Sleep disturbances in athletes - Abstract

Few studies have been carried out in our country concerning sleep disturbance in high performance athletes. With this paper we begin research on sleep characteristics in our athletes. Sleep Explorer was applied to three groups of athletes: Foreign athletes who take sports as leisure and two groups of Cuban high-performance athletes. The variables frequency and disturbance level gave interesting results for the groups of Cubans and no Cubans, the highest values corresponding to the Cuban. Between both groups of Cubans, Handball and Tae Kwan Do, only frequency was significant and the highest values were those of the later group. Two important aspects are to be emphasized: they were on competition stage at the moment of application and although they report sleep disturbance, the expected competition result were no affected.