Everything else in these notes is something a player does. This one is something they stop doing, which is why it gets ignored — and it may be the largest single lever a young athlete has.

Training doesn’t make anyone better. Training plus recovery does: the session is the stimulus, the adaptation happens afterwards, and a lot of it happens asleep. Tissue repair runs on the deep stages of the night. So does motor consolidation — the skill practised in the afternoon gets filed and stabilised overnight, which is part of why a movement often feels cleaner the next morning than it did at the end of the session that taught it.

The evidence in adolescent athletes points consistently in one direction. Studies of teenage sports players associate short sleep with higher injury rates; sleep extension studies in athletes report improvements in sprint times, accuracy, reaction time and mood. These are association-heavy findings on relatively small groups rather than a single decisive trial, so the sensible reading is directional: more sleep looks protective and performance-positive, and no study has ever found a young athlete who needed less.

Then the part that gets misread as laziness. Adolescence physically shifts the body clock later. The hormonal signal for sleep arrives later in a teenager than in a younger child, so a 14-year-old genuinely cannot fall asleep at the hour that worked when they were 10 — and school still starts at the same time. This is a structural squeeze, not a character flaw, and treating it as one turns a biology problem into an argument.

What helps, in the order that it matters:

  • Consistency beats any single night. Similar sleep and wake times across the week — including weekends — do more than one heroic early night after a bad run.
  • A wind-down the body learns to expect. The point of evening yoga is less the stretching than the signal: dim light, floor, breathing, same order, every night. Repeated often enough, the routine itself becomes the cue for sleep.
  • The last hour is the one that counts. Screens hurt mostly by keeping a brain engaged and a bedtime moving, more than by their light.

The honest part: sleep advice is easy to write and hard to live, and a 6am training slot makes it harder still. If the schedule and the sleep genuinely can’t both fit, the schedule is what should give — and morning lag is one of the signals worth reading before an injury reads it for you. A kid who used to wake before the alarm and now has to be dragged out of bed is telling you something about the plan, not about their character.

It’s the cheapest intervention in youth sport, it needs no equipment or subscription, and nobody has ever posted about doing it well.