The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport play and life. Welcome to perform. Hello everyone. I'm dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor of Kinesiology and the center for sport performance at Cal State Fullerton and
Today's Show. We're going to be talking about sleep performance. Now, I like the term sleep performance to really indicate the difference between going from good sleep to great sleep.
And so what I don't want to spend much time on today is talking about things like
Like complete sleep deprivation. So what happens to physical performance when you go 24 hours or 48 straight hours without sleep. I don't really want to talk about what I'll call the extreme sleep restriction. So sleeping for two hours a night, you know four hours a night things like
that or even a single bad night of sleep.
What I really want to spend most of our time here talking about is
what really happens does anything happen
when I go from
six or seven hours
of sleep to eight or nine
how much of a competitive Advantage am I getting?
Other high
performers when I can go from that good to great sleep. We're also going to talk about why you should be approaching your sleep with the same Vigor and specificity
as you're doing your nutrition or your exercise
training. I mean kind of think about it this way if you were trying to perform your absolute highest and you had
the resources or if you simply look at the model for those individuals, who do
you would see that they have dedicated Professionals
for high performance nutrition. You probably have done or would do rather.
Some sort of extensive
blood work or testing so that you can get the best nutrition supplementation for your unique body. We would take a similar approach right
some sort of advanced testing perhaps and an individualized program that has been modified and adapted as our goals are changing as our body is responding as we move throughout our life
now in the sport performance will be
kind of called this periodization. So this is a phrase where we have different volumes or intensities or exercises and goals based upon different phases of the Year. Trying to get to a specific.
If I Cal come we wouldn't necessarily eat the same thing every day of our training
wasn't the same. We would adjust our food intake our calories. We would have more volume in our workouts. We have less volume. We would have more days off less recovery and
everything else that goes into this. So you see what I'm getting at here, right? This is idea that what we eat and how we train our
highly responsive and adaptive to both our unique physiology
as well as what we're
expecting out of our body. Why do we not have the same approach with sleep?
Well, the answer is we can
and in fact, I'll try to convince you hear that. We should
we should be taking the same level of specificity and precision with our sleep our plan and protocols should be adapting and changing based on how our body is responding. And
what are asking our body to do now
as you can probably tell I'm so fired up about this. I'm doing my best to mentally go slow here. So I don't trip over my own words. I'm completely obsessed with this topic and I've been on it for a while now and that's because the data are so robust and impressive about what
Ben's when you optimize sleep performance. So again, I'm not really talking about the consequences of bad sleep on your long-term
health or things like that.
It's the opposite it is how much of an advantage you can create in your performance when you sleep better
one quick example here because it's something we're dealing with right now with the handful of our NFL athletes and that
is the ability to Aid in injury recovery post surgery as well as even return to play for concussion and
and other physical problems when we're maximizing sleep, but then there's also the direct performance benefit pick your metric here, whether you want to look at surrogates and physical attributes things like
endurance coordination speed physical strength Etc. You want to look at on field play. So basketball shooting accuracy tennis serving accuracy or other markers of again performance directly on the
field, but then probably the one we use the most often is it directly translates into more wins and these
There are very well-rounded from a number
of areas the NFL the NBA the NHL the Olympics PGA Tour, etc. Etc. There is clear and impressive evidence that those who
maximize their sleep win more
games. Now. I know what you're probably thinking. That's great Andy, I'm sold on bought in. I want those benefits, but it's just not feasible for me to sleep more any number of reasons whether you're an athlete or
not, that could be legit. And so I want to make it Ultra clear here. I'm not
only talking about the need to justify.
Extend sleep and sleep more hours,
but how you can mimic the
benefits of sleep extension for these performance enhancement for these injury mitigation and return to play benefits without just extending the hours you sleep. Let
me give you a couple of examples here what you may or may not
realize is depending on the study. You pull somewhere between 20 to 40 percent of athletes have clinical sleep
disorders and so by simply treating those things with any number
of simple and specific Solutions. You
can create such improvements in Sleep Quality.
That you're effectively extending sleep
an easy example here for a major league baseball player. I worked with for a very long
time. We had no reason to think he had a sleep disorder slept pretty well, but not great kind of the same thing. You'll hear most
people say I think I sleep pretty well. I'm not having huge issues. But I also don't feel incredible either and so we are actually two good full appropriate diagnostic of him found. He was actually having a large number of sleep issues at
night, but the solution is the fun
part here we were able to actually
Buy him, a very cheap pillow if you will kind of looks like a fanny pack that you wear in reverse and that kept him from sleeping on his back
that reduced the amount of times he woke
up throughout the night by about 80% in the very first night and it stayed that way ever since.
So again, just another example of the power of precision and treating your sleep the same way you would treat your training and nutrition allowed us to create an incredibly powerful sleep extension solution with very minimal effort and it didn't require
us to
Changes daily
schedule ask him to get the bed much earlier or any other things that are sometimes not realistic
for your personal situation.
So for those reasons and many many more I'm super pumped to be talking about sleep performance today now in doing that we're going to cover a lot of the
research about systematic reviews and meta-analyses as well as direct studies on this. I've also talked to a number of
professional experts in this field. And so I'm going to be bringing you a combination of what the research
says what these are
experts in the field say what I've used in the athletes. I've worked with and my personal experience
and we're going to bring all that together in a cohesive system to help you do what we always
do here and that is address the three eyes. So we'll start off by investigate. So, how do you investigate? How do you measure and diagnose and manage your sleeve the second I being of course, how do you interpret that? How do I know if that's good? Great. Okay sufficient good enough for ETC
and then three, how do I intervene? So what do I do about it? What are
Protocols and approaches and solutions we can take to solve any of these individual problems
as always throughout that I'll try to
cover the landscape. So we'll talk about
cheap solutions free Solutions.
What can we do if I manage a team of people if it's for me personally rather than people I'm coaching
all the way up to one of the best in the world doing what are things that are
maybe within your financial reach or not. But what is the gold standard in all these things
while I'm going to be spending most of my time talking about the research?
Search
directly on high-performing
athletes. I do want to remind you that it's not necessarily our core interest here that you play sports coach
Sports participate are ever want to be involved in sports.
It's just that to me represents a great surrogate for people that are trying to
maximize their total Human Performance. Whether this is your physical performance cognitive performance mental performance or otherwise
and so understanding this gold
standard of
high-performance allows us to use some of the same skills and tools and
Tactics
for folks that are
also trying to ask the same out of their individual body, but perhaps not applying it to sport. So whether this is things like Physicians night
nurses military folks
judges anyone else who's really trying to ask your body to perform at the highest level possible.
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Now before we get started, I need to clarify a few things as always is the case in
science. We need to make sure that were understanding the same words were operationally defining terms. So there's no confusion. And so the first one I want to talk about really here is the difference between sleep deprivation.
An extreme sleep restriction I've mentioned that a second ago, but just really wanted to double down and clarify that
I'm not really going to be talking about research the benefits what happens to Performance when you go
through things like complete sleep deprivation. There's actually a lot of research on that a lot from the military when you take people and you have them go 24-48 hours of sleep and then you return there's tons of evidence on
what happens to Performance in a
lot of areas. But again, I'm really not going to pay attention to any of that stuff because that's not what I'm getting at and I'm also
so not talking about short-term studies that use extreme sleep restrictions. So this is maybe two three or four hours of sleep per night for the course of 3 to 14 days.
Those are important things to
do and they have a lot of applications for a lot of individuals.
But really I'm keeping most of we're going to
talk about exclusive to the evidence behind again,
what happens to this sub
optimal sleep this is defined typically as folks that are trying to sleep normally, but maybe only sleeping between six to maybe
Seven and a half hours versus those that are getting seven seven a half up to eight or nine. Okay, so
it would take us a long time to get
through that other research and it is but sometimes it over appreciate Sorkin conflate the benefits or Consequences of bad sleep in those special situation. So just want to make sure you're clear when we hearing the numbers and the evidence behind one time and talk about later. It's not coming from studies using those types of examples. And so what we're really talking about here.
Is
chronic suboptimal sleep and there's three areas first one being duration. So we're talking about is how much time you sleep second one being quality and as you'll see later that is extraordinarily difficult to get our heads around there's no Universal definition in there. And so we've got to have some extensive conversation about what to do about that and we absolutely will and then the third is timing and so there's a lot that goes into timing of the day circadian rhythms Corner types and stuff like that. And so that's what we're going to spend most of our time.
And our conversation today
if you really want I've got a
handful of systematic reviews in a number of areas that I think are super effective all coming in the last couple of years. I've spoken with a number of sleep professionals. These are phds MDS as well as on the grounds practitioners of sleep and professional sports coming from the NFL the NBA the military Special Forces specifically those dealing with the astronauts Etc and they all have given me confidence that these
Handful of articles are very good. So I feel strong in them. I've read them extensively. Those will all be in the show
notes
available. But just want to read the title off of some of those right now
first one is sleep and the athlete
a narrative review and 2021 expert consensus recommendation. This is got a large number of authors on this if you're unfamiliar with a consensus statement means it generally refers to a number, you know, typically 5 to 25 or more scientists and a given area come together.
And say what are the things we all agree upon? And so they tend to be very strong in confidence because you know so many authors from different institutions worked on this. So this paper I know came from the awal shoes well respected and extensively published scientist in the area as well as a me Bender whom I spoke to directly about this and so this is a great article to get you started on that. Another is sleep hygiene for optimizing recovery and athletes a review and
recommendations again from another strong
group of
Is our UC San Diego published in the last couple of years
and then the final one is managing travel fatigue and jet lag and athletes a
review and consensus statement from 2021. So
there are many many many many other papers there, but I chose those three specifically I thought they were
easy to read very useful and can get you started in a lot of the major areas.
And so that's being said, we need to recognize a couple of final things before we
dive into the details of this episode and that
is this
Field is honestly quite emergent
people have obviously been studying sleep for many many
decades, but it's almost exclusively from the perspective of disease and
overall health. In fact over 80% of the research on sleep and athletes has been published in the last decade alone.
We have other major limitations lot of it has come from
research on questionnaires. So using things like subjective analysis of your sleep
and they haven't necessarily always
been validated as quality in athletes, so
To challenge their research on female specifically is
exceptionally limited. And so
there is some initial indication that the requirements may be different for
females maybe not but we just really honestly don't have enough information there to make a firm conclusion. So something that needs to be increased in the
future and then lastly it is honestly challenging to controlled or blind people and sleep studies. You got to know pretty quickly. If you're in the sleep for
10 hours per night group or in the six hours per night group
and
So that is a limitation in a number of the studies were going to cover but that is always the
case in science. There's no Panacea. There's no perfect study. So it's always about evaluating the quality
that study other studies in the
field from other Laboratories and then making a consensus based on the information that you do have.
So all the evidence base here is more limited than we would like there is enough there for the authors of these papers as well as honestly myself to conclude a couple of things the first is that athletes need to be screened for
Sorters will talk about why that matters so much and how to get it done a little bit later. The second
is we have a huge
opportunity to create a competitive Advantage by developing more precise and effective sleep plans for our ethics.
Now this needs to be done based on people's unique physiology, but even more broadly than that can just be done from sport to Sport and think about it this way the reasons or the ways, we can enhance sleep in a football player
are probably
Different and those in a
swimmer because the challenges they face in their schedule and their body size in the demands energy expenditure are quite different. So giving them all the same Solutions. Well, hey, it's better than nothing. But that lacks the Precision we're looking for so in both those cases we could create more effective sleep extension by being more precise with what we're asking them to do and probably then have less roadblocks less problems with adherence and less overall complaints from the
It's with that you get more adherence you get more success
and we get more performance
benefits now, I would love to
tell you I'm the first and only one who's on to this secret area, but that's not the honest truth.
