Abstract Introduction Insufficient sleep is common in elite adolescent athletes, who must balance high training volumes with demanding school schedules. Yet how this cumulative schedule affects sleep throughout the different phases of an athletic schedule remains unclear. Our objective was to monitor athletes over an extended period, classify training and school demands, and examine their impact on sleep across the different phases. Methods Twenty-nine adolescent rugby players (16.4 ± 0.7 years) from a high-performance center were monitored continuously for 2.5 months. Data collection covered four real-life phases of the athletic schedule: post-holiday return to school/training, regular school/training schedule, training camp, and holidays. Sleep was assessed daily using actigraphy. School and training timetables were quantified by categorizing all activities into 30-min time slots between 08:00 and 22:00, as rest, on-field (training, matches) or off-field (school, meetings). Results School days showed the highest activity load (380.8 ± 103.6 min), combining large off-field time (279.5 ± 104.2 min) and training time (101.3 ± 75.6 min). They also started earliest (08:29 ± 01:12) and finished latest (17:48 ± 02:15), leaving the least room for sleep, with a total sleep time (TST) of only 7h02 ± 01h03. The longest sleep was observed on the night before competition (Friday–Saturday): bedtime shifted slightly later (00:01 vs 23:31), but wake time shifted dramatically (09:26 vs 07:13), resulting in 8h37 (± 01h12) of sleep. Even without next-day constraints, rest nights (Saturday / Holidays) TST only reached 8h14 (± 01h12) and 8h07 (± 01h13). Wake times were later (09:50 and 10:10), but bedtimes were also delayed (00:47 and 01:16), limiting recovery. Conclusion Elite adolescent athletes consistently slept below the recommended 8–10 hours during the week, when dense schedules left little room for sleep. Surprisingly, rest days did not produce a meaningful increase, with sleep barely exceeding 8 hours. In practice, when next-day constraints disappear, athletes simply delay bedtime, limiting the benefit that weekends could provide. This suggests that insufficient sleep is not only driven by high athletic and academic demands, but also by behaviour. One likely contributor is the growing use of screens in the evening, which may partly account for the delayed bedtime. Support (if any)
Crosbie et al. (Fri,) studied this question.