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Sleep – The Ultimate Performance Enhancing Drug

Sleep is the ultimate performance enhancing drug. If you could bottle up all the benefits of sleep in a side-effect free drug you’d have the first trillion dollar drug. Most people only get about four-fifths of the sleep they need. Which doesn’t sound so bad until you think about the chronic cumulative effects. What if your salary was cut by 20%? The immediate effects would be bad enough, but imagine what it would do to your retirement savings.

Lack of sleep can even affect your genetics. One recent study showed that people who slept for less than seven hours per night had an increased genetic risk for obesity. But how is this possible, aren’t your genes encoded at birth? Yes – and you can modify the interpretation of them with your lifestyle choices.

I protect my sleep fiercely. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a 9-10, sometimes 11 hours of sleep a night guy. Despite my best attempts I usually get to bed around 10, which means I’m usually up around 9. I take quick naps in the mid-afternoon often. While I’d love to be one of those people who can get away with 5-6 hours, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen for me, it’s just not in my genetics. But on the flip side, I reap the myriad benefits of all that sleep.

Sleeping better is accessible to almost everyone, but you’re going to have to do the fairly mundane work of basic sleep hygiene that you’ve been ignoring in the hopes of finding a sleep hack.

Environment

First let’s talk about your bedroom. You need a comfortable mattress. Sure you can buy one of those hip mattresses advertised on Facebook, but I think it’s worth taking it a step further considering you will literally spend a third of your life sleeping on it. Consider calling my friend Casey at Wildcat Mattress and telling him about your needs and preferences. Next you need to darken your room significantly. Buy room darkening roller blinds if you don’t already have blinds that block all outside light. They’re dirt cheap and incredibly effective. Finally, you need to be able to get your room down to a good sleeping temperature – between 60 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Depending on your situation getting an extra window unit or wall-mounted air conditioner might be the most efficient and effective way to do this. Our current house has central A/C but I still have a Haier ultra-quiet window unit because it’s both more effective and more efficient than trying to chill my entire house down to 60º. Temperature, light, mattress – fix these things.

Habits

Next you need to address the behavioral habits surrounding your sleep. If you watch TV or use electronics immediately before going to bed, you should probably stop. Research has shown that the predominantly blue (in terms of spectrum) light emitted by modern electronics is double plus ungood for sleep and may in fact cause other pathologies including eye issues. Amber-tinted glasses can help with this. Big picture though, it’s also best to wind down before sleep in a more natural manner.

Getting to sleep before 10pm is ideal, as most people will experience a bump in cortisol levels around that time if they’re not asleep yet – experienced as the well-known “second wind” you get late at night. This cortisol coming at the wrong time could be the cause of many downstream deleterious effects.

You’ll have to experiment and figure out for yourself if caffeine late in the day (or at any time of day) is a problem for your own sleep cycle. Between self-experimentation confirmed by genetic testing I know that I’m a caffeine “fast metabolizer” and it doesn’t affect me negatively if I have caffeine even as late after dinner. Your mileage might vary, and you might have to cut it out after noon.

Apps

Most (all?) sleep apps don’t truly measure your sleep, they sort of approximate it based on things that are easier to measure like how much you’re moving. Zeo was a company that actually measured your brain signals, but unfortunately they failed. BUT, I still think it’s worth using a sleep monitor app, even one as simple as Sleep Cycle because it brings your focus and attention to improving your sleep. It can also help you sort out variables that affect your sleep – such as when you’ve had caffeine or worked out.

Talk to Your Doc

If you’re more than 50 pounds overweight and/or snore significantly you should strongly consider asking your doctor for a sleep study. If you need a CPAP you’re probably not going to sleep well without one, so get it checked out.

Supplements

There are some supplements that can help with sleep. ZMA is one that could be beneficial, is pretty cheap, and is unlikely to have any ill effects. Melatonin is the most popular sleep supplement, and it’s worth experimenting with but you can become dependent on it so it’s best to back it out once you’ve normalized your sleep rhythm. Plus, supplementing with melatonin doesn’t do any good if you’re not covering the other basics first, and in fact it can totally backfire.

Ultimately, these steps are mundane. You’ve probably heard them before. If you were hoping for some sleep hacks you are disappointed. The good news is that means you haven’t done moved the simple and effective big rocks to improve your sleep, and you still stand to gain from the most effective actions.

by david Leave a Comment

Your Diet Needs To Be Different, No Matter What It Is

I don’t hope to convince you that the Paleo diet, the Atkins diet, a Precision Nutrition style model of eating, Primal eating, or vegetarianism is the best diet. In fact, I’d like you to believe that no matter what your current diet is you should change it – at least eventually.