The researchers growing the emphasis of this individual sports and organizations is also growing fact, I get asked all the time and interviews. What do I think kind of the next big area of human
performances and sleep is often
my number one or two answers.
Sir,
it's extremely clear. There's a really
interesting paper that came out recently by dr. Allison breger called Sleep is of the muscle by the muscle and for them also, and in that she called Sleep the easiest and cheapest way to enhance at the health and performance
and I think Alison is dead
on there. If you look at what's happened the international Olympic Committee the NCAA have both came out with statements and the last couple of years putting sleep as fundamental to athlete health and putting a large emphasis on this.
We see a growing number of
Sleep performance specialist popping up around at least in the United States. So the University of Washington I know has recently had every one of their football players diagnosed for a sleep disorder. I've been in conversation with a number of professional sport teams who are either trying to build sleep
performance programs
hire Specialists and that area
and to really put the same emphasis on this
that they have their training and nutrition.
So while it's not there yet. It is clearly something that
behind the scenes is being worked on in.
Act I would even say that if you're not doing that you're going to get left behind pretty quickly because this is such a clear and obvious win
sleep affects nearly every physiological
process whether we're talking about performance enhancement or recovering from injury or concussion. It's
also really really bad. And so many people I've mentioned that depending on the
study you look at somewhere between 20 to 40 percent of athletes have sleep disorders.
And then as I've teased a couple of times the solutions to sleep have traditionally just been like hey, yeah, man.
That's great. But try to have my 19 year old NBA player sleep more. Good
luck. That's not where the field is anymore. The solute solutions that are available are way more
realistic and effective than that.
And so as we continue to see these people put a greater emphasis on sleep. I wanted to make sure that that wasn't just information hid behind the scenes to some of these high performers that
everyone had access to the same tools and tactics.
So as we start jumping in the details now, I want you to
remember I think about sleeping three major areas. The first is duration, so,
So hours or time amount you spent sleeping second is quality and third is timing.
So let's get started with duration now, I think what's most interesting here is the field of research called Sleep extension or sleep banking. This is the idea that you will
add on amount of time you're sleeping. So you're asking people to increase the amount of time. They are sleeping from anywhere between 30 to up the minutes to up to two hours. Now this always brings a smile to my face and other people's mind talk about this because they're like, yeah sure. I'm just going to sleep two more hours.
Yeah, you're going to and the reality of it is the research on this shows that it is quite effective.
You will again see studies that have done this. I'll ask people to either do a combination of things will simply give them a time and they'll say, you know, try to sleep for 10 hours per night. And so as a result of that they will increase their sleep by an hour or two hours or wherever they started with others. They'll actually just give a number so try to sleep for 90 more minutes or 30 more minutes or something like that.
And if you look at the results of most of these studies you will see for the most part. These groups will increase the amount of
time that they sleep from
Plus or minus 30 minutes to up to two hours. So it is very effective and
plausible where this all got started was actually around the year 2000 this kind of study came out initially looking
at work in cognitive function reaction time and moon stuff like that.
But this field really launched off in 2008 with a
Seminole and classic study that you know, quote unquote shocked the Sleep World from the Walter Reed Institute. This is a facility that does a lot of research for the
Army and what they found was effectively
Huge benefits and people who went through sleep
extension prior to known sleep restriction. So this is very interesting. Now the same year Sherry mama from Stanford came out with the Classic basketball sleep extension study. If you're familiar with
that and this is really what set the field on fire. There's been a ton of work since that but I think it's such an important paper that I want to go through it in detail because effectively what they did was found massive Improvement since portability. So whether you're talking
about free throw shooting percentage,
In time three-point shooting
percentage in these Stanford
basketball team. So you're talking about division 1 athletes that have nine percent improvements and shooting accuracy
over the course of a season by sleeping
two additional hours per night.
And so there's a lot to unpack there. How do you get college kids to sleep two additional hours per night. And did you really say a 9% Improvement and free throw and three-point shooting accuracy
throughout the course of a season. Yes. Yes. Yes and plenty of things more so
I want to
That paper a little more detail because again, I think
really highlights the power of sleep extension as a huge performance enhancing tool.
So as I mentioned this was
conducted at the University of Stanford with their division one basketball players and I'm gonna
compliment Sherry and her team having done research like this. I know how extraordinarily difficult it can be. There are of course limitations to get
you started right away. There's no control group here. We also don't know how much of a benefit they had in their performance just because of the course of the
season and a bunch of other issues, but doing research
Like this on actual high-performing athletes is next to Impossible. This actually took her several years to complete because of just how
difficult such a process would be so
lots of limitations of course, but still lots of things we can glean from this especially because it
launched the entire field in my opinion. There are other studies that have come out since this both from Sherry's group and others looking at endurance
cyclists swimmers tennis
players rugby players and a bunch of other stuff. So
yes some
To this specific study, but let's
really rather than worry about the details in the numbers here. This is pay attention
to the thought and the exercise of how much this stuff can help. So
getting a starter what they did is they took the athletes and they were able to get eleven of them to complete it. They had to screen out for anybody with any
sleep issues or use any drugs. They didn't allow alcohol or caffeine use the entire time and they
had them perform their normal sleep for two to four weeks or so. Now the reason is two to four weeks is you know,
because the challenges of working with real athletes in real
Time in Real Sports Seasons as I mentioned it took them a couple of Seasons. So not all the same participants came from the same year of play. So they are able
to get folks in and just depending on preseason scheduling testing and other stuff like that
the the acclimatization period there was a little bit different. So two to four weeks the study itself lasted five to seven weeks for those same reasons, so they had people
sleep normally for two or four weeks. And then I asked them to sleep for
10 hours per night again that resulted in about a two hour sleep extension.
On average some participants had less some did more they had they eat they track their sleep with a combination of sleep logs. So this is you know, just think about a notebook and the athlete wrote down how long they slapped and quality of their sleep and things like that as well as what's called actigraphy. You'll probably recognize that as as wearables. So think about a device on their wrist that measure their sleep so not the gold standard polysomnography, of
course, but still a lot of insightful stuff in the
application of a high-performing
athlete. What was really cool.
About this is they and kudos to the coaches to they worked directly with the sport coaches. So they had a bunch of physical performance testing.
So they did one test that's called a 282 ft Tessa. I think this is they ran from Baseline to half
court to back the Baseline to the end of the
full court back the Baseline and they were timed on
that. They had a bunch of other physical performance metrics as well. I get as I
mentioned three point shooting a free throw shooting and I'll talk about those in a second,
but they did those because
Those are a part of their normal
standard testing anyways, so they weren't asking the participants to do anything differently. They weren't having them come to the lab and do
additional work and why that I think is very important is
because getting an athlete to come to your lab and do testing for a study in season in my experience. I'll just tell you again little bit behind the curtain here. You're probably not going to get a great effort. And so when you start looking for maximal results and performance, it really comes down to how motivated the person was that they're not
but this was different this was in
their practice with their
Coaches. So
I promise you they were trying to shoot his best. They
could not just in a post testing but the pre-season testing to write like you want to make your team. You want to play more same thing with air conditioning test.
So really strong evidence therefore the performance benefits because they're trying to do their
best because that's what their coaches are asking them to test their
they also did a combination like I said of shooting I think they shot 10 free throws
and I think I shot 15 three-pointers and they kind of took that you know, how many did you make out of 10?
Thing also this stuff was not done one time. This was a common performance test on multiple times throughout the year. And so they're not just affected by. Hey, was it one bad day was that person sick or hurt or had a bad night's sleep the night before something like that. So very robust testing from that perspective. They took
psychomotor testing as well. This is actually a cool thumb tap
test so that this is something that could do on their phone and it measures reaction time and a bunch of other stuff. We're a little thing will pop up on their screen and I'll
tap it with their thumb kind of as fast as I can and so they're getting this combination of attention because it happens over a long period of time. So how were they able to focus or they lose track of what they're doing and stopping intention as well as the reaction time.
So pretty extensive and elaborate study design that
maximizes what we call ecological validity as well as external validity. So how would this apply in the real world and this case, you know being able to pay more attention and shooting better in practice are a pretty strong standards.
Metrics that people would care
about so what actually happened here. I'm going to walk you through the results in both absolute and relative terms. If you've been involved or read much Human Performance research, you'll know both of those metrics are actually important when
you're considering the context whether or not this was, you know, something to pay attention to or not easy
example here is you know, sometimes a one percent Improvement in performance
may not be enough to reach statistical significance, but I might be practically relevant if this resulted in you say jumping two inches
Higher, but it wasn't enough, you know again to reach stat Sig here,
but most practitioners would care about 2 inches. So let me walk you through Bowl. So you have the most
appropriate action information and then you can judge yourself whether or not you feel like this is worthy of note or not.
So as I mentioned they did the 282 ft
Sprint test that's that, you know half court in back Etc test
at Baseline. It took them about sixteen point two seconds to complete and at the
end of sleep extension. It was down to Fifteen point five.
So they reduce that time by point seven seconds again. I'll leave that up to you to decide but to me that's a pretty impressive Improvement throughout the course of a season
free throw shooting percentage. Again, this was out of 10. And remember this is not just one
test pre one test pose. This was done routinely throughout the season and then you're getting an aggregate score here.
So on average they made seven point nine shots out
of 10. So you call it an 80% free-throw
percentage which we
expected for athletes at this high quality in a practice situation.
And they were up to eight point eight are almost 90% This
is the lot you're effectively making one more free
throw out of 10. This is huge and definitely the difference between winning and losing making a team playing Etc
three-point percentage was a
similar story. So again, these are out of 15 shots. So
preseason. They're making
about 10 out of 15 60 percentage and all the way up to 11 point 6, so, you know added
one to
one-and-a-half extra makes perfect and temps again really important both
Significant Improvement as well as practically important Improvement
other metrics that were included that were cool subjective rating at practice improved scale of 1 to 10 here kind of seven out of ten before all the way up to
almost 9 out of 10 at the end same thing with their subjective rating at games seven point eight out of 10 all the way up to eight point eight out of ten.
So lots of improvements have actual performance and perception of performance and then they're not going to run you through all of the other.
Other metrics in the study but you're going to see a similar theme with weekly Reaction Time daily morning reaction
time of this PBT test. I talked about
daily evenings of
etcetera, etc. Etc. So not everything came
up a statistically significant, but most of it did and all of it was a
pretty similar magnitude. So
really just kind of looks like this, you know, call it 3 to 10 percent Improvement
and most variables measured so I don't know about you, but if
you walked into any performance
staff or
Coach's office or walked into an athlete's locker
and said I'm going to give you a 10% Improvement in all these
metrics throughout the year. I think you're going to catch their attention. So this stuff is certainly caught mine.
Now if this seems a little bit too good to be true. I'll be honest. I had the same feelings right when you look at some of those numbers. It's like wow, that's a lot and you look at the study and you're like, hey, there's no control group and etcetera Etc. And so I said man, how do I think about this? I started calling friends colleagues of mine. I called
Jeffrey dermer who's worked with the Atlanta Falcons.
Ins and USA weightlifting and tons of other professional sports. I called Amy Bender PhD and and sleep science
and worked with tons of professional athletes and they basically all said the same thing. Okay, great. Let's say the
results are slightly exaggerated.
