Sleep and Fitness
Many of us know we need to work on improving our sleep, but it can be difficult to figure out where to start. If you struggle with sleep, you know you can’t just decide to start sleeping better one day. It takes more than just setting aside the time. It’s a process that requires both a major focus on behavioral change and fostering an environment that makes it possible to get your best sleep.
In this blog, I discuss what poor sleep does to our health and exercise performance, review strategies for mitigating the effects of a bad night’s sleep, and conclude with some sustainable, longer term solutions that you can start implementing today. Some of them will be new, others will feel like advice you’ve read 100 times. As you read through, be honest with yourself. Do you actually do all these things, or just know you should be doing them?
Negative effects of insufficient sleep
Here are four major ways that sleep affects progress towards health and fitness goals.
Performance
Studies show that lack of sleep has a particularly adverse effect on our ability to execute the more technical movements in our training. Technical movements are movements that require the coordinated recruitment of multiple muscle groups at once.
Lack of sleep also negatively affects our ability to produce explosive power (think olympic lifts, box jumps, wall balls, kettlebell swings, etc). On the bright side, our brute strength (the ability to lift or move a set amount) is not as affected by a night or two of bad sleep.
Recovery
When we arent sleeping enough, we don’t recover from workouts as efficiently. We don’t eat as well, we don’t train as well, and we don’t spend as much time in the part of our sleep cycle where our body physically recovers. During non-REM sleep, our bodies repair muscle through muscle protein synthesis and the release of human growth hormone.
Long term, poor recovery means we don’t get as much value out of our workouts as we could, and we have a harder time staying consistent with our training programs.
Body composition
We have more trouble building and maintaining fat free mass (muscle) when in a sleep deficit. We just aren’t as good at doing our workouts when we’re tired, so we get less work in. Sleep deprivation also impairs muscle protein synthesis, which is essentially how our bodies use the fuel we give them to repair and rebuild muscle post workout (see above).
Lastly, lack of sleep affects our total daily energy expenditure outside of structured exercise - when we’re tired we just tend to move a bit less, have a lower body temperature (which is associated with lower metabolic rate), and less control over food cravings (which leads me to the next point).
Appetite and food cravings
You might have noticed that lack of sleep has a pretty noticeable effect on your appetite and cravings. Both experience and studies show a tendency towards increased cravings for foods lower in nutrient density, increased alcohol consumption, and overall increased food intake with being awake for more hours in the day.
Short term solutions
There are a number of solid strategies you can employ to mitigate the effects of a night or two of bad sleep. These are essentially bandaid solutions, they should not be relied on long term but can help you get through the day.
Caffeine
Caffeine is an ergogenic aid (a substance that enhances training performance). It really helps with energy output and mental focus during workouts. Unfortunately, it remains in your system for up to 10-12 hours - sometimes even longer. This means it can disrupt the following nights sleep. This can turn into a vicious cycle - you lean on caffeine to get through your day which leads to yet another bad night’s sleep.
I will go over recommendations for caffeine in relation to sleep in more detail in the following section where I discuss long term solutions.
Napping
Napping, especially napping for 30 minutes or longer, can help offset the effects of sleep deprivation. However, napping for too long or too close to bedtime can disrupt our circadian rhythm. This can make it hard to get to sleep and to stay asleep the following night.
Training program modifications
As I discussed before, sleep deprivation has a particularly significant negative effect on highly complex movements. You might try modifying your program to focus on simple yet effective movements. This might look like using more machines at the gym than usual, eliminating explosive movements, and generally sticking to movements that require a bit less thinking, but still help you to continue building strength!
Unlike caffeine and napping, modifying your training program will not result in sleep disruption for nights to come.
Long term solutions
Treat this list as a checklist. Some strategies might sound familiar, others might be new. When you see something familiar, be honest with yourself - do you actually do it? Some things are easier said than done! Go through them all, then choose 1-2 you want to focus on this month. Once those feel second nature, come back to this list and choose another.
Get in bed on time
This is first for a reason. The most fundamental habit when it comes to sleep is actually getting in bed early enough to give yourself the chance.
We should try to get so much sleep that an alarm becomes unnecessary. That might sound dramatic, but it’s more possible than you’d think. You’ll be surprised what a regular bedtime and good sleep hygiene can do! You can still set an alarm, but after some time you may find yourself not needing it.
Limit alcohol consumption
While it might feel like a drink helps you get to sleep, alcohol actually disrupts the second half of our sleep schedule most. This is when we get the majority of that core sleep where our body repairs muscle tissue.