If you’re a fitness enthusiast (and maybe even if you’re not) you will have noticed that trends in diet come and go in cycles. A decade ago, low-fat dieting was all the rage both in mainstream media as well as in bodybuilding circles. It seemed to pass the common-sense sniff test, “if you don’t eat fat, you won’t be fat.” This cycle lasted for many years, until a wide enough swath of bodybuilders realized they were trading major biological functions (mildly important things like, you know, sex drive) in exchange for keeping their fat intake so low.

Then the tide shifted towards predominantly low-carb dieting, with much higher fat intake. Naturally, this worked exceptionally well for a while as people learned that body fat is much more closely linked to carbohydrate intake (and the associated hormone responses) and that dropping carbs very low created rapid fat loss. Most recently, formerly low-carb evangelists have realized that carbs, too, are needed for healthy metabolic function. Having nowhere left to turn, with protein being sacred and realizing that neither fat nor carbs can be injudiciously eliminated from a diet, these folks are turning to more of a “everything in moderation” approach. But they’re still wrong.

A few years ago a couple bright, innovative authors and researchers proposed a very controversial idea. Brad Pilon and Martin Berkhan suggested that maybe, just maybe, you don’t need to eat the widely accepted 6 meals per day. In fact, these guys recommended fasting completely anywhere from 18 to 24 hours per day. People who have implemented this strategy have reported exceptional results, especially in fat loss. Those who came directly from a habit of eating meals every 3-4 hours often observe the most pronounced positive effects.

The shift from carbs to fat, and eating often to taking large breaks from eating has one major thing in common: change.

It’s not, contrary to the flawed understanding of many of the premature evangelists of these ideas, that any one of these macro dietary trends is necessarily better than the other. For example, when you’ve been eating low-carb for a long time and you begin to reintroduce carbs in your diet you will likely experience marked improvements in performance, body composition, and health. Your clone in opposite world will experience the same level of improvement when they reintroduce fat into their low fat diet. The point is that when you let the pendulum swing too far in any one direction, you can expect that a change of direction is going to happen – whether you like it or not. The people who try to maintain stability in the face of impending change are in for a world of pain.

Life, in a very real way, is chaos, change and the response to it. What separates you from a rock is that when a pick splits the rock in half the rock will never be whole again, much less bigger than whole. When you lift weights, your muscle is (figuratively) split in half and then put back together again – not only whole, but better than before. Nassim Taleb wrote what I consider to be one of the most important books of our time on this phenomenon, coining a new term for it: antifragile.

A champagne glass is fragile. A short fall from a low ledge will shatter it to pieces. It can’t handle any disorder.

A pint glass is still fragile, but a bit more robust. A fall from a ledge may not break it, but a fall from a table will create more disorder than it can ever recover from.

Your body is antifragile. If you looked at muscle and blood markers of distress after a workout, you would assume the body had suffered an injury. Some time later, everything would be back to normal and measurably better than before. An antifragile system does not suffer when disorder is introduced — it benefits from it.

Relentlessly sticking to a very specific and stable dietary philosophy is fragile. You will experience disorder and you will not be able to react to it. The disorder will be greater than your body can handle, and you’ll break. A recent and common example, that you can verify with a few minutes on Facebook or reading blogs in the fitness industry, is the extremely high prevalence of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Chronically low carbohydrate intake, as seen with rigid ideological low-carb dieting, often combined with high stress, is associated to serious thyroid dysfunction.

In nature, things move in waves – changing direction when they crest and trough. Biology can be explained by chemistry, chemistry can be explained by physics. An oversimplification to be sure, but it is our current understanding. We know that the very foundation of physics is the movement of matter through space in the form of waves. Waves carry energy. In a very real sense, change or lack of change carries energy. At a certain point it will take more energy to resist the change than it does to move with the change. The longer you resist the change, the bigger the correction will be when the change of direction finally occurs. Anyone who has seen a figure competitor binge after a contest like they just go out of a concentration camp can attest to this.

Perhaps you have experienced this yourself. You may have eaten a certain way for quite a while with either positive changes you wanted to see (such as fat loss) or no change at all if you were happy with your current state. Whatever you were doing, you might say it was working for you. At some point though, it stopped working. You stopped losing fat, maybe even started gaining weight even though you were eating the same way. This gets frustrating, so you increase the compliance with whatever you’re doing. If you’re eating low carb, you cut your carbs even lower. If you’re fasting, you fast even more often. If you’re eating many meals with high protein you eat even smaller meals and up your protein intake. Essentially, you apply more effort (no different than the first topic in this book) but it doesn’t work. It won’t work, because the entire system has changed. You don’t need to go further in the same direction, you need to go in an entirely different direction.