Let's say they're exaggerated by 25% Let's say there's a jerk by
50% when you still take a five percent
Improvement.
I would and those metrics and that level of athlete where the margin for improvement is. So small anyways, call it 75 percent exaggerating
that's still a pretty big impact as when you compare that also with the research in the same area. You're talking about studies that have been done. Of course that one in basketball players, but similar work from Sherry's lab and swimmers similar thing as I mentioned in rugby players and you're all going to find this kind of
Lobel you know 2242 up to 10 percent Improvement in performance, depending on how you want to look at it these sleep extension studies range from three nights of sleep extension all the way up to seven weeks. And it seems to me as the evidence continues to grow you're just seeing the same thing played out more and more. So while again the specifics
of can I guarantee you sleeping two more hours improves your serve tennis serving accuracy by 10% No, I
can't
but am I confident it's going to improve your
performance. Absolutely
just to give a little more
context about the Sleep extension research and
athletes. There's a couple of other studies worth noting one of them looked at an additional one
point seven hours of sleep per night over the course of a week and this was done in tennis players and they found that it improved tennis serving accuracy by about 6% or so
on the other one looked at a little bit less.
So 45 minutes of extra sleep per night, but for a longer duration, this was now three weeks and
They found a Improvement interaction Time by 4%
as well as a reduction in
cortisol by 19% This was in rugby player. So little bit different demand little bit different tests, but still are similar story and the
final one of note was more similar
to the basketball study in which they asked him to sleep for an hour and a half extra per
night, but just for three total days and so
their sleep time actually went from about seven point one hours per night to almost eight point six hours. This is another example of I'm not talking about going from for
Is asleep tonight to six hours sleep now. We're talking people already sleeping a decent amount 7 hours and pushing them all the way up to close to nine
hours in this particular study. They found a three percent Improvement in time trial performance.
This is a 60-minute cycling test in these highly trained endurance cyclists and athletes. So
again wanted to share all of those studies because it highlights. It's not really
specific to basketball. It's not just physiology of endurance. It's not just skill.
It is really robust in terms of
how much it improves what areas of performance improved how long you need to do it for how much you need to sleep for and so I don't want you to get too caught up and either the numbers in terms
of the percentages of the improvements
or even really the protocol how many more minutes for how long I think the take-home point is if you can get people to start sleeping longer for a couple of days or even for a couple of weeks and if longer means 45 minutes or 2 hours,
it doesn't really matter if you can get
that stuff you're going to see
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Now one more thing. I wanted to pass
along to you that I thought was actually pretty interesting regarding sleep extension and then you're not going to find this in the peer-reviewed research. This is an anecdote to be totally candid with you but still really important I talk to actually at length with dr. Jeffrey dermer who's an MD Ph.D and sleep and it's been around for decades one of the most profound and prolific sleep scientists really of our time and he did a lot of work in the NFL and he told me that
I'll have to say this is like carefully as I can here, but he
basically said when working with one particular NFL team that he noticed there wasn't really a
huge Improvement in performance or cognitive function or action time that they could really tell
but the Sleep extension was incredibly powerful at helping people return from injuries.
The performance staff felt. It was very clear that their guys were either getting hurt less often but more specifically coming back from those injuries faster than they were in the Years prior.
Are you not paying attention to sleep?
So again a number of
potential benefits here and rationale to exploring this idea of extending your sleep,
but I know what you're probably thinking.
Okay, how do I do that? Number
one? And then what if it's
just not possible you have got various sleep
restrictions now in this particular case, I'm talking about
athletes as well as everybody else. So sometimes people don't realize athletes want to sleep more but they don't have the option to they've got schedules. They've got practices have got flights and travel.
And they've got the same restrictions that the rest of us have. So again as I mentioned, I really feel like the benefits of sleep extension are quite profound
the biggest issue. That was really a practicality and what I mean by that is you're everything a dude. I'm sold. I'm in I want to sleep more. It's just not possible whether you're an athlete or non-athlete all of us have restrictions on our time. You may have other obligations. You may not and you just can't sleep any longer throughout the night or have any number
reason. So what do we do if we believe in sleep extension we want to get these
It's enhancement benefits out of it, but we just are not able to sleep for more time for whatever reason.
Well, you got a number of different options here. The very first is being more specific and intentional about when you're trying to extend your sleep. The reality of it is almost nobody has the ability to sleep for nine or ten
hours a night every day every night the entire year. That's an unrealistic expectations. You're setting yourself up to fail just like you wouldn't do that with your nutrition. You wouldn't do that with your training. You wouldn't just run as many miles as you can in a week you would
Lift as many reps as you can you would have a periodized approach. So go through periods where you're going for more volume because you're going for Less volume and all their periods. You're going to have more calories during this phase and less calories during other phases. I would say the same thing with sleep extension. And so think about your schedule whether you've got an important travel coming up you've got really tight business schedule. You've got work obligations. We have a training camp. So we're starting pre-season training. We're in fight.
A MMA fighters. We saw some other area of time that is most important to us
or is a time of known sleep loss
right in that we
probably want to go behind in front of that and get our what's called Sleep banking
in and so we're going to look and say
all right great. I'm going to
remove things in my life if I can or add things in my life, like napping or other things that allow me to get towards that sleep extension in the say 3 to 30 days prior to those like those big.
Known losses of
sleep a really good example of this that I wish
I'd known about but honestly
didn't a number of years ago.
I was fortunate to travel with a UFC fighter named Brian Ortega that I've worked with for many years and we actually were able to go to Abu Dhabi and fight at a place called fight Island. So this is really interesting. This was during the covid pandemic and the world is basically shut down and the only fighting and really the only sport happening was the UFC in this specific fight bubble out in Abu Dhabi
now the
With that is I live and Brian live lives in Southern
California and we had
to go all the way out
to Abu Dhabi so we had time change to deal with we had traveled to deal with and at the same time we've got a very extensive wait cut. So Brian has to lose a decent amount of weight. Like every fighter does Brian's pretty normal and everybody's got a decent amount of weight to lose and the four to five days prior to that performance in addition to that. We have to fight than a five-round fight. We have just a number of media obligations. Brian is the headline event. So there's just a lot of
challenges that go into this
so we've got to go over there and we got to
try to manage one of the key variables which is sleep.
Well we get over there and we've got to now also deal with the fact that we have to fight not at local
time. But because the UFC is an American company for the most part, they generally want their fights to happen during American prime time. So I think we end up fighting if I remember correctly something like 6 a.m. Local time in the morning so that it could be a you know, 7 Pi p.m. PST, you know and
California went up and so we went over there with the idea of saying okay great and I timed everything out. I pre-prepared. I used an app called time-shifter to help make sure all of our circadian rhythms were on the right point and everything was plotted out weeks in advance and I thought we had a perfect system there. Unfortunately when itin arises when we got there, all of Brian's media obligations were still in Abu Dhabi local time.
So this was right in the middle of our sleep window. So we tried to stay on
California time, but he's
being woken up all day to do press conferences and weigh-ins and media and things like that. And so to end up being an entire sleep disaster. He got almost no sleep. I probably had one
night of straight sleep the entire do almost two weeks. We were there
just disrupted his body was all over the place every metric. We had was just off the charts gone cuckoo. He had no idea when he was awake or sleeping. It was really really challenging thing. We were fortunate Brian actually went on to perform at is one of his best performances ever.
And won the fight we got to come home, but it was
an absolute disaster it looking back on that there wasn't much I could do right he had to perform at that time. He was going to have to do the media obligations. There's just nothing I can do about
it. The only real
solution I would have had was the bank asleep prior to going out there.
It would he would not have performed at his best. No question the research
especially from the military is really clear here when
you go through no more now, we're talking
really known sleep restriction. I'm sleep deprivation.
Which is what we were at if you if you go through sleep extension prior to events like that. You can you can blunt or attenuate the drop in performance which is to say the performance drop will happen, but you can have it go down slower if you Bank some sleep going into it.
So I wish I would have known about that. I didn't this was
again many years ago and I just didn't know that information. So what are gone back next time if we ever have to go through something like that. We're absolutely going to bank probably at least three weeks prior to as much as we can. Of course, we're trying to
As much as we can be in fight Camp
regardless, but we would have made other
changes to ensure he had access to more sleep because we knew we were going to have such a challenge over there. So didn't know it at the time. We were in a unique situation lesson learned but a key tool and tactic I will certainly use in my coaching practice the rest of my career.
So why is it sleep extension is such a powerful performance enhancing tool? Well, it's because of what I call
the athlete sleep Paradox
and that is despite what you may think athletes tend to.
To sleep less and worse
than non-athletes despite the fact that they probably actually need more sleep.
And so you can look at this from a lot of different ways. There's been a number of longitudinal studies done on divers and rowers and skiers of cyclists. And what you're going to kind of collectively find is most athletes tend to sleep in the neighborhood
of six and a half to seven hours per night. Now the average person is in that range maybe in the seven hours or
so and so you can see the athletes are a little bit lower, but they actually need even more you can
Sherry my actually from Stanford the Sleep extension study also published another paper and in that she looked at 620 athletes at Stanford across 29 different sports
and found that almost 40% of those athletes reported sleeping less than seven hours per night during the weekdays and over fifty percent reported extremely
high daytime sleepiness
as though you can you can chop this up and look at all the different papers, but you're going to find a similar note athletes tend to sleep worse and there's a lot of reasons
for this.
Some of it's very practical they have early morning practices. They have extensive late night games or
competitions. Some of it is because of physical nature
methods tend to be bigger than other people and so their necks are larger and this alone can be a predictor or cause of sleep disorders. They tend to have worry and anxiety the night before sport competitions and things like that depending on the sport there and they may have caloric
restriction or other
excessive training just a lot of other
things that go into it and so
Of it is behavioral some of it as lifestyle. Some of it is physiology and some of it is just the nature of what they go into in terms of competing.
And so they're in this really hard spot. They need more
sleep arguably then other folks and yet they're sleeping actually less.
So put some in a really big Pine. So it's really no surprise then
when even if they're sleeping at seven hours and we take them to 9 we see these giant bumps and performance. It's almost like, you know, minimally are lowly active individuals going from six.
Hours a night to eight and a half right? Because they're
almost in a little bit of a pseudo sleep debt because there's
simply not matching the demand for what they need. Let alone going all the way up to the top to maximize recovery and performance. And as I
mentioned this is really not extreme sleep restriction. So there's a lot of really cool papers and a line seems to be somewhere in this like seven to seven and a half hours range. There is a significant difference in all things, um that there was one study looking at getting a cold or
Being sick and found that an additional 30 minutes a night
increased or decreased rather your chance of getting a cold by four fold,
right? So huge in performance there. There's a really cool paper on tweeting.
I guess we'll call it Xing now
but tweeting and NBA players and all they did was look
at just publicly available tweets on NBA players and looked at how late they were tweeting at night post game and found those a
1.7 percent Improvement in
shooting accuracy and those who are not up tweeting late at night.
And so
just that alone. I got a really low
quality indicator of sleep. You know, how much you Tweeting at night
was explained almost 2% of shooting accuracy again, you take any NBA coach
you take any basketball coach and say we can give you two percent bump and shooting accuracy. This is a really big number especially in a high performer who doesn't have much room to go
again rugby similar thing, right? There was a really cool study looking at rugby and kind of a three-week pre-season
training phase and they found both body composition
and a
But performance or significantly better in those athletes who slept more than
seven and a half hours relative to those who slept less than seven and a half
hours. And then finally, there's been a number of studies kind of an injury and then the line there is again use go from seven hours of sleep a night to 8 hours of sleep per night. And then this one setting particular found that increased
injury Risk by 1 point 7 volt. So
again, there's lots of examples like him up with here, but there is just a lot of information suggesting.
