Dagsmejan, the leading luxurious technical sleepwear brand, is now the official sleepwear partner for the Swiss National Ice Hockey Team right in time for the Ice Hockey World Championship.
What might seem like an odd partnership is actually a genius combination. According to Anna West, founder of Sleep2perform and a top sleep expert for athletic performance, about 50% of elite athletes are estimated to sleep poorly, with 28% reporting a significant prevalence of daytime sleepiness.
As a former ice hockey professional, the current coach of the Swiss national ice hockey team, Patrick Fischer, knows first-hand the special recovery challenges of this sport: late evening games under floodlights, high adrenaline levels, frequent travel and return to (hotel) room often after midnight.
These special challenges are even more prevalent in a world championship tournament, where a new game is scheduled every day or every other day and any negligence can be punished by elimination of the tournament.
For the world championship tournament, Fischer’s coaching staff has therefore broken new ground: by involving a sleep and recovery coach, who educates and supports the players to develop individual sleep strategies. As part of this program, functional Sleepwear sets from Dagsmejan are made available to each player.
“In the final phase of a world championship tournament, the best team is the one that recovered best. A good quality of sleep is one of the key elements in every player’s recovery system, and every detail counts. That’s why we are working with the innovative textile company Dagsmejan from Zurich, which produces a new type of functional sleepwear that is optimally adapted to our physiological sleep needs. This enables my players to have the best rest they can get and therefore to deliver the best performance when it matters,”
Patrick Fischer, Head Coach of Swiss National Ice Hockey Team
In addition to mental routines, cold stimuli such as cryo-therapy and a protein-rich diet, good sleep is one of the key factors for our recovery – only if we sleep well and sufficiently growth hormones will be released to carry out necessary repairs in our muscles during the night.
“Good sleep is essential to achieve training progress and to be able to deliver peak performance over a longer period of time,” said West. And especially in a motorically, athletically and tactically demanding sport like ice hockey, good sleep is crucial to anchor routines, ensure optimal recovery and to prevent injuries.
Dagsmejan functional sleepwear is the result of an interdisciplinary research project involving materials scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA), textile ergonomists from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and sleep experts from Stockholm University.
This interdisciplinary project has resulted in a new type of sleepwear that optimally supports the physiological requirements of the sleeping body. “As a young, innovative textile company with roots in Switzerland, we are very honoured to be able to support the Swiss national team with our functional sleepwear products during the world championship,” says Andreas Lenzhofer, co-founder and managing director of Dagsmejan.
Learn more about how Dagsmejan’s Recovery Collection is scientifically proven to help athletes recover faster on dagsmejan.com. The Recovery Collection is available in men and women’s styles and retails for $99 per item.