially and uh that not sleeping for many days can be uh can be really negative and deleterious

so for performance but for many other things um so when people talk about chronic sleep deprivation this is not the case this is an intermittent sort of sleep deprivation it's not a chronic one and this is why we decided to use intermittent because we believe that chronic is bad and intermittent might be uh the best way to to overcome the negative effects of sleep deprivation so you have the time to recover from uh that night to sleep deprivation at the same time um maybe adapt yourself to it and the way that i interpret that that is that there's a dose response relationship to anything you do to exercise to medicine to whatever and what you're trying what you're intentionally i'm emphasizing that that that word very deliberately what you're intentionally deciding to do with the training intervention is to is to utilize enough sleep deprivation that you think is going to induce an adaptation but not so much that is dangerous or deleterious and i gotta be honest with you like because i see some of this criticism that gets floated around not as much as you do obviously but i see some of it and i i kind of have a little bit of a skeptical eye on it as as well it lines up with what we know about what people can

tolerate from a sleep deprivation or sleep restriction standpoint yeah if you're doing like four or five nights of sleep deprivation or severe sleep restriction in a row yeah sure that's going to be a pretty heavy toll to pay but as any new parent knows or as anybody who is you know had to take a transatlantic flight or had to stay up all night studying for exams or kind of whatever you can usually tolerate one night maybe two nights of like heavy sleep restriction and and then you're gonna have to like apply some sort of recovery so i mean so anyway from my perspective it meets the reasonability test for whatever that's worth okay i i understand i understand uh it's good to have doubts you know i'm the first one uh who i'm doubtful because i don't know i don't know how it works but i also know that for example um intermittent fasting is used too and uh it doesn't make you die okay at the same time it's true it's true because i have we received a really strong uh statements you know but for the same reason okay chronic starvation uh leads to death okay as chronic sleep deprivation can lead to death death of course but that's why we decided to go for the intermittent type of sleep deprivation um yeah that's a good analogy that's a good analogy that everybody can that everybody can apply to okay

so let's let's go down the mechanistic rabbit hole a little bit because you've got something that's novel right you've got a novel intervention it's kind of meets the reasonability test it's obviously a case study which i think both of us will emphasize that it's a case study it's on one person we can't draw too many conclusions from it and things like that when you look at this as a scientist from a mechanistic perspective what what's the adaptive what is the how can you describe the adaptive process because that's always what i struggle with with sleep deprivation yeah we can see the you know the beginning and end points of what you can measure but unlike muscle hypertrophy or some sort of aerobic development where we're increasing red cell mass or something like that where we can pinpoint these like really narrow physiological mechanisms uh that are a result of a training intervention this is an area that i a i'm just unfamiliar with but i i it's it's not as robustly understood so what do you think under what do you think underpins the changes that you're clearly seeing in this case study and that you can theorize that you can see in any other intervention what physiological underpinnings that can you actually see unfolding i think that uh the mechanism um underneath um performance from this perspective is related to uh the mechanisms related to perception of effort we saw for example in our case

study that perception of effort uh decreased post sleep deprivation training and also uh the perception of effort um and the the mental demand perceived by the athletes in himself were lower after the period of uh of uh the training period it's also been um seen in some studies on active sleep deprivation that it seems that uh performance is impaired when you're sleep deprived through perception of effort so basically perception of effort is higher and and therefore you perform uh much worse when you're sleep deprived um the mechanisms related to perception of effort involved certain specific areas of our brain which are uh in particular the so-called anterior cingulate cortex the pre-motor and motor areas of the cortex uh what's happening that um the higher the activity of this uh of these areas the higher the perception of effort so when you do exercise for example but also when you do a cognitive task we're not talking only about um physical uh activities