And it really is not the same sleeping seven or half hours or seven hours is like okay, I feel fine. I feel normal and I'm a little bit sleepy but it's not that big a
deal with 30 more minutes really matter what an hour really more matter the hopefully
I'm convincing you that yeah. Yeah, does it matters a lot so I could keep going here and share with you more research, but I think you're getting the point
generally athletes are not sleeping enough for their demands.
What actually is I think really interesting is this sets up.
Is athlete sleep Paradox I talked about a second ago. And that is
athletes don't sleep enough even though they actually probably need more that second part though is a little bit more confusing
why athletes need more sleep?
There's not a strong relationship at least
scientifically that we know of yet
between energy
expenditure say calories or you know, how much work you put in and minutes needed for sleep. It doesn't seem to work like that. So you can't simply say I ran a few more miles today or I was a little more active my steps were higher.
Therefore I need x amount of minutes per sleep, or maybe you do but you actually won't sleep that much more.
So there isn't a tight relationship there clearly seems to be
some relationship between energy output and slim some sleep. But again, it's not a one-to-one relationship. And so when I talk to a lot of the people in this area, I kind of pressed him on
that and there's a couple of different reasons. One of them is those studies really
just haven't been done and I haven't been done in high performers. So there may actually be that relationship there may not we don't know that's an omission of the research at this point.
But there's actually enough biochemistry here for you us to into it that there's probably something happening here and so a couple of things to think about one. We're not talking about returning to Baseline. We're talking about people who are trying to
create new adaptations. So it is not just recovering it is now optimizing or maximizing. So that's
one the second thing is think about what we're
asking at these to do so, we're let's remember some basic or let's learn some basic biochemistry of exercise here
now everything in biology uses a single
molecule.
For energy called ATP stands for adenosine triphosphate. So it is an adenosine molecule with three that's why it's called try phosphates attached to each other.
It doesn't matter where you're getting the energy
from the create that ATP fats proteins carbohydrates doesn't matter what animal you're in frankly or what you're using energy for digestion exercise recovery brain function. It's your element. It's
all using that magic energy
currency called ATP. All right.
Now the way that this
Operates is there are high energy bonds that
connect one of the phosphates to the second phosphate to the third phosphate. So you can
kind of think this adenosine in the middle and this little
tale of the three phosphates when you break off one of those phosphates from the other your end up with another molecule that is not identifying triphosphate is adenosine diphosphate because it now has two phosphates and then you have that third phosphate is what we call an inorganic free-floating phosphate. Okay now by breaking that phosphate off you bro.
Break that bond that has a net release of energy you put some energy into the system to break the bond, but it gave out more energy after it broke and then it did to break it. And so that's an exergonic reaction. You've generated energy and use that energy to power your exercise or recovery, whatever you're
doing. So as a net result of that every time you've asked your your body for energy, you have created
an ADP and that phosphate. Okay the fate of the phosphate we'll talk about in another episode of
conversation if you were to ask yourself for more
energy or
Your body from Orange rather you would break that ADP again. So you snap that s phosphate off and you would turn into adenosine monophosphate. So one of them you do it one
more time. Now that third
phosphate is gone and you just simply have adenosine. Why is that matter
adenosine is a little molecule that binds to little ligand
receptors all throughout your body in particular in your brain and this controls fatigue or rather sleepiness. And so what happens in this fact, this is exactly how caffeine work, right? So adenosine can caffeine rather.
Comparably a bond that binds those adenosine receptors and so that it blocks the perception of
fatigue. So when more adenosine
accumulates throughout the body on those receptors more sleepiness more fatigued
and so throughout the day as you're going through metabolism,
you're creating you're generating more energy, you're creating more free amounts of adenosine more of it is binding those
receptors and you're increasing what's called your
sleep pressure. So your sleepiness and fatigue is building over time, and this is
great when you sleep at night you
Of those identities you recycle them create them back into ATP. And so you've recycled your energy your sleepiness goes
away. Your grogginess goes away and your energy comes back up the next day. This is our sleep/wake cycle, right
when you wake up the next morning that feeling of
grogginess that feeling of sleepiness is called Sleep inertia. This is getting up in the morning.
Right? This is related to how much
adenosine you've effectively cleared throughout the night. This is one of the
many many reasons why
sleeping better at night.
Or sleeping more effectively sleeping more
allows you to feel less groggy the next day saving of a higher quality Etc. It's also why as I'll talk about in a little bit
things that people tend to think are normal with their sleep are not so he does not common to
feel groggy all day. It is not common to be able to sleep kind of on command throughout the day. Those are strong signs that you aren't
probably not clearing
all the adenosine there could be other things going on, but that could be one of the things that's happening. It is still left there. So while you also potentially
don't have as much energy in the next day because you don't have the adenosine to make enough ATP that becomes a problem.
So we're caffeine enters. The picture is caffeine competitively binds to the same receptors. So when it is
stuck on to that receptor the adenosine Can't Buy in there so you don't get that same sense of fatigue. And so that's why caffeine has both a stimulation effect as well as an anti fatigue affect. So there it's also a can why if caffeine is consumed too late or not metabolized?
Is sufficiently enough that you're gonna have a hard time sleeping at night because you're not getting that same adenosine binding not getting that same signal for sleepiness.
So it would then make sense and we can Intuit someone who's going through more ATP Recycling and production
throughout the day like an athlete like somebody who's more physically active
would need more sleep more
time for the glymphatic system to operate more time to clear our overall adenosine now again, we don't
Not
have direct studies of this but an intuition says
this this makes sense. There
have been some studies
looking at things like endurance athletes versus other say strength and power athletes and it initially suggests that the amount of time during the sleep stages where we're particularly effective at clearing this stuff is enhanced. And so that's again another indirect information.
That's why I think at this point there's
enough for us to say. Alright
we can we can turn the
When we don't have direct human
trial evidence, then this is an appropriate time to look at mechanism since we don't have those trials for energy expenditure and high athletes and separation.
We can look in the mechanism. The
mechanism makes sense that makes teleological sense. It makes intuition sense. We have some other similar studies like with the endurance athletes. And so you kind of combine that story on top of the evidence that we know that athletes
still don't sleep enough as normal people
are even less than and it makes sense for us to say, okay.
You need to sleep more and you're probably not sleeping enough as it is and you probably have an argument for needing more sleep than everyone else. Anyways,
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Let's move on now and talk about
I'll sleep quality. Now as I mentioned this is very challenging because there is no specific
set definition for what quality means in fact scientists argue about this stuff constantly.
So as we go through this research keep that in mind, I
also want you to keep in mind that not all Studies have used the same methodology some of used. What's the gold standard? So polysomnography actual test with a hook up electrodes to athletes and clinically diagnosed
them and others have used things like
questionnaires that have been scientifically
validated, but they
probably
result in a higher percentage of diagnosis orders than the direct
test. But nonetheless, I'm just going to give you some ballpark numbers here based on
the collective amount of research,
right? So if you look across the studies that have been done on division one football players
the NFL the NHL Olympic athletes rugby and things like that. You're going to see the
number at 20 to 40
percent or so, meaning that percentage of athletes have clinically diagnosed Sleep Disorders, but what
Easy is over 80% of those will go undiagnosed
and that's the same in the general population. So
the overwhelming majority
of sleep disorders are never actually known or identified and then of course because of that they're not solved which is a huge problem
in terms of which disorders are most prevalent You've Really Got
The Big Three that is obstructive sleep apnea you have insomnia and then the third one is restless leg syndrome.
How much of these exist in each one in Osa or sleep apnea is pretty common most
Common ten to twenty percent probably has a lot to do with
physical size of athletes, but can be around quite often.
Insomnia is the second most common and that's somewhere between four and 12
percent of athletes will exhibit signs some point in the life of insomnia. This is
you know, particularly problematic
in sports like wrestling and swimming who utilize a combination of late night or afternoon evening
training sessions
as well as very early work out. So four five six a m-- workouts this can either exacerbate and
Any symptoms for those that have it or in some cases? Unfortunately create it will talk about solution steps for that a little bit later
restless leg syndrome is also somewhat common, you know somewhere between 4 and 13 percent.
So another one to keep out for this is why in many of the consensus statements, you will see people advocating for athletes to get tested
at least once a year for Sleep Disorders because this is a really
high number.
Let's even say that some of this is a little bit exaggerated. It's not 40 percent, but it is 25%
Point that still means once one in every four or five people in your room on your team and your locker room has a clinical sleep disorder and almost surely an 80% likely they're never going to know about it. So we're leaving a lot of health and performance on the table
by not addressing our Sleep Quality and addressing will specifically Sleep Disorders again, no specific definition exists for Sleep Quality, but there's a
lot of metrics that people will use to
infer that some of the things that jump out our
So this is like what percentage of time you spend sleeping at night versus awake another one called oiseaux wake after sleep onset is very common one. There's latency how long it takes you to fall
asleep and then fragmentation and you look at the research on all those in these globally tend to be worse
and athletes so you may or may not qualify for a clinical safe diagnosis,
but that's not really what we're concerned with. Right? So the analogy here would be an X-Ray so your knee hurts you go into the doctor
they pick an
X-ray and they say well it's not broken. Therefore must be optimal. That's not how it works. I'm still in pain. I'm suboptimal, right? So there's a difference between getting a clinical diagnosis or meeting a threshold for sleep disorder and
still having very poor or low quality sleep. So one actual study. I'm thinking of his colleague of mine Corey peacock did this and this is cool because this was in UFC fighters. He tracked them for an entire. I
think it's somewhere between like a six to eight-week camp for a actual UFC fight and
they found that sleep latency was one of the telltale signs
I'll problems and so this continued to get worse throughout the camps and it was actually directly related to a number performance metrics. So their
sleep latency was negatively correlated to VO2 max
heart rate recovery
vertical jump height and then was probably most important which is the amount of workouts
or training sessions that they missed and these
correlations were strong. All of these were about point eight or
higher one is the highest you possibly get.
And so that alone is a
Nominal thing to take a look
at and and pay attention to as a way to identify our my sleeping at the highest quality maybe or maybe not clinical disorder level.
So in addition to sleep duration and quality another lover we can
press to enhance performance is sleep timing. Now.
This is actually really cool a lot of people think about this simply as the context of jet lag, but it is more than that. There is circadian
rhythms that you perform the best in and it tends to be your local time tends to be your
And so if you're traveling and you're changing time zones this matters, but
if you're also manipulating when you're performing even within your time zone, it can mimic the same effect. So what I'm getting at here is
if you can optimize timing
you can get the benefits of sleep extension
and improving Sleep Quality without changing either of them
and what I mean by this is that the research is so cool here because it comes directly from games one. There's a lot of research across a bunch of
of different sports the NBA the
NFL Major League Baseball the NHL
there's a bunch of studies going
back through 10 years 30 years up to
40 Years of historical
games and they look at these things and they say,
okay can we predict who's going to win more games based simply on a combination of are they playing in their right circadian time or not? So the example here would be let's imagine you have a West Coast team and they are
normally used to competing at 4 p.m. On the west coast and they travel to the Midwest or the East Coast, but they compete
Time that is still for clock on the West Coast time. So it's their normal circadian rhythm. They have a big advantage over the other team because they're playing in their Northern despite the fact that they've changed time zones. So it's more complicated and more interesting than
just, you know, jet lag which is obviously very important.