If you plan to drink, earlier in the day is better. The more work your body has done to metabolise that alcohol before sleep, the better!
I’ve written a number of posts on alcohol and fitness if you’re curious to learn more.
Alcohol and fitness on the blog
Hangovers and next day workout performance on Instagram
Simple tips for smarter alcohol consumption on Instagram
How we metabolize alcohol on Instagram
Limit caffeine intake
Caffeine stays in the system for a long time - studies show that the half life of caffeine (the time it takes to eliminate 50% of the caffeine concentration in ones blood) is at least 2-3 hours. This means we should aim to stop drinking caffeine at least 5-6 hours before bed. For some, this might be closer to 8-12 hours. This all depends on how you metabolize caffeine, so it may require some trial and error. If you currently stop drinking coffee around 3pm and arent sleeping well, you may want to try stopping earlier - say 12pm.
If you’re interested in learning more, I have an old blog post on caffeine and fitness.
Improve your circadian rhythm
Circadian rhythm is a natural internal process that regulates the sleep wake cycle. It repeats itself approximately every 24 hours (the word comes from latin “circa", or approximate and “dies”, or day). There are a lot of factors that affect our internal rhythm, so this one comes with a mini checklist within the checklist:
Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time - even on the weekends!
Use blackout curtains or a sleep mask to make your room as dark as possible.
Expose yourself to sunlight as soon as possible in the morning. If this is not possible due to your work schedule or the time or year, try investing in some happy lamps.
Think of your bedroom as a place for very select activities. The bed is not a place for work!
Avoid stressful activities and conversations before bed
Avoid anything physically or emotionally taxing for a couple hours leading up to bed when possible. Engaging in emotional conversations or strenuous physical activity can make it difficult to get to sleep on time. This might look like:
Scheduling training sessions earlier in the day.
Avoiding late night arguments and confrontation when possible.
Being selective about the books you read or shows you watch in the evening.
Avoiding intellectually challenging work leading up to bed.
Be more intentional with meal timing
Our sleep wake cycle is just one of many internal circadian clocks. While we can think of this as the main internal clock, we have a lot of peripheral ones that affect the sleep-wake cycle. One of these is our digestive system’s clock - the demands we put on our digestive system close to bedtime affect sleep quality.
Overall, food timing is the one of the last things on this list you should worry about. Focus on caffeine, alcohol, sleep envrionment, and stress first. Even after that, make sure you have a healthy diet overall.. That said, if you’ve tried it all you may want to consider the following adjustments:
Avoid large, rich, fatty meals for a couple of hours leading up to bed.
Try to eat more of your food during the first half of the day
Try to maintain a relatively consistent eating schedule, even on the weekend. Erratic eating schedules can lead to a sort of metabolic jetlag that affects our internal digestive clocks in subsequent days.
On snacking
New studies also suggest that late night snacking has a small, but significant, slowing effect on metabolism and that a more consistent eating schedule tends to have a favorable effect on regulating energy levels, speeding up metabolism, and improving sleep.
Participants who snacked often and late at night were observed to have a lower body temperature throughout the day (warmer body temperature suggests a faster metabolism), lower total calorie expenditure, and disruption in appetite regulating hormones.
Sleep enhancing supplements
Sleep supplements are another thing that you might want to consider if you’re trying to cover every base. While they’re less fundamental than the other sleep hygiene principles I’ve discussed, they aren’t bandaid solutions either. There really are some well studied supplements out there that can help enhance sleep!
These three supplements can help your body to produce sleep hormones and improve sleep quality.
Melatonin
Melatonin is the actual hormone that helps you to get to sleep and stay asleep. Look for the lowest dose you can, if you take a super high dose your body may have trouble clearning it out of your system before the next morning leading to sleepiness and difficulty waking up. This can result in a cycle that’s sort of the inverse of what we see with caffeine - exaggerated drowsiness throughout the day can lead to difficulty sleeping the next night. As a result we might continue to rely heavily on melatonin for sleep.
Tart cherry juice + tryptophan
Tart cherry juice can help enhance bioavailability of tryptophan. The means that your body can more easily make use of the tryptophan you already ingest. In turn, that tryptophan will help your body to produce more melatonin. Tryptophan supplementation itself has a similar effect, but cherry juice will allow you to put the tryptophan you’ve already ingested through real food sources to use!
Magnesium Glycinate
Magnesium and glycine have both been shown to enhance sleep quality. If you’re concerned with sleep quality, opt for magnesium glycinate over other forms of magnesium.