um what's happening uh uh what's happening uh uh what's happening uh uh uh my perspective at least uh what i think it happens when you do sleep deprivation training uh is that you uh adapt uh this uh by doing this training you adapt these areas um which uh in turn will lower their activity when you perform consequently perception of effort is lower and consequently and finally you tend to improve your performance it's a it's a complicated topic to explain in a few words but i hope i was clear well anytime we're talking about the brain it's it's very difficult to kind of unwind because there's so many intertwining things going on all the same time i'll leave it at that things going on at the same time that as opposed to like muscular physiology or even cardiopulmonary physiology it it it becomes this big mess where we have to lump everything into something like perception right um as opposed to as opposed to peeling it apart but i mean i can kind of tell you what what i've experienced from a coaching perspective having athletes in these situations where they have to go into a multi-day event three four days or whatever and we're trying to figure out how to combat sleep deprivation is i've always viewed it through the lens that the advantage that you can get out of any type of sleep

deprivation training is really rooted in understanding how you how you react and how you can perform in those conditions and that's the best vocabulary that i could really use to to describe it and i mean i and i don't know where else to kind of like go from where else to kind of like go from there in terms of making uh kind of making a case for using an intervention like this right six weeks you do one day of total sleep deprivation and as coaches we can kind of contrive it maybe it's five weeks maybe it's four weeks maybe it's ten days every ten days you do the sleep deprivation training or instead of an entire night you do two hours of sleep a night you know there's a zillion ways to do it but in terms of the value proposition to the athlete i've always kind of viewed it through the lens of an experiential one right not so much of a physical one which we typically think about when we talk about endurance training or strength training interventions where your muscles get bigger your freaking lungs can can transport or your blood can transport more oxygen and things like that so so i mean i guess what i'm trying to say with that is is it lines up with just my anecdotal this is why i would introduce this intervention in the first place okay okay um that's good but i i think you're right especially um when we talk about ultra endurance such long distances uh long distance races competitions uh

i think that we need to start talking about what's happening here too in the brain um it's not it's not well studied uh there are a few uh i've seen there are a few studies uh in uh um ultra endurance uh trials uh on uh for example cognitive performance during the race uh itself which is important too because uh apart from uh being physically prepared you need to be also cognitive cognitively prepared sometimes you uh you compete in very hard environments uh and you are sleep deprived at the same time and uh you you need to be vigilant uh for several days uh and it's hard so i think that um looking for new uh new things new types of training uh that can help endurance ultra endurance athletes is is essential i want to i want to kind of talk about what you want to study next and then circle back to maybe some practical implementations for athletes that are looking at this and i know the latter question is a very difficult one to answer considering how like early stage some of the some of the knowledge set that we're getting out of this research is but maybe you can entertain me with some of your thoughts if i were bringing you on as a consultant what would you actually do type of questions but you've already mentioned this right you've already mentioned a little bit of this so you now have

some initial you know initial case study pilot data and things like that where do you want to take it from here do you want to look at the intervention side or do you want to look at different ways that you can test performance in a sleep deprived state like how like what do you think is more important to understand first in this like research chicken and egg game that you're ultimately going to have to play because you can only do you know so many things at once okay yeah uh well as i mentioned before as i said to you before i'd like to do a proper randomized control uh study so with uh uh two big nice groups of athletes possibly and see the effects of the deprivation training uh on performance but also i would i would keep using uh um electro physiological measurements to have a proper insight you know what is happening at the brain level too that's your window right that's your window into the physiology essentially yeah yeah yeah for sure because i think that uh the next step would be i'd like at least to to see what's happening at the brain level while you are exercising through functional magnetic resonance for example and see what's happening in those areas where perception of effort is involved i'd like to to find a way um at the moment the technology doesn't require us to use a functional

magnetic resonance during a proper exercise because there would be too much noise yeah but but maybe starting with something uh less demanding uh with uh um smaller types of activities of physical activities it would be it would be good too because i think that's uh that's the key perception of effort is the key in uh in sports such as uh yours yeah it's a huge area and i this is probably unknown to you but i spent a good chunk of my book actually using sam's uh psychological model of fatigue as a construct for how to work on specifically the mental game of ultra running and how that impacts things that's a kind of another topic do you think that when you expand the group that you're going to start to see some of the prototypical individual variances start to get teased out like we typically see in in like more what i'll call like more traditional physiological research whether an altitude intervention right is a is a good example of that where we see people that have kind of different responses to different uh altitude training protocols do you think you're going to see something like that or is it going to be more universal because it's centered around the human brain no no you're totally right i think i'm going to see a lot of um differences between individuals and this is something that i forgot to mention uh but i like to test too