So this Rhythm this there's a ton of information here Stephen lockley from Harvard. He's been around for forever has published a ton
in this area was a Monumental in developing the Circadian rhythm and like timing
For the National Space Station he has a great app. I have no affiliation to this what's called time-shifter which helps you set your your supplementation and light and foodstuff for if you're traveling Ashley, I've used it for years. I paid full price for
it lots of stuff there, but he's done a ton of research on this stuff and it's really compelling. So Steve has done so much cool work in this area, but I'm going to condense it to just add a
couple of points
one study. I think of in particular was they then went back and looked at performance and Olympic swimming
from
And afford to the 2016
and they were able to predict point three percent a Performance Based simply on
on circadian timing, right? So
again, we're not talking about who
slept more or less sleep disorders or anything is simply can you play and perform in the right time for your body?
I think more interesting is Sherry ma from Stanford who I've mentioned before spent I think about three years working
with ESPN.
And what she was able to do is predict somewhere between the neighborhood of 70 to
80% accuracy of who would win NFL games based simply on the team's time zone. So this is this is incredible. Obviously, this
is stuff that people use in those in the sports betting World Behind the Scenes a lot part of their information. If you ever wonder why a betting line is where it is on some teams. This is a huge component to that certainly not the
only one but it's really cool stuff. So again be able to understand and enhance your performance if sleep extension is out of the question
if sleep
Is out of the question of Sleep Quality, you're trying it's not working. Whatever
another way again, you can get yourself to perform a huge performance enhancements is manipulating your timing the more you can stay
consistent and performing in your own local space whenever you used to performing the better, you're going to be
let me give you one tangible example, so you have some that a lock onto here.
The University Washington football team. My hometown team candidly is going to be dealing with the
unique challenge. They are right now in the Pac-12 which means every team they play is on the west coast. There are moving to a division that is in the midwest. So they're gonna be playing Ohio and Pennsylvania and Iowa and Minnesota and things like
that. So let's imagine this. Let's imagine the University Washington
typically played their football games as they do either at 4:30 p.m. Or 7:30 p.m. Washington time.
Okay, great. So if they played a team at
4:30 at home and that team came from the East Coast or Midwest
University of Washington has an advantage the other team traveled and now they're competing at their normal local time huge win for the University of Washington. But another scenario gets more interesting. Let's imagine that they're on the road and let's imagine they went to Ohio State as an example and they played that game at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time zone now.
This is actually a still despite the fact that they're on the road. This is still a huge Advantage for the infertile University of
Washington because 7:30 East Coast time is still
430 West Coast
time. So not only is the University of Washington competing on their normal circadian rhythm. But
Ohio State in this case is competing at a way delayed
Rhythm.
Typically those teams are going to be playing at about noon local time. So instead of playing at noon
local time than now playing at
7:30 local time. They've shifted.
Their performance Windows 7 and a half hours. So in this particular case despite the fact we would be on the road. We'd have a three hour time zone difference. They would still be a slight one
to two percent Advantage for the University Washington. Third example here would be the opposite. Let's imagine again University Washington typically plays at 4:30 p.m. Seattle time and they go to Columbus Ohio State and they play a game
at Columbus or house
normal time, which is noon.
Eastern Time, right?
This is now 9:00 in the morning
for the University of Washington. This is now many what we almost eight
hours earlier than normal would be a massive Advantage. Not only because the time shift change the travel
being on the road, but because the circadian rhythms you would probably be looking at you know, maybe a four to five to six percent Advantage just on that fact alone to the Ohio State team. So
something to really pay attention to those of you that have the opportunity or ability to manipulate this I would encourage you to do so but something
We can really pay attention to when sleep extension or Sleep Quality are not on the table as variables that we can improve it's now time for us to really get into the details of the three eyes. The first I being investigate which is how do I assess and analyze my sleep the second being interpret? So how do I know whether that's good bad great terrible or otherwise
and then third being intervene. So what do I do about it? What protocols and
solutions do I have to solve these problems? So we'll start with the first one and that's investigate
now the consensus article I talked
At the very beginning of the show here has a really nice model at the
end to kind of walk you through the steps. So
way to think about this is
I'm probably not going to be able to send every person I know or even myself
go to a sleep lab and get
a full sleep study done, you know every month or every week or even every
year and so how do I actually use a combination of free
to maybe moderate lie to all full-blown sleep studies and how do I decide who to use that? And so
they have a really nice
Up overall testing model that will do now
to me. This is really important because I've talked to you already
about how prevalent Sleep Disorders are the other thing. I haven't mentioned yet. Those how bad people are at assessing their own sleep. You can look at any number of Publications here, but specifically those on athletes show that they are notoriously bad at estimating both their Sleep Quality actually quantity how long it took them to fall asleep as well as in this is one that matters how much it's actually
acting their cognitive and physical performance colleague of mine and dunigan has done a number of studies in this area and it is mind-blowing how bad athletes are at this. We actually just recently completed a paper together where we assess sleep and nutrition and training in combat sport athletes across the entire Globe both professionals all the way down to amateurs in Elite and we saw the same story. They really bad at understanding the basics of sleep knowledge as well as really estimating their Sleep Quality and
So all that to say really worth your
time to do something here. I've generally recommend getting a sleep study done at least once a year,
but this is really
the model that that consensus paper laid out. So kind of level one is basic sleep education and I'll talk about more details of that later why you want to do it how effective basic sleep education actually is despite what you may think
and then from there you go on to your next
level and that's some sort of
free or low-cost in this case
completely free.
Screening see these are questionnaires. The one I like the most is called the athlete sleep screening questionnaire is a SS Q is a validated study in athletes again. I'm emphasizing that point because are lots of validated sleep questionnaires, but this one is specifically in athletes are high performers.
And again, that's something you can deploy to
anybody as often as you'd like you could use it monthly or once a year daily really if you wanted to at almost no cost from there that's going to help you kind of triage where you put your emphasis a little bit the
Model they've got here is if they identify No, Sleep problems whatsoever in that screener, then you go back to First Step, which is you still continue to educate because sleep problems can start just because they don't have one now doesn't mean they won't have one later and just because they don't have a sleep problem that qualifies on that question are doesn't mean they're not suboptimal doesn't mean they're not 80% or 90% as we've talked about earlier. Hopefully, I've made the case that even those last few percentage points. Absolutely map.
So that's one order No, Sleep issues whatsoever. According to
questionnaire according to questionnaire. If they have mild sleep problems, then at that case you can go on to a more advanced questionnaires. The one here you're going to go after it's called a sbq. So athlete sleep Behavior question are a little bit different than the previous one, but this can help you kind of identify if some other issues are going on if data come back from that and says, hey everything's all
clear. Then you go back to
step one which is education.
If not, then it you may want to invest in some sort of
long-term either sleep
log or wearable tracking device something like that. Now you're going on to either continue to use free tools sleep logs. This is just a journal you're writing stuff down your tracking how good you feel you're tracking how bad you felt your sleep was how long you slept, you know, things like that totally free or you've invested somewhere between, you know, maybe a couple of hundred dollars to five six hundred bucks on some sort of wearable. I'll cover those here in a second.
If we go back to the beginning now, and we've identified from our
asq a either moderate to severe sleep issue. We've got different steps Here and Now
what's important and I want to say that one more time is
this is not just severe. This is moderate to severe either one of these get the same next couple of steps,
which is you're going to refer to some sort of sleep specialist.
Unfortunately, there's not a lot of high performance sleep-trained people at this point. You're really going to have to
Do the medical route but worth it. If they have a medical disorder you're going to do some sort of Consulting and testing they need to go into differential diagnosis, you know to have a sleep disorder. If so, which one etcetera etcetera you're going to treat that athlete or have the physician treat that athlete and then go right back to step one with education.
So overall as a framework. I think this hopefully has been helpful if those you that are working with many people
either you're setting up a clinic or a coaching practice or something like that or even if yourself and you're trying to figure out man,
you know, should I
Send money on a sleep study. Should I spend money on a Tracker? Well, maybe just start with these free versions
first. And then if you don't feel like running you can continue to just use a high Sleep Quality behaviors and hygiene and things like that. But if you do flag for anything even what's considered to be again moderate or severe then maybe invest exploring into higher Fidelity types of analyses
now something really important. I want to point out if you were to use something like the a
ssq in of itself does not determine whether or not you have a
Disorder it is just information that gives you a likelihood another way to say this is hey, you should probably go get checked out for my True full clinical
analysis. Well, you maybe then think of yourself. I
don't have a sleep disorder. I'm not even to take the questionnaire, but I'm
trying to really convince you that that's the wrong approach because like I said a second ago one prevalence of sleep
disorders are very high in everybody and over 80% go undiagnosed to we know athletes
or anyone who's really pushing high performance or
or physically larger is more
susceptible than the average person twenty to forty percent. So
high numbers right there three athletes in general are very bad at
understanding and recognizing how poor their sleep is and
that's generally because there are a ton of signs and symptoms that you go through and you deal
with in your day that you
think are benign you think are normally think
that's just how you are. I think that's just how your body is you think you're tired because you're training so much you think you're
fatigued and sore because
What you're doing in practice and all that is partially true.
It's all also signs of sleep disorders.
So you'll probably going to be pretty surprised. If you take this questionnaire at what they're
asking and
how they can actually ask these questions and based on your response to these alone
are validated ways to identify sleep to sort of remember that's what validated means it says when we gave people
this questionnaire and we compared that directly to the
gold standard polysomnography. This is all the wires and electrodes hooked up to you the
full shibam
that the people who score certain way on this questionnaire.
Also then have actual Sleep Disorders. That's what it means to be validated. Okay. So again, I would still say, you know get that ee verified but that's what it really means. Okay. So
if you start looking through the questions and you start seeing things like do you snore most people just think that is a normal thing or it's
not a big deal when a reality of it is it is a not a guarantee but it is a sign of a sleep disorder. How much caffeine do use how rested
Do you feel throughout the day we talked earlier about other symptoms? Like it
should not take you more
than 20 minutes to fall asleep at night. That's your sleep latency another common sign of how hard is it to get to sleep? How long does it take you to fall asleep?
You shouldn't wake up with there's going to be some
inertia in the morning a little bit of grogginess, but it shouldn't be extremists shouldn't be prevalent. You should not be able to fall asleep all day at any point in time throughout the day. Those are other common signs sort of so
it is some very basic questions and you may be thinking to yourself. Oh, yeah, I don't have
A
sleep disorder. I don't sleep as much as I want or maybe a little bit slower, but I wake up really tired all day. Oh, yeah, I do snore. Oh, yeah. I am fatigued. I wake up more than once per night most nights.
All of these
are signs of if not clinical sleep disorders, certainly suboptimal sleep
that all said, I hope I didn't
dramatize or overly attempt to scare you into thinking you all have Sleep Disorders. That's not the case.
It's just more the point of look. This is an opportunity.
For some pretty tremendous performance
enhancement the likelihood of you having
were sleeping you think is reasonably High and the cost here is nothing takes a few minutes to do easily scalable
Solutions are easy to find in terms of how you scored.
And so to me it just seems to land on the boy. We should absolutely do this.
The benefit is really huge in the cost is quite low.
Okay, so to recap for most people starting off with a questionnaire is probably really good strategy.
