If I could tell you that I had access an incredibly effective performance enhancer that couldn’t be picked up on any drug test and is completely and utterly free, I’m fairly sure you accuse me of lying.
What about if I then said that you had unlimited access to it too? You’d probably just shake your head and walk away. Well it’s all true. What is this wonder drug? Sleep. That’s what.
Sleep has been called the most potent natural performance enhancer known to humankind. With very good reason. Below we take a brief look at exactly how sleep and athletic performance are linked…
Sleep and training
Getting sufficient rest is vitally important for all of us, athlete or not. It plays a role in just about every single thing we do, The Sleep Advisor team discuss this in great detail. But it’s importance takes on new levels when you start putting your body under unusual amounts of physical strain — like training for a race for instance.
No amount of hours spent on the track or gym will make you into a top athlete if you are not sleeping well. Those hours pumping iron or pedaling furiously are actually doing your body harm, you are tearing muscle fiber down. it's only with sufficient down time that the body is able to repair and reinforce.
Any training regime that clocks up the hours spent in the gym or on the track, without making account for sufficient time to allow the body to repair itself, is doomed to end in failure.
So if you are looking for things to cut out of your schedule to make space for more training don’t you dare thing about cutting your sleep shorter. Dump the girlfriend, quit the day job or cancel your Netflix subscription. But don’t cut out on sleep. If anything you should be sleeping more.
Sleep and motor skill acquisition
When it comes to learning new skilled actions and behaviors such as those needed for athletic success, it has long been thought that practice is the only thing required for improvement. Studies now suggest this view to be too simplistic.
Research now suggests that the brain continues to learn even when the day’s practice session is over. In fact it’s during sleep that night that the brain consolidates any new techniques learnt during the day. Say for instance you’re working on a new tennis swing, it’s during your sleep than the brain replays the action over and over again.
So remember, it's no longer just ‘practice that makes perfect’ when it comes to mastering a new technique. It’s ‘practice, sleep, practice again, makes perfect’. Not quite as catchy I will give you that, but more accurate.
Sleep and performance
The gap between medal winners and also rans (or also-cycled), often involves little more than hundredths of seconds. Sleep has a huge impact on cognitive performance. The difference between winning a race and finishing dead last could be as little as an hour more (or less) in bed.
Don’t believe me? Ok. Just as a thought exercise, try and recall the last time you had a bad night’s sleep. Statistics suggest you won’t have to think too hard on this. Now consider for a moment what your reaction times were like. I bet it took you a good five minutes to even decide what breakfast cereal to have. Now imagine you’re on the starting line waiting for the gun to go off. Yikes!
The impact poor sleep has on reaction times has been compared to the impact alcohol has. And no athlete looking to perform at the highest level would dare turn up to race after a couple of pints. In terms of performance that’s exactly what they’re doing if they turn up after a bad night’s rest.
Sleep and injury
Excelling at your chosen sport is a lot to do with consistency, are you able to get out there week after week and perform at a high level? If the answer is no, it might not be because of a lack of talent but because your body simple can't cope.
Study after study has shown that one of the most reliable predictors of injury in athletes is how well they sleep. It’s quite simple, athletes who got eight or more hours a night have been shown to get injured far less than athletes who sleep less than eight hours.
There seems to be two main reasons for this. The first relates to what we discussed above, our body needs time to repair and prepare, sleep is this time. If we don’t get enough sleep or our sleep is broken then those repairs and preparations aren’t properly carried out. The result is injury.
Training without sufficient sleep is kind of like driving the car out of the garage before the mechanic has put the engine back together and bolted the wheels back on. You might get a little way down the road but it ain’t gonna be pretty!
The second reason for the upturn in injury amongst sleep-deprived athletes relates to cognitive performance. When we’re tired we’re low on energy and our reaction times are significantly impaired. To make up for these shortfalls we overcompensate. We stretch further than we should. Tackle harder than we need to. This overexertion leads to poor technique. Both of which can lead to injury.
If you’re an athlete and you’re trying to work out why you keep getting injured or why your times simply aren't improving as you’d hoped — maybe it’s not your training or your diet that needs altering — but your bedtime. Sweet dreams!
Do you get cravings at night? Are they often for alcohol, or for sugar? Do you have trouble getting to sleep without at least one of them? This post covers a simple plan for handling night cravings.