um sleep uh we start to see the sleep is uh as many other things genetically determined so also uh the way you deal to sleep is genetically determined it seems at least so um for me like uh not sleeping for an entire night so uh he can be like a really bad thing i wouldn't be able to do anything the day after i'm in your corner i'm in your corner i'm the exact same way yeah for someone else it's not it's not the same so it would be good also to to to see how how it works based on um genetic traits you know and i know any difference i know athletes that for whatever reason they're just really good under sleep deprived condition with no no rhyme or reason to it it's not like they've trained it or whatever they can just tolerate it for for whatever reason so practice would back up that that that sentiment that there is some sort of genetic component to to it that i think is actually a fairly robust one just because i see the discrepancy in people who can tolerate it and people who who can't and and to date it's not something that people have robustly trained yeah yeah yeah definitely absolutely okay so now i'm going to put you on the spot as a as a consultant

right so you can take off your scientist hat and put on your consultant hat so it gives you a little bit more like liberty to to tell what you think versus what you've studied right which i know a lot of scientists have a have they they're very reluctant to do so there are athletes listening to this that are training for multi-day and 200 mile races right and they want to know if a sleep deprivation protocol is a something that they should undertake b is effective and then see exactly what they should do now i know those are those are kind of impossible questions to kind of generalize but if you were consulting with athletes or even in a military kind of context where endurance performance is contingent upon how little they have to sleep and how fast they can locomote when they're actually awake what would you advise that they do during the training process to try to ready themselves for that particular demand of the event okay so if i speak as a scientist i wouldn't uh i wouldn't recommend to use a sleep deprivation training yet at least because because we don't know uh we don't know where the the moment uh defects uh if it's effective uh really effective or or what um and and and i would suggest to to to sleep well as a it's a good uh it's a good process for recovery okay but from a consultant

perspective and um based on the fact that i've been an athlete too uh i come from team sports but uh uh i used to play uh i used to train a lot uh and i know that uh athletes uh always want to try maybe something new or uh test themselves and i already know that there are uh several ultra endurance athletes uh who do that so because i've um yeah i've been to uh tour tour de jean yep i did tour de jean a few years ago sleep was a big issue for me there oh girl we could talk about that for a while i believe so i believe you um they already told me that some of them were already kind of training themselves not to sleep maybe not in a proper um um you know uh organized way uh but they were just trying randomly so in that case at that point i would suggest them to try it um in a more um organized and well-planned way instead of doing that randomly one day yes uh or in two weeks time another night of sleep deprivation uh but yeah i i cannot at the moment i don't feel myself to uh to suggest uh to use it uh right now it's tricky i know i'm putting you on the spot with it because you have to wear two hats there it's

tricky i'll give you an anecdote maybe you can ping off this anecdote a little bit and you'll you'll appreciate that you'll appreciate this given uh given your heritage the italians in particular were obsessed about doing their sleep deprivation and in a very prototypical italian fashion you can appreciate this too we're completely haphazard in doing it like there was no pattern between anything they would be like uh you know two weeks ago i did you know three nights without any sleep and then 10 weeks before that i did one night at very italian i just kind of like did it on a whim type of deal but for whatever reason the italians whenever i went over to tour de jantre just talked to them about it that was their mo is that they did it they did do sleep deprivation training they felt that it got they felt that it made a big impact but to your point it was so haphazard in nature i couldn't really pin down any rhyme or reason for it yeah yeah exactly uh i heard the stories from tour de jantre's outlets too so probably we spoke with the same people probably i don't know but yeah if i if someone wants to try it i would suggest not to to do that maybe in the week before the race just have some rest before the race and try it maybe a little bit um separated you know from uh from from the race itself what do you think the i i hate asking you