Now the upside of it as we mentioned is it's free quick
and easy to interpret the
downside of it is it's really just
subjective data. It's not an objective. Look of what's actually happening to
do that. You've got to go to the next level. You're introducing some
cost there,
but you're going to trade that off for accuracy. So the next kind of Step Up which is in this moderate again, usually two to four five hundred dollar range is using what's called
actigraphy. These are your wearables. All right.
Right, I'll talk about the pros and cons of those in just one second.
So those commercially available devices are objective some but most aren't
clinically validated or FDA-approved to have actually be able to diagnose Sleep
Disorders, but some are but they have other value and stuff that I'll talk about here in one second the highest
level up and now you're talking the most costs the most invasive
but most accurate our clinical sleep studies. This is used as a technology for the
most part called polysomnography.
This can be done at
home or in a clinic and there are many
pros and cons to that as well. So
what I'd like to do now is really quickly talk about each of these different objective
methods discuss the pros and cons so you can make the best decision possible for you in your given scenario. I'm going to
start off with
polysomnography or what I refer to from here on out is
PSG now some of the benefits here are it has a ton in fact more than anything else data behind it. So there's a
lot of comparisons you can make there's a lot of science has a lot of
support and you can really get a true
sense of what's going on. It is objective. It is something that can be done in your home or in a hospital setting. Now the hospital setting is the overwhelming
majority of psg's but more and more
companies are and Technologies are coming on board that allow you to do this from your home.
And so the ability to diagnose and interpret clinical sleep disorders is really high here the downside though is now it's kind of the same thing as the up.
Side one if you're doing this in a hospital or clinical setting it's not a
realistic picture of what's Happening your life. It's you're not going to see the same when you've got these electrodes hooked up to you and you're in a funky bed. You're probably only gonna be able to do it one or two, maybe three nights. And so we're getting maybe not a great picture of exactly what's happening. We're
also basically scanning just for disorders. And so if you don't meet those certain
thresholds, which are honestly somewhat arbitrary, then you may be kind of basically told. Hey you're fine.
This is similar to the X-ray thing. I talked about earlier. So they're coming and say hey, I don't see a broken bone. So you're fine. But just because your phone isn't broken doesn't mean your joints functioning correctly either.
And so there's some downside there. They tend to be pretty costly in the the weight line can be very long, but they are again the most accurate picture and because they are clinical then you're able to work with a physician that
can help you treat anything. If you do have something that is worthy of medical consideration. So
a lot of pros and cons to that if we
Move to the PSG and home still pretty expensive typically still people are only doing
a night or two, maybe three of that
but we're getting a more
realistic picture and setting of that. So
options are available depending on where you're at. Sometimes you can get a covered from insurance which is nice and other times not but
PSG would generally be the gold standard.
Now another way to approach sleep at the highest standard is to use a method called cardiopulmonary coupling. Now, this is actually been around for a long time. It's got dozens and
Dozens of studies behind it though.
Most people have never heard of it.
It's a little bit different than PSG at approaches different things that has different Target. It's looking more at your
physiology your autonomic nervous system your respiratory rate and things like that. It was developed by dr. Robert Thomas from
Harvard and again has been studied in a lot of areas. It's FDA
approved as a way to diagnose Sleep disorders. And
so there are some pros and cons to each of these approaches. I would recommend if you're
interested in that to talk to your physician or
Medical team to decide which approach PSG or CPC is better for you based on the questions you have and trying to get
answered but I wanted to make sure you knew that both of those options are available taking it down to the next level is what we call actigraphy there are commercially and
research-grade available devices to be candid with you. We use the research grade ones a lot
and more and more. Those are actually becoming commercially available.
And so that's something to pay attention to
but the other ones you're more familiar
with these are watches and rings and
Wrist straps and chest straps and different things like that that can be used
depending on which one you want to talk about. The data are quite different. They all have their own unique value
benefits and things like that. I don't want to get into the details of all those quite right now,
but I think globally you can think about actigraphy or wearables as hey there are a couple of hundred dollars and they have generally some pros and cons many of them are pretty
accurate at measuring things like whether or not
Asleep, and in fact, some of them are really accurate over 90 95 some of them higher than that percentage accuracy of measuring when you're asleep
measuring when you're awake becomes more
challenging and so they tend to have problems in those areas. Those can range between like 50 to 80%
accuracy again, really depending upon the dice you're in so using it to identify whether you're asleep or not great, but past that we start to get into problems. Now the reason I don't want honest we spend a lot of time here is because I believe in the technology. I think it's going
It better so I'm not super concerned that either any of those given devices are at 90 percent because I probably going to figure they're gonna be 95% student off anyways or closer than that. And so it's really not that big of a deal at the current moment the issues with actigraphy I think are different and that is really they're trying to put together with the best intentions Collective
scores for optimization for quality. And as we talked about earlier, that is very challenging. I
don't necessarily
Need or want or should have the same amount of time in each one of my sleep stages. It's probably dependent upon what I'm doing and in fact sleep stages
themselves have some problems. I maybe that's a conversation for another day. But if you poke into the research here, you'll find plenty of sleep scientists who've just fundamentally disagree with the idea of trying to optimize or maximize a certain amount of time spent in a slow wave sleep or deep sleep versus Ram or things like that. We don't necessarily know what those optimal numbers are. We definitely don't know what they are and
Athletes, well, there's no data on that almost whatsoever.
And so really being overly concerned with your score on your wearable is where problems
start to come in. And in fact, there
is something that's growing in this community called
orthosis Omnia which is insomnia that is induced by people trying to optimize their score on
wearables. And so I don't want to paint a bad picture here because wearables can be incredibly beneficial we see tons of evidence of
people getting better at their sleep.
Because they're more accountable. They are more calibrated. They thought they were getting more sleep than they actually are there are tend to make better habits and choices because I know they're going to look at their score in the morning and they want to get better.
And so this is not all bad. It is like anything else we've talked about unlike anything else. We probably will talk
about ever in this podcast
and that's pros and cons. Right? So way the downside with the balances it's maybe not as accurate, but it's an order of magnitude
cheaper and instead of having to do one or two nights. You can now do every single
single night
at the same time. Maybe there's problems with that. You don't necessarily want everyone and I could tell you countless stories
of athletes and clients. I've worked with where we take their trackers away from them, or maybe we keep them tracking but we block their ability to see their own score because it just leads to all kinds of problems.
And so it's a viable option use what's
best for you in your
situation. Okay. So at this point, hopefully I've covered a tool that's accessible for just
about everybody listening here. We talked about screeners which are completely free to
Low
moderate cost wearables all the way up to the highest standard of either polysomnography or cardiopulmonary coupling testing done at your home or in a sleep lab
also to continue on with that. I'll share with you a little bit about what we do with our
professional athletes and Elite Executives.
That really don't
have time or cost limitations but want the best possible solution
what we actually do is build full functioning sleep labs in their home as well as a scalable
version that they can take on the
Road, so we are running FDA-approved clinical sleep studies on them almost every single night and we're measuring everything about their sleep.
We're doing things differently
based on their sport. So our golfers go through a little bit different protocol than our UFC fighters and that's different than our major league baseball players Etc. And so the testing that things were measuring and monitoring are slightly
different and all that tells us in the highest Billy
possible how they are sleeping. But we also care about why they're sleeping that way.
So as a part of that we're running four separate analyses. So we're always looking at the environment. Hopefully by the time you're listening to this
my paper has been published. So we've got a literature review out right now in review and that covers 11 unique factors like CO2 and a bunch of other things that are involved in your environment that can be influencing your sleep and explaining why you're sleeping the way you are
outside of that there's physiology. So there's a bunch of specific sleep blood work and blood panels that we've created things to
go after.
Your thyroid and iron and a bunch of other stuff that you maybe not paying attention to there's a
behavioral component to it. And there's also psychology. So all four of those unique
components are going to tell us why you're sleeping the way you are
so we do this again pretty extensively and the reason we put so much effort and energy into this is well
everything I've been talking about. It is really a huge performance magnifier.
So Solutions like that are available for those folks that are
want to go to the nth degree here with their sleep.
So now we've fully investigated are analyzed our sleep. How do we interpret the results? So let's move on to
our second either, please.
Also remember we're not talking about how do
I interpret my sleep from a risk of disease later in life or any like that we're
talking about how do I interpret it from the
perspective of maximizing performance? So what should my sleep look like if I'm trying to get the
Optimal Performance results in terms of duration. The number seems to be about nine hours.
Of course,
there's lots of individual variation here. Some
folks. May truly
be at their best at eight hours or seven or half and some might actually need 9 or 10
but 9 seems to be the number that came up a lot in the research also in my conversations with these
Sleep Experts like a me bender and Stephen Locke Lee and Jeff
dermer. They all basically came back and kept saying nine
hours. So I think that's a pretty good starting place
in terms of other metrics of quality. We mentioned
latency 5
Five to fifteen minutes seemed to be the sweet spot. If your latency again, this is time. It takes you to fall asleep at night is under 5 minutes. This is probably an indicator of the fact that your underslept if it's longer than that, we're probably in an area of may be suboptimal sleep routines or habits or environments or something like that. It's delaying us from getting into sleep. We also may be doing something throughout the day like excessive caffeine training too hard too late at night or other issues like that that are delaying our time to sleep.
Efficiency if you're getting that metric on your wearable, you're going to see again. The medical numbers
are say hey be above
85% I personally and
this is just my and he's interpretation here.
I always like to see it above 93 percent efficiency is generally a problem of sleep latency
or waking up too often throughout the night. Those are the two biggest contributors. And so
I'll on I want to see that number above 93 if I can above 95% waking events have already talked about it.
It is
absolutely normal to wake up once a night,
but we're not trying for normal here. I actually my goal is to get people to sleep through the
night every night. Otherwise, I don't want you waking up at all. That's the target. We should be able to sleep through the night on a most nights. It doesn't mean if you're waking up every night. You've got a disorder or anything
close to that again. We're pushing for optimal here. Now as you age this gets more challenging, but certainly waking up twice or more per night is almost
always in my book going to be suboptimal
sleep.
And then finally, we want to have some subjective measures of how are you feeling? How does that
make you perform the next day? So,
how is your daytime sleepiness? I want you waking up with a little bit of sleep
inertia, but not a ton. I want you to feel pretty refreshed when you get when you wake
up. You're going to be a little bit sleepy throughout the day
especially early
afternoon, but I don't want you walking around all day the ability to fall asleep on
command K. So daytime sleepiness is how we kind of cooks it so
for me, that's the general picture out what I'm looking at
for Sleep Quality.
Now I need to mention this again because it
comes up so commonly
and that is your sleep stages people are very concerned about
how much time they spend in say deep sleep or REM sleep or any other styles of sleep. Now,
this becomes really challenging and I have to be honest with you in my coaching experience of generally found this to be more problematic that is helpful doesn't mean it hasn't helped some but this causes a lot of issues. I mentioned earlier. It's somewhat arbitrary most wearable.
Those are taking a measure
of your sleep kind of once every five minutes or so
and in their arbitrarily defining your sleep based on 30 seconds
epochs or time
domains and they're using standards that are really really old and this case 40 plus years old and they change sometimes the scientific Community says, okay. Now this thing is defined as n 2 or n
3 or
whatever. Sometimes I take them out entirely and so it just hasn't been that helpful to worry about I generally feel like if you pay attention to the
Other stuff your sleep Behavior. So your sleep environment your sleep
relationship in general. What we want to do is not have you obsess over some arbitrary or
in this case, sometimes proprietary equivalents of optimization meaning depending on which company bought it from they Define optimal differently
and there's not even a scientific consensus of that. So we're really chasing a rabbit that may not
actually be something we want to go after
and so
I don't want to be too negative here. But really people have worked themselves into a bit of a to see here trying to optimize for Sleep based on those trackers when I don't think that's the best case used for them. There's a lot of benefit from trackers like we've talked about earlier.
