Unlocking Your Potential: The Power of Quality Sleep for Health and Progress

Is your sleep stopping your progress?

Sleep is so important for maintaining cognitive skills, such as attention, learning, and memory, such that poor sleep will make it much more difficult to cope with even relatively minor stressors and can even impact our ability to perceive the world accurately. Effects on your mood, energy, productivity and focus are just a few of the negative impacts sleep deprivation can have on your and your family’s daily life.

Not only do you feel sluggish, lethargic, fatigued and unmotivated when you aren’t getting adequate sleep, but it will also have an incredibly negative impact on your training and nutrition.

For your training, a lack of sleep will mean that you not only struggle to perform and progress but you will also be at higher risk of injury due to slower reaction times, brain function and muscle soreness. Studies have shown that being consistently under slept for less than 7 hours per night can increase risk of injury in athletes for up to x1.7.

Have you ever walked away from a training and thought ‘shit that was harder than I thought’ or ‘I felt crap today’.

Often this isn’t just a coincidence or as a result of a long day at work or poor nutrition. A lot of the time that will be down to your sleep over the previous few nights. Even if you think that you got about 8 hours, maybe it took you a while to get to sleep and the sleep that you had wasn’t deep sleep (rem sleep), the most essential ingredient to life where your body and brain recovers.

Protein and diet is not as good as quality sleep. When you are sleep deprived you feel hungrier, less satisfied with food and actually burn less calories as poor sleep can de-regulate your metabolism.

Bad diet choices are another inevitable result of being under-slept. You’ll feel hungrier and  feel less satisfied. A drop in leptin makes your stomach actually feel emptier, while a rise in ghrelin makes you feel hungrier and slows your metabolism. 

Now, thats all of the bad news and the quite confronting reality here is the good news. You can make this monumental change and improve your life every day starting today !

Even if you believe that your 5am starts mean that getting 8 hours is difficult, what is anyone really doing past the hour of 9pm anyway apart from watching Netflix?

Start tonight. Make sure you give yourself an 8.5-9 hour window of sleep. This will account for any struggles you have with getting to sleep.

Tips for success:
Go to bed at the same time every night.
Be strict with yourself.
Try breath work to get to sleep, and if you wake up in the night. Simply focus on nothing else other than your inward and outward breath.

Do not check your mobile device within 30mins of bed time and aim to begin turning off most of the lights around the house around 60mins before you head off to bed.

Try reading or a slow activity like bedtime yoga or meditation to help yourself to sleep.

Much like a diet or training plan, there will be some days where you don’t have a great sleep, but 1 day every once in a while is a lot better than most days. Just like with your training and diet, 1 bad day won’t ruin your progress as long as it doesn’t become a habit.

Really commit to making a good night’s sleep (7-9 hours) a non-negotiable part of your life style for optimum health and exercise benefits including weight loss, muscle building and aerobic/ fitness based goals.

P.s. Your family and friends will be thankful of how great your mood is, how energised you are and fantastic your life is!!!