this because it's going to be an i don't know piece but based on the physiology and what you understand what you understand about how the brain is impacted what do you think the legacy is of a training intervention like you did with this with this case study and what i mean by that is is this was over a very specific six week period and you see some sort of adaptation that occurs and you can understand the physiological underpinnings of that adaptation how long does that last and the reason i ask that is is kind of to your point don't do it in the last week of the race we know that training interventions have a tail to them right i can introduce a high high volume period of training and that can last several weeks i can introduce high intensity training and that might just last several days or a couple of weeks right we can make that distinction between different types of training can you say anything to introducing a sleep deprivation intervention in terms of how long those effects might actually last or is it just a big unknown for you this is another big uh big question that we would like to test but we we don't know we thought about it that's why i said it's better to give some time between sleep deprivation training and the race itself but just to be sure because we don't know that yet it can be that one week is enough and you don't lose you know the adaptations at the same time uh two weeks uh you're fully recovered but adaptations tend to

uh decrease we don't know i mean you know so i mean you know when the deleterious pieces are removed right and that's when the sleep deprivation has essentially been restored so if you have eight hours of sleep deprivation or how whatever the total is once you can kind of continually restore that or the over the course of several days the potential deleterious pieces and you can see this in you know skill sports and endurance sports alike essentially get uh rectified but it's a different question uh on the adaptation side of things right in one case you're preventing the negative in the other case you're trying to preserve the positive that's the unknown piece right is trying to preserve the positive and and this is part of the struggle that i have with introducing this type of intervention is is going back to the dose responses a i can't really pin down a dose right i can get it into an area which is kind of meets the reasonability test or it doesn't affect training too much but i don't know how much that actually results in a positive adaptation nor do i know and i think you're getting to the answer to this question as well kind of what the legacy is like how long that adaptation would actually last before it goes back to baseline yeah yeah exactly and that's uh uh i think that's the most uh difficult part to test as well um because it's it's difficult to say uh it's gonna be for sure something that we we would like to test maybe uh by doing uh the same type of

uh sleep deprivation training but um of different duration or uh starting before uh and completing it uh two weeks before the race or one week before the race or three weeks before and see what's happening or six or a four-week intervention versus a six week six-week intervention or even a two-week intervention versus a six-week intervention like those types of things are still kind of all unknown it meets the reason six weeks is pretty long but but it kind of meets the reasonability test right of you're doing it frequently enough i guess to get some sort of uh uh perceived exertion adaptation right or physiological adaptation and not so long that it becomes inconvenient or problematic exactly exactly so so more than one in less than a hundred days right because you did six weeks 42 days so somewhere between there is the right dose yes i think so okay is there anything else that uh that you think that athletes can start to chip away at or or do things to train for i mean we're looking at this in a from a binary almost like a binary perspective right you're either sleeping or you're completely withdrawing all the sleep per night and there's a little bit of a hybrid in the middle which is clinically referred to or in the in the research referred to as sleep restriction versus sleep deprivation do you think that there's

any room for that in terms of introducing an intervention that can that can that can be an advantage for an athlete that's going through something like this oh an intervention in between you mean something uh like sleeping for two hours a night instead of completely withdrawing all the sleep yeah uh something like uh um that banking sleep is it correct the word banking sleep well that would be that i was going to get into that next but yeah that would be the opposite where you're sleeping for more than the stereotypical eight hours per night in order to have that built up for a sleep deprivation rate but i'm talking about from a training intervention standpoint instead of using complete sleep deprivation for one night using sleep restriction where you're only sleeping for a couple of hours a night or three hours a night to induce the same effects that you're seeing from the sleep deprivation side do you think that there's room for that yeah yeah definitely we need to be careful though because uh uh for sure if you you uh if you just sleep restriction instead of sleep deprivation you may want to do it uh not once per week but like more uh more often during the week and we don't know if it's uh um if it works or not in terms of recovery right there's a bigger impact because you have to do it more

frequently is the counter yeah yeah because it's been uh seen that also like uh if you if you do sleep restriction for a few days in a row it's equivalent to uh not to sleep for one night for example so you need to be careful to quantify how many hours of sleep restriction uh for how long but of course it's something that uh it's interesting and can be investigated that so that's well i i didn't want to mention this but i'm going to go ahead since you open the door up i do think that from a pragmatic perspective total sleep deprivation using that as a as like a training tool is a it's a it's a less problematic way to go about it to go about it because if you're using sleep restriction as you mentioned typically you have to do a few days in a row and at that point it's like okay then what is that how much training are you taking off the table and it seems that and there's more literature as opposed to this case study that will back this up that one night of complete sleep or uh complete sleep restriction isn't really that big of a deal in the total context of training as long as you're not like maximizing your total training output that you're trying to do or you're trying to achieve the last one percent of performance that you can that you can maximally uptake and what