But I'm just generally going to caution you against this one in my personal coaching
experience. We talked about how they are problematic in terms of accuracy some better than others and they're getting better, but they're not
there and why this really matters is there have been some studies that have looked at effects even lockley stuff have looked at things like sleep deception. So imagine being in a study and being told you either
slept for 5 hours when you actually slept for eight or the opposite and
that research is pretty clear. You will perform.
Form the next day based upon what you think you
slept rather than what you actually slept.
So imagine what's happening when you're getting false or inaccurate information from your tracker. It is absolutely impacting how you're performing the next day. And so the people that are just like well, I just track and I don't do anything with it. Okay, we talked about arthas Omni earlier. Now we talked
about the research on Deception.
This stuff is making an impact on you. And so we really want to be judicious and careful with how we're using those trackers my recommendation it
Again, one more time to be clear here is just really not to worry too much about the Sleep
staging how much time you spent in deep or Ram or things like
that and pay attention to the other things sleep latency sleep Behavior use it for accountability making better choices and maybe you don't have that extra cocktail. Maybe you don't do that other thing, you know is gonna be bad for your sleep because it's going to impact your score tomorrow to me. Those are beneficial uses of it and just really be cautious and careful.
I'm spending too much time worrying about those sleep stages just as one final note before we go on to our third
and final I and that is as always me wanting to be transparent with you and share what I do in my coaching practice
if I'm interested or feel like I need to dive
deep into somebody's Sleep Quality or look up. There's what's called Sleep architecture. I'm going to use cardiopulmonary coupling of that CPC we talked about
and I'm going to go after three
things in this is not specifically based on the research. It's honestly my personal experience in the ones that I found to be most important.
Portent and the biggest
indicator of opportunity to improve sleep and those three metrics are going to be their
sleep stability
sleep fragmentation. And then finally their respiratory rate and
effort. We're going to talk a lot more about that third one
in future episodes. There's a lot of interesting things that
so to summarize everything about Sleep Quality lot of ways. You can go about it Define it
how its most important for you be careful of the pitfalls
and use it to develop more resilient sleepers, not more.
the ones with that being said it's
time for us to jump into our third and final I and that's intervention now
frankly, we could probably do an entire
episode on different ways and tactics and tools to improve sleep but given with
this far and what I'd like to do is just focus on a handful
that have been shown in the research as well as in my own personal experience
to be particularly helpful and improving sleep duration quality and timing and so the very first one I like to start with is maybe not going to apply to everyone but I think
really important that I don't want to miss and that is the importance of sleep education really specifically sleep education has been shown to enhance sleep duration by anywhere between up to 20 to 90 minutes. It reduces sleep latency by up to 30 minutes can improve efficiency by over five
percent and has been shown to reduce sleep onset variance by almost a half an hour.
And so it's not just duration its quality
as well. So really worth your time. There's a lot of research on what happens.
Two athletes and individuals sleep
duration and quality when you simply educate them. So
step number one is telling your kids and telling your
athletes and telling the people that you're training and
coaching how important sleep really is. I know what you're feeling. It's the feeling I get when I have to
talk about sleep sometimes a man. Like I'm going to say this they're not going to pay attention and it's not going to matter.
But the research shows the opposite. The research is really clear when you spend anywhere between
30 and 60 Minutes educating people on
sleep.
You can see pretty important improvements in duration and quality that lasts up to a month with just a single session of education. And so this stuff is really important to talk about you want to teach a handful of different things number one the
value of screening like we've established earlier checking out whether or not you have a disorder
that is the need for a duration. So telling them people don't know
that nine hours is the number that sleep scientists recommend for high-performing athletes that
fact alone can change behaviors and then third
Is actually sleep hygiene factors a really cool study on soccer players
that asked them to do very minimal. I think it was about 10 or 15 minutes
before they went to sleep to not use their phone. They used an iron mask
and then a couple of very very standard
non invasive approaches to sleep
and what they found was the groups that did that were able to sleep almost an hour and a half more on the days following a game. So what that means is as anyone who's played Sports know when you play a night game
Um,
it's really hard to sleep that night. It's very common for out to sleep for five hours after
that. And so the group in this study that
didn't do the hygiene steps slept for a four and a half hours on average that night the group that did slept for almost six so
they were able to add an hour and a
half of sleep by having them do just a few very basic sleep hygiene steps,
but this really is not
an explanation or example of the quality of the hygiene. It's the education piece that matters here.
Just telling them they need to sleep more.
And giving them a few tips really
does make a big impact so want to make sure that you have that information. I realize not all of you. In fact, probably a few of you are coaches. But for those you that are out there I wanted you to have that
information. So outside of Education the next big rock to move is opportunity. And so this is really a
conversation with you and yourself for the most part. Everyone has the ability to give them self more opportunity to sleep. So when we're
talking sleep extension, of course just giving
yourself more
ours is the obvious solution. How do you do this? Well, generally we don't like to schedule things first thing in the morning if possible. I personally don't use an alarm clock. I have not in many many years I get up
very early personally, but I don't schedule things I have to do within the
first couple of hours. So I don't have to have an alarm clock
more importantly probably is getting to bed at a consistent time
shutting things down earlier. If you can avoid night exercise a very late at night avoid working late at night and things like that.
If at all possible that gives yourself the opportunity.
Another thing to do is
making sure that you are creating what we call a pro sleep culture. This could be within you and your team if you're leading individuals
and by this don't think about Just Sports think of this as running a business and a company. Are you creating a pro or a negative sleep culture? Right? Are you allowing people the opportunity to embrace sleeping? Well, are we
still thinking about poor sleep as you know a badge of honor if you will?
Well, in fact there's a lot of research on this and how important it is and how impactful it can be
to just promote sleep as a performance-enhancing tool not just something getting in the
way or you know taking away training
time. This is something that we're going to use as a
competitive
Advantage. So making sure we have the opportunity
from our self as well as the people that were guiding and leading to have a pro sleep culture.
The next one is what we've talked about a little bit earlier in that is making sure we have a structured sleep plan.
It's what I mean by this is when you're organizing your day,
like I've talked about
or you're organizing your team meetings or when you're working out. Are you doing it in a way
that allows you the chance to sleep appropriately as we mentioned before not doing things that night that we know disrupt sleep if we can do them earlier in the day are we giving ourselves the
opportunity to bank
sleep prior to Major competitions or major periods of lost sleep. So say you're traveling a bunch. You've got a heavy workload coming up
finals week or whatever.
The case may be and you know
sleep is going to be a problem. Are you removing things in the three days to 30 days before that that are optional so that you can maximize sleep in that particular time
in any given day. If you can't get enough
sleep. Are you giving yourself the opportunity to take naps 20 to 90 minute naps are very effective for performance
enhancement acutely, but more
importantly to just add back some of that sleep
time. So all this falls under the umbrella of you'll never sleep enough if you never give yourself the chance.
Chance to sleep enough the next set of solutions really deal with improving the quality and timing of your sleep getting started right out the gate the most important thing you can do to improve your sleep quality is treating your sleep disorder. If you actually have one there are a number of really easy solutions depending upon what your sleep problem actually
is, I think about
this from the perspective of
a football player. There are
probably more likely to be dealing with things like sleep apnea because they're larger relative to say maybe a swimmer.
Who's issues more likely to be dealing with circadian rhythms because they're oftentimes practicing and training early in the morning. So write out the gates just thinking about what we're asking our bodies to do gives us some strategies for what type of disorder we may
likely have and then of course then the solution for that in order to make my Solutions a little bit more straightforward. What I want to do is talk about getting to sleep faster and then staying asleep more effectively.
So one of the reasons why people
struggle to fall asleep and how can we improve that
it can
A number of different things the obvious ones but still important
are we using stimulants or caffeine too late for our own physiology? Some folks can metabolize caffeine very quickly and it
doesn't affect them others really struggle. If it's within
eight or more hours of sleep. It can affect their overall Sleep Quality. That's a common one a
working or doing any other
stimulating events at night can be a problem where people really miss. This
is the best way to probably think about
it is novelty. So it's not the
fact that you're on your phone or the fact that you're watching TV or anything. It's seeking of novelty. That seems to be the big problem.
So it's okay for some
folks. I will be candid with you. I watched a little bit of TV basically every night before
sleep, but you don't want to do or things
that cause you to seek novelty. And
so your phone becomes problematic
because something new will pop up and a
reward that pattern
of seeing something new and novel and get you excited. And so what you don't want to do is watch TV shows that are that you don't want to watch things that are
Aggravating or rousing exciting
you want to watch typically things that are more interesting but
not overly stimulating. This is planet Earth. This is not
murder mysteries. This
is not things that get you aggravate an irritated like the news and political events and things like that. And so that is what you want to be cautious of eating
too close to bed can be a problem. However, however, and this is important people misses there is excellent.
Research showing small snacks before bed can
enhance save quality and reduce sleep
latency specifically kiwis are well studied
as effective sleep aids higher glycemic index
meals pretty close to bed. Again. Low
amounts can be great. We certainly don't want to eat high amounts and increase digestion or heart rate and problems like
that. But small snacks for some people
can actually be really effective at putting you to sleep.
Probably most important to all this though is really the pattern and if
you look around
Letting the Sleep research or talk to Sleep Experts. They're
going to talk about the need to make sure that your sleeping environment is really asleep. Sanctuary arm body has probably one tool
better than anything else and that's the ability to pattern recognizer
and this becomes a problem. If you go
into sleep environments and you are anticipating a pattern of sleep issues. Then that pattern is going to persist if you have the opposite then that pattern will persist.
So what we see lot of times our solution
strategies for people having a hard time going to sleep despite.
The fact that they're doing all these other things right and this is common right all I don't have caffeine. I stopped working, you know many hours before I don't eat before I meditate before I do breath work. I do all these things then I still struggle with sleep. Okay, great. I'm not watching TV all those other things. Why am I still struggling to fall asleep? Well oftentimes, it's the fact that you think about struggling to fall asleep that's causing that pattern to persist. So how do we solve that? We take clocks away.
You don't get to measure and you don't get to
Your sleep score. You don't get to see your sleep latency number. You don't get to look at the clock
and think about how long it's taking you to fall asleep.
So all of those are also tools to take that out of the equation and reframe the approach to thinking when I get into bed. This is an
awesome opportunity to sleep rather than oh my gosh. I'm going to get into bed and have another night where I can't fall asleep. That's a bad framework to be in and you want to get out of that as quickly as you possibly can these
environmental pattern recognition things are so strong. You can actually use it to your advantage, especially when
traveling everyone knows that the
first night effect, which is when you earn a new destination you struggle to sleep
the first night, but tend to sleep
a lot better the second or third and subsequent nights.
Well lot of that is because you're in a different environment, right? We are
seeing and smelling and hearing the same things we did in our
house. So if we can artificially create that in our house and take that on the road, we can dramatically improve our Sleep Quality and
specifically our sleep
onset. Think about smell as the easiest one if you take a cent that you like
Common ones
are lavender and you put a little lavender on your bed at night in your house every
night. You stand to associate that smell with safe
secure high quality sleep Etc. You take that on the road with you then put that on your new mattress or bed or wherever you
go. Those same sense will kick in the same pattern recognition will happen. And
ideally you have the same quality of sleep.