Whatever you are doing right now, whatever “works for you” in this moment, is not going to work forever. You should be prepared to change it, and in fact you have to be prepared to anticipate the change and shift before you’re forced to. The longer a system has been stable, the more unstable it is. Change will happen. Will you be ready to surf the wave, or will you be drowned by it?

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

What are you eating the most of?
What are you eating the least of? Could you eat more of that?
How many different things, in different categories, do you eat?
Are there things you can’t eat at all? Can you find a variation, or something close to what you can’t eat that you CAN eat? [Ex: You can’t drink milk, but you can eat hard cheese. Can you eat softer cheeses?]
How often do you eat? Can you eat less often? More often?
Can you eat large meals?
Can you eat many small meals?
Can you go 12 hours without food? 18? 24? 36?
Can you operate at your highest level of performance eating low levels of carbohydrates?
Can you operate at your highest level of performance eating low levels of fat?
Can you operate at your highest level of performance eating low levels of protein?

by david Leave a Comment

There’s No Such Thing as Perfect Form

Potentially the most absurd and pervasive belief in the fitness culture is that perfect form prevents and eliminates injury. A Google search for “perfect form injury” reveals some twenty six million results, every single one of which on the first page are related to the belief that perfect form will prevent injury, and imperfect form will result in injury.

If this is true, I only have one question:

Why are the best and brightest in the fitness culture and industry still getting hurt?

I only need to take one look at my Facebook feed to see many of my friends who are leaders in this industry complaining of neck, back, shoulder, and knee injuries. These are very rarely acute injuries as well — typically they are pain issues with no obvious origin or moment of injury.

This is no criticism of these excellent people and trainers, although there are a few gurus who are well deserving of criticism. Rather, it is a criticism of this broken belief system that textbook perfect form is an antidote to injury. This belief is so pervasive, so insidious that just about everyone accepts it.

To be perfectly clear on terminology, when I refer to perfect form I am referring to the form for an exercise or movement that makes it into a textbook or how-to video. Things like vertical shins, symmetrical feet, elbows tucked in, and so on. Alternatively, what someone can see from the outside looking at how someone moves and makes a judgment about how good the form is by looking at it.

The idea of perfect form presupposes a lot of things, but first and foremost that everyone is identical. You cannot discuss angles of bones and joints without first agreeing that you are talking about the same structure. It would be like a group of engineers discussing the acceptable tolerances and design decisions for a bridge, but basing all their assumptions on the design of a different bridge.

Even if people did have relatively similar bone lengths, connective tissue insertion points, and joint configurations, it would still be impossible to account for the tiny but pervasive differences in individual anatomy. One of your legs is longer than the other, the only question is by how much. Given the prevalence of desk jobs, I can predict with nearly perfect accuracy that one of your shoulders is more protracted and internally rotated than the other. One of your hands is probably stronger than the other, maybe even the whole side of your body. How can it be, then, that there is a universal form that doesn’t account for these differences?

Worse, there is no feedback. It’s a uni-directional conversation. You tell the body what to do without the body being given a chance to respond and react. When you shove someone into form that isn’t suitable for them, you’ll most likely get some feedback in the form of pain or sensation. This is an action signal that says “Move, this isn’t working.” Ignoring that and forcing a position results in greater and greater sensation until the body gives you a sensation you can’t ignore and something snaps. Contrary to the idiocy you’ll see on Internet message boards, people snap far more often from trying to force perfect form than they do from pursuing what is best for their own bodies.

If you get past the textbook and start looking at the form great lifters employ, you will come to a troubling conclusion. Every great lifter has distinctive form that is completely unique to them. You can look at two of the greatest deadlifters of all time and see massive differences in form. Who is right?

Your response: “But I’m not a world class lifter, I have to stick to perfect form so I don’t get hurt.” No, you need to move the weight from point A to point B in the shortest distance possible for your body. This may start out looking nothing like typical form. It may end up looking picture perfect, or it might not end up looking textbook at all and you become a great lifter because of it. Pursuing what is best for your individual body will take you further than trying to ram a square peg into a round hole ever will.

If you’re not going to continue to force someone else’s idea of perfect form, what are you going to do to pursue your best form? Here are questions for you to ask:

Does it test well? See my videos on ROM testing for biofeedback.
What is the shortest distance between point A and point B, and how can I get there?
Does it hurt? Stop immediately, and make a change.
Does making a change make it feel better? Use it.
Does making a change make it stronger? Use it.