and what i mean by that is is yeah you wouldn't do that if you're going into the freaking olympics like nobody would tell you to stay up all night before an olympic 10 000 meter final so well the people take it like that whenever i mention these things but if you're normally training and you have a reasonable background and you're not trying to squeak out every last little bit of training load or training volume one night of complete street sleep restriction it's gonna suck it's not fun and it's not the best but it's not a like you don't need to like up end every corner of the earth to kind of cover up for that like people can tolerate it yeah i i totally agree and it's also being demonstrated and sometimes also there are studies in which they didn't find any um actually any decrease in performance either so uh for one just one night of sleep deprivation so yep that's my coaching rule of thumb one night and you gotta suck it up two nights and then we'll we'll make some course corrections after two nights or if it's one night and then the previous nights or whatever there's some sort of confounding factor then i'll adjust the training but one night total sleep deprivation or what you sleep like crap for whatever reason it's suck it up buttercup anything anything beyond that then then we'll make some course corrections yeah yeah and also yeah i'd like to stress the fact that uh since you mentioned it but uh we are uh proposing this uh type of training for people who are competing

uh uh also during nights you know during multi-days events of course i would never suggest this for a sprinter or for an 800 meter runner you know just to just to be clear we are doing this to to find a way to increase performance since in this type of athletes it's part of the context of the event right i think that's that's a very important point it's part of the context of the event it's if it's not part of the context of the event it's probably not ergogenic exactly yeah okay i'm gonna let you off the hook you've been a really good sport in dealing with the a lot of these theoretical questions i know how a lot of research scientists they don't like to they they like to deal with it with what they know and what they've studied and extrapolating outside of that becomes uh it's not in your it's it's not in your mo it's not in a lot of scientists mo so i appreciate you entertaining that piece this is a really fascinating piece of research and i think is these more of these multi-day events like tour de jean like the cocodona 250 and these other 200 mile races that we start that we're starting to see crop up around the world and in the us as they become more popular people are going to look at not only the sleep strategies that they need to deploy during the event but how to properly prepare for them because it is context of the event and it's research like this that we're just starting to like scratch the surface on right we're just starting to peel it back that i think is extremely interesting and might

change my perception of sleep deprivation training which i honestly don't deploy a lot as a as a coach for all the reasons that we mentioned uh during the podcast so i appreciate you entertaining a lot of the theoreticals here thank you no problem it was uh nice to talk to you before we go oh go ahead no no nice uh it was a nice chat i really enjoyed it me as well before before you go i'll have links to this uh these all these in the show notes but where can people find out a little bit more about you or in the research group that you work for and some of the work that you're doing yeah uh of course well i'm pretty active on twitter uh which is uh at chiara gattoni so my name and last name and uh also have a research gate profile in which i'm connected with my um um psycho biology uh fatigue lab with samarcora so you can find also all the other researchers who does research on that not only on sleep but also on mental fatigue caffeine and other things related to the neurons performance fascinating work that you and your group is doing and once again i appreciate you uh coming on the podcast thank you thank you jason all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to chiara for coming on the podcast today and also the work that you do and and a little bit sticking your neck out on this one single case study

there's going to be a lot of people out there that are going to look at this and say oh it's an n of one and you know we can't really learn it all all that from it and like i said during the intro if we take this within the context that it is presented we don't over exaggerate it we look at if there are some physiological underpinnings to the actual intervention which it looks like there actually are and then we evaluate it alongside the entire context of what an athlete needs to do from a training programming standpoint then we can come up with some reasonable conclusions and solutions for athletes to actually deploy in training so i had a lot of fun with this podcast i hope you guys did too if you liked it feel free to share this podcast with your friends and training partners that is how we get the word out from the onset of this podcast i have not taken on any sponsors or any sort of endorsers of any type that is my commitment to the audience to bring you the best content in a completely unadulterated fashion you can help that out by sharing this podcast with your friends i appreciate the heck out of each and every one of the listeners out there and as always we will see you out on the trails so