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The effect of sleep on motor skill learning in young badminton players aged 6–9 years

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Abstract

The objective of this study was to examine the effect of sleep on the acquisition of motor skills in young badminton players. Thirteen badminton players, aged 6–9 years (8.0 ± 0.3 years; mean ± SE), practiced the shuttle bouncing drill, and a skill none of the players had prior experience with. After practice sessions, shuttle bouncing performance was immediately tested and then retested 1 week later. We evaluated sleep parameters for 7 consecutive days using actigraphy. Using the median value of sleep efficiency, subjects were divided into two groups: good sleepers and poor sleepers. Good sleepers had shorter sleep latency (p < 0.05), longer wake after sleep onset (p < 0.001), longer total sleep time (p < 0.005), and higher sleep efficiency (p < 0.001) than the poor sleepers. Interestingly, improvement in shuttle bouncing performance was significantly greater in the good sleeper group than that in the poor sleeper group (p < 0.05). In addition, we found that changes in the shuttle bouncing performance positively correlated with sleep efficiency (β = 0.765, p < 0.01) and total sleep time (β = 0.588, p < 0.05) after adjusting for their badminton career. These data suggest that sleep may affect the acquisition of motor skills in young players.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Akazawa Nobuhiko, Dr. Song-Gyu Ra, and Dr. Hiroshi Kumagai for their help with data collection. The authors have no financial, consultant, institutional, or other relationships that might lead to bias or a conflict of interest.

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Correspondence to Seiji Maeda.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This study was approved by the Ethical Committee of the University of Tsukuba (No. 24–131).

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All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Choi, Y., Sadamune, R., Nakamura, Y. et al. The effect of sleep on motor skill learning in young badminton players aged 6–9 years. Sleep Biol. Rhythms 16, 141–147 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41105-017-0136-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41105-017-0136-4

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