You can do a similar thing with temperature right if you have a set temperature of your bed, you may not be able to take that entire cooling mattress with you on the road.
But there are things like cooling pillows.
So you use that same temperature on your pillow at home take that pillow or pillowcase with you. And now you have a mimic environment.
You can buy in a couple of different things like that and you should
really improve your sleep latency when you're on the road now when it comes to staying asleep at night, there's a bunch of different solutions we can talk about one of my most
common ones is hydration. If you drink too much water, of course, you're going to wake up and have to urinate and that's going to cause you to get up a whole bunch but really some folks don't understand.
That Sleep Quality will be a big determinant of on how frequently you get up to go pee if you're waking up more than once and you go to P. There's a large volume there is clear and that's happening the next morning as well when you wake up and you still have a lot of P. Then you probably hair or in issue of drinking too much pure water and that case just reduce your water intake for a couple of hours prior to bed and you should be fine funny enough. We've had plenty of our high-performing clients.
Our high-performing Executives and our coaching programs come to us with all kinds of
problems with their physiology and performance and brain fog and really all of it boiled down to the fact that they drank
way too much water night. It was tanking their sleep. We move that and
within days they're sleeping for
10 hours for the first time in 15 years
and I have so many examples of
that where it's pretty silly honestly where I'm like man you spent a lot of money and time to figure out you drink way too much water night
so it can be quite that simple.
Other times though is a little bit deceiving so folks will oftentimes think that's a problem. If it's not the case you're waking up and there's not a lot of volume
there or there is like one time and then the second time it's you know a lot less or more yellow colored or in the morning you wake up and realize you didn't even
pee for 45 minutes after waking up. This is sometimes an issue of
Sleep Quality. And so what
happens is typically at night you're supposed to be sending signals to your kidneys that says, hey stop filtering and
producing urine and so obviously
We don't want to be waking up to do that all throughout the night.
If you're of a low quality sleep though
for any number of reasons that signal can continue to be sent and so you can continue to make the
urine and so people think that their Sleep Quality is being ruined by
the fact that they have to get up and pee when they're honest reality is they're peeing because they're already basically awake. And so
that is another way to figure out maybe I have a disorder. Maybe I should get checked out maybe something is going on
because I'm waking up to pee a lot and really there's not a lot there. I probably should get checked out
another really common one is
sleep position. We see this routinely we're 80
plus percentages of people sleep problems happen when they're on one position of their body most commonly, it's your
back. And so avoiding sleeping
directly on your back and sleeping either on your sides as a blanket rule though. Not true for
everyone can really
dramatically improve people's sleep. I've told this
story or
earlier of one of my professional athletes. I worked with having this issue, but we have seen this time and time again, and so getting
some assessment or
analysis of what's happening in your
sleep.
This is a similar
story to ergonomics. So making sure that your bed and mattress and pillow
are all comfortable can also be really important
factors to your overall Sleep Quality
outside of that. We start now
talking about environmental factors. You probably have heard a nauseam about of course temperature you want to be comfortable there and we want to be probably a little bit cooler than we are during the day,
but even noise we want to be less than 35 decimals anything above that tends to create problems. This is where actually things like pink noise.
Eyes start to come into play.
There's a lot of really interesting research coming out on that. It's a little bit deeper than white noise and
it's not really publicly available for the most part. But the research thus far is quite impressive the issue with like white noise or sleep machines is the fact that above 35 decimals that can actually
create sleep problems because they're so loud. And so while it's great to kind of drown out the background information, you don't want to be in a position where you're actually too loud
depending on where you live if you're especially in urban
Armand you have lots of externals sound stuff going on
you may want to actually turn to
something like earplugs instead of a sleep machine for that purpose though ear plugs May create problems with ear pain and discomfort and stuff like that. So
again choose the best tool
that you have for your situation, but really below 35 decimals is the gold standard there
again, ideally in the show notes here. We've got the
link to my paper that you can go through all 11 factors,
but other ones that are really common our CO2.
To there's emerging evidence that when that thing gets above nine hundred parts per million and then really specifically
and invent an exaggerated scenarios of above like 20
400 parts per million that this can
dramatically impact Sleep
Quality sleep
onset and sleep
latency as well as next day wakefulness memory and decision-making
and a bunch of other cognitive performance task. So many many other factors that go into your sleep quality of such as your environment on the
Have in the show notes
last thing I want to talk about here is snoring. Now. I don't want to overly
concern you everybody snores at some point or another. It doesn't necessarily mean it probably doesn't mean you have a sleep disorder though. It's not totally benign. If you're a chronic or excessive store that that's really the
problem here. It's not a
normal function. It's common but it's not normal. Now
one thing that's actually quite funny that I we laugh
about on my team a lot is how frequently people come into our program.
Alms because of sleep issues and they've tried everything
they've done all the stuff we've talked about they've had sleep studies done before
and they came back either Nick really moderate or
nothing at all and they maybe think their
testosterone is low, or maybe it is and they just like they've run through everything like I just cannot sleep and we do one little test on them and realize wow, how's your sleep
partner been assessed like all my sleep part or just snores like
crazy and we always talking I'm like man I got really
This for you here sleep is fine. But your partner sleep is a complete disaster and they're ruining your sleep. So we've had a lot of people come into our
program and then basically switch. So the person that paid initially said don't even
do me anymore. Do this on my sleep partner my husband or my wife, whatever
fix their sleep and then that original person sleep disorder
quote-unquote goes away immediately and permanently and this is happen. Like you can hear me literally laughing. It's happened so many times
and I don't feel bad about it because of people sleep perfectly afterwards because we found the real
problem and it had nothing to do.
Do with them
and so snoring can be a real problem with sleep. And so really making sure that it's not you it's not your sleeping partner or a lot of cases. It's their
dog not often cats are snoring that loud but dogs that's really really common.
And so that it can be really
disruptive to overall sleep.
If it is you personally will go back to that example. You can try just going with something
like mouth tape. I've done that a ton. I use it a ton especially using a combination of nasal dilator. So either nasal strips or
Something like that to open up your nasal passageways as well as mouth tape
and and I will be candid with you. We've had a lot of success with that and sometimes that'll step alone really can improve snoring and
and solve a lot of problems. It doesn't always happen them. So if it doesn't then you probably need to go to the next step one way or the other but it can absolutely be a viable solution and is a nice place to start
and just to be really clear the next
step I'm talking about is usually getting a sleep study done,
but you can try other stuff as well. We've already talked about
position is another common.
Ocean generally people don't snore on their sides and they do not nearly as much or as loud as they are when they're on their back.
So just try investing in one of those sleep pillows. I talked about earlier that
forces you to sleep on your left or right side. Sometimes that solves the problem immediately. There are also tongue exercises you can do we can actually have a whole protocol here in the show notes. This
is very free. It's going to take typically four to eight weeks to have some sort of an effect but there's strong research behind tongue
strengthening exercises to resolve that problem.
Sometimes there is no solution. It is anatomical and you either have to have some sort of nasal
surgery or
put in some sort of a mouthpiece to resolve that
problem and then sometimes not even that works. But for the most part something in that solution been I just went over is going to either dramatically help. If not completely solve your snoring
problems. I'd like to finish with a couple of quick tips for Sleep timing now. Mostly we're thinking about this in the context of jet lag if you're interested in
In that I'd recommend checking out. Dr. Andrew hubermanns, excellent podcasts and toolkits on that. You can go to huberman lab and just search a jet lag protocols and he's got a bunch of free information on optimizing and maximizing performance through jet lag. You can also use the app. I mentioned earlier Stephen lockleys time-shifter then again no affiliation there
but really what I want you to pay attention to is not creating jet lag in your own self and what I mean by that is making sure your sleep timing is consistent we
He liked to look at 45 minutes, maybe up to an hour at most
of waking
and going to sleep. And so if you are, you know waking up at 6 a.m. During the weekdays and then you sleeping in till 10:00 a.m. On the
weekends, you're effectively creating a four-hour time
shift every single week and that's going to be highly problematic. It's almost no different than you getting on a plane and changing time zones every single
weekend. And so really being consistent with
your waking time is the best strategy. I like to Anchor that at the easiest one to manipulate. It's hard to
Force yourself to go to sleep when you're not tired at night, but you can always wake up at or close to the same time. So although you may want to
sleep in many times you can do that, but try to keep it within an hour or so.
If you need more sleep outside of that try to go to
bed earlier the next night or
perhaps add in an app like we've talked about earlier.
If you're really going to be extending your transition. I would use the more diligent approach and I would like to finish here because I think this culminates an
exactly what I'm talking about the entire episode here
and that is using
Of to our advantage for performance enhancement. It is creating optimal plans based on
unique and specific solution and treating it like the true
performance enhancing variable it is and this is how the United States weightlifting team
handled sleep prior to the 2020 Olympic Games in Japan. Now as we talked about earlier, if you don't handle this appropriately not only you missing out on performance gains, but you're having a serious competitive disadvantage. So all the diligence and attention you put into your training for the years
ahead of that.
That and your nutrition and your physical therapy and your mental health and everything else like
that can completely be
smashed by a bad sleep transition approach that the data are overwhelming here.
And so what they did was number one, they hired a
full-time sleep consult and they built them out a sleep plan that
started six weeks
prior to the Olympic
Games. They did three weeks at home where they
transition and got them on a
training light and eating time
that was on Hawaii time.
Reason they did that is because they went to Hawaii spent three weeks there and then
transitioned over to
Japan and so remember six weeks total here. So three weeks at home
to get on to Hawaii time. Again three things. I'm in a plated was their exercise draining their light exposure and their food they then moved over to Hawaii. They spent three weeks. They're getting then on Japanese time. So by the time I left Hawaii and got to Japan they were already on optimized Japanese time this allowed them to the
land. And remember this was
during covid-19.
And so they couldn't hang out in the Olympic Village for all the time. Like they typically we did these athletes were oftentimes competing two to three days. Maybe five days at the most from
when the time I landed in Japan
for the time they're on their Podium.
So to me that again that was a great example of taking sleep seriously and making sure when only not ruin our performance
but optimizing it and getting the most out of our system.
So to wrap everything up let's
summarize what we talked about today. We
started off by going over the
power and benefits of
Physical performance
and strength and power and reaction time as well as on-field performance. So accuracy of shooting and things like
that to actually winning more games but it extends beyond that. We're really talking about the ability to maximize our
physical performance in any domain or capacity in which we're asking our body to perform remember as always if you have a body you are an athlete and we
all want to perform at our best and it would not make any sense for us to think that
that sleeping. Okay
is okay. We want to sleep great so that we perform great
in doing that. We talked about three major areas sleep duration see quality
and sleep timing and how
various strategies can be used based on
our own individual needs and demands to create
specific solutions
to maximize all three of those areas of sleep to get the best out of our body that we can we also talked about how that can
help us recover from injury faster. And as always we
A combination of free to moderate to what the best in the world are doing for the three eyes that is how do I
investigator? Analyze my sleep. How do I interpret it? And then
how do I intervene to make changes on it? I
hope you enjoyed all this and that you don't use any of it against me
when your athletes are competing against mine because I want to win
thank you for joining for today's episode.
Our goal is to share exciting scientific Insight that helps you perform at your absolute best
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