Foods change brain chemistry (and more, but let’s stick with brain chemistry for now).
Both alcohol and sugar can change brain chem in a big way — and in almost the same way.
Serotonin is a brain chemical that makes us feel relaxed. It can reduce rotten moods (dysphoria) from depression, SAD (seasonal affective disorder), PMS, anxiety, and more.
At night, we tend naturally to want to increase our serotonin so we can relax.
Serotonin is also the precursor of melatonin, sometimes called the sleep hormone. (Melatonin is important for many reasons, including its anti-inflammatory benefits, but that’s a separate topic.)
Bottom line, serotonin can help us wind down and get to sleep. It seems logical that, before bed, we’d want something serotonin-boosting to help us do that.
Alcohol and sugar are frequent options.
Will Alcohol Put You To Sleep?
Alcohol can help you fall asleep. In fact, you might even have started using alcohol as a late-night relaxant because it put you to sleep a few times before. The brain remembers that and will prompt a craving for something that worked in the past when it wants to fall asleep. (It’s about brain chem, but let’s keep things simple.)
But if it’s good sleep you’re after, alcohol isn’t the best choice. It will change the quality of your sleep — and not for the better.
Until your body has processed the alcohol completely, you’ll stay in lighter sleep stages. The full sleep cycle includes light and deep stages. Deeper sleep (theta and delta waves) is the most restorative, so sleep brought on by alcohol might leave you feeling less refreshed than more natural sleep.
Is Sugar Any Better For Sleep?
Late-night cravings for sugar might be prompted for a similar reason to alcohol cravings. Maybe eating something sugary helped you get to sleep on several occasions, so the brain sends signals asking for that same sleep “cure.”
Sugar and alcohol can wake us after a few hours and make it difficult to get back to sleep. This has more to do with low glucose levels than with brain chemistry, but the impact on your night’s sleep can be severe. In both cases, the effect in the morning may be dramatic and unpleasant.
It’s easy to be casual about sugar consumption, thinking sugar’s “just” food. Actually, it’s a drug with strong effects on brain chemistry and more.
Don’t underestimate the impact of sugar on your morning-after. One of my clients said that, after eating a lot of sugar at night, she used to wake up feeling “like I’ve been run over by a truck.” Another client described it as a “sugar hangover.” Both are accurate!
Mixed drinks include alcohol and a mixer that typically contains sugar, so you’re likely to get all of the above effects — less restful sleep, middle-of-the-night awakenings, and AM hangovers. If so, you may need a better alternative.
What Works Better Than Alcohol or Sugar?
Please keep in mind that the end game is to increase serotonin. Starches will do that, and usually without side effects.
Starches are the foods that most people call “carbs” — even though plenty of other foods are carbs, too. (Vegetables, fruits, and roots, for example, are carbs. Yes.)
Starches include lentils, quinoa, sweet potatoes, rice, potatoes, pumpkin and other squash, beans, bread, and more. And it doesn’t take a lot to trigger sleep.
A small serving of one of the above starches will help you get to sleep. Just eat it about 60 to 90 minutes before your desired bedtime and let it work for you.
If you feel you need a slightly bigger serotonin boost, try adding a bit of saturated fat to the starch, such as coconut oil or butter. The combination will increase your insulin release and your serotonin production.
If you try this a couple of times and find that it doesn’t work, haul out the big guns. Have a little turkey with one of the combinations above, making a powerful sleep-inducing trifecta.
Keep your portions small to avoid feeling stuffed or ill as you lie in bed. The goal is just to change brain chem, not to eat an extra meal.
Much more can be said about cravings, and will be in a future post.
Sleep difficulties can take several different forms. Let’s look at one.
If you have trouble falling asleep at night, one easy solution is to eat a small portion of carbohydrate, preferably starch, about an hour or so before bed. Starch examples include quinoa, potato, rice, sweet potato, pumpkin, oats, even pasta.
What Starches Do[wlm_private ‘PRO-Platinum|PRO-Monthly|PRO-Gratis|PRO-Seasonal|Platinum-trial|Monthly-trial|PRO-Military|30-Days-of-PRO|90 Day PRO|Stages-Instructor|Schwinn-Instructor|Instructor-Bonus|28 Day Challenge']
Starches stimulate insulin, and insulin allows a specific amino acid (tryptophan) to reach the brain. When tryptophan reaches the brain, it’s used to make serotonin.
