Delegate: Cara Thibault
Affiliations: Centre for Sleep and Human Performance, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Short Bio: Cara Thibault is the Director, Athlete Program Services for the Centre for Sleep and Human Performance. Cara joined CSHP after working for many years in the Canadian high performance community, most recently Speed Skating Canada where she was the High Performance Director for the Long Track Program, leading the team through the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang.
Prior to working with Speed Skating Canada, Cara spent four years at Own the Podium as Manager, Sport Science, Medicine and Innovation where she worked alongside a variety of leading sport professionals worldwide, one being Dr. Charles Samuels who has over 15 years experience working with elite athletes. Gathering knowledge from Dr. Samuels and witnessing the positive effect of health and wellness interventions for athletes in the performance environment, instilled in her the belief that sleep may have a significant impact on an individual’s human potential, and by screening athletes we could identify sleep disturbances that otherwise may have gone undetected. Cara believes in the importance of recovery and regeneration in the performance environment and alongside Dr. Samuels and the entire team at CSHP, brings a strong commitment to athletes, coaches and teams to deliver education, screening tools, and research based strategies to establish healthy sleep hygiene for athletes throughout their career, and for a lifetime.
Activity: Evaluating baseline sleep of the athletes is critical to predicting the overall efficacy and effectiveness of the recovery strategies for the athletes, tolerance of high frequency travel schedules, and the need to address baseline sleep disorders that could currently be affecting recovery and performance but have gone undetected. We will communicate via social media and email the opportunity to complete a comprehensive athlete sleep screening questionnaire (ASSQ) for any interested athletes and/or teams worldwide. This tool is designed to capture individual athlete sleep behaviors, identify athletes with abnormal sleep and primary sleep disorders and determine the frequency with which athletes have difficulty with sleep when traveling. The ASSQ screening system when done with an entire program or team stratifies athletes into those who require basic sleep education, assessment with the sport medicine physician and those who require a sleep medicine consultation and investigations.
Location: Calgary, Canada
Date of Activity: March 2019
Submitted By: Cara Thibault