Serotonin relaxes us and allows us to fall asleep. It’s also converted to melatonin, the sleep hormone. Melatonin has the additional benefit of anti-inflammatory action, which is one reason sleep is so good for us.
When Starch Doesn’t Work, Add Turkey
If you try starch and still can’t fall asleep, another suggestion is to start your pre-bed food ritual with a little bit of turkey, which contains a relatively high amount of tryptophan. Eating carb together with turkey will have the same effect that you may have experienced after a Thanksgiving dinner — feeling sleepy after the meal.
Although turkey is usually blamed for that sleepiness, the tryptophan wouldn’t reach the brain readily if we didn’t eat carbs with it. Several larger and more abundant amino acids compete with tryptophan for brain entry. In effect, they block tryptophan and prevent it from reaching the brain.
Those competing amino acids are used to form dopamine and norepinephrine, which make us alert.
How Carbs Help
When carbs trigger insulin release, the insulin transports amino acids throughout the body. They can then be used for the various functions that aminos are used for: formation of antibodies, hormones, receptor sites, enzymes, and more.
At that point, tryptophan — smaller in size and less plentiful — can reach the brain. It can then be converted to serotonin.
Why Starches? Why Not Sugar?
Some people tend to crave sugar before bed, but eating it can backfire for a couple of reasons.
Sugar triggers the release of endorphins and dopamine. As mentioned above, dopamine is a brain alertness chemical, so it could wake us up, rather than allowing us to fall asleep. Some people are more sensitive to the dopamine effect of sugar and might find themselves “wired” after eating sugar.
Starches, in contrast, tend to produce relaxation without that wired feeling.
Another Problem With Sugar
Another way sugar can backfire has to do with glucose. This could wake us up in the middle of the night.
Sugar tends to trigger high insulin secretion. That effect is much more pronounced in some people than in others. (Those people are called “carbohydrate sensitive”, but don’t be confused by the name. We’re still talking about sugar before bed, rather than starch.)
In someone who is sensitive to sugar in this way, the extra insulin might cause glucose levels to drop very low. It might seem as if the low glucose would make someone so tired that they’d stay asleep all night and even having trouble waking in the morning.
Instead, the drop in glucose tends to cause us to wake up in the middle of the night and have difficulty going back asleep, even if we feel tired.
So starch again seems to be a better solution.
Bottom line
Eat protein throughout the day, and eat less protein with your dinner. Eat a small portion of starch about an hour or so before bedtime. Add turkey if it doesn’t work. Avoid late-night sugar.[/wlm_private]
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Note from John: Last Thursday a participant asked me; “John, where do you find all of these helpful tidbits about eating? I'm a sugar addict like you (I share my own personal struggles with my class) and appreciate your helpful reminders.” I responded by telling her that Dr. Joan Kent, our resident nutritionist at my website ICI/PRO, publishes these weekly. I simply copy down a few notes or print the article and share the info during recoveries.
Ask my family, of the three components of fitness (Training – Nutrition – Rest) which is most important to me and without hesitation they will say Rest! Or in my case Sleep! I'm habitual in my sleep habits because a good night's sleep is paramount to my effectiveness the following day.
So when I heard that today is Sleep Apnea Day here in the USA, I though I should do my part to help inform you so that you can in turn inform your students.
Sleep apnea’s most frequent form is obstructive sleep apnea when the sleeper’s tongue and soft palate fall back against the back of the throat closing off the airway so firmly that the sleeper doesn’t fully inhale in repeated episodes that last 10 seconds or longer. In severe sleep apnea patients, the episodes can recur hundreds of time during the night, giving rise to serious impairment due to repeated oxygen deficiency.
My brother Dan has Sleep Apnea and for a long time he slept wearing the CPAP device shown in the video. Clumsy but a life saver for him and his wife 🙂
This tip maybe of value to some of your students, or maybe you…
I've never heard myself snore, but Amy, the Senior Group Fitness Instructor in our family has. I don't have Sleep Apnea but my snoring has had me evicted from my bed. We didn't realize it at the time, but my snoring was much worse in the winter = very dry air. Amy and I were on one of our working fitness vacations in Jamaica, when she commented that I don't snore there in the moist warm air. So we bought an inexpensive humidifier that now sits next to my side of the bed. As long as I remember to refill it with water, Amy has a quiet, restful night!
