The #1 Performance Enhancer
Everyone is out there trying to find that one thing that enhances their performance. Some may say it’s a specific exercise in the gym, others will say it’s their plyometric program or even a specific food.
I’m sorry to say but it’s none of that.
I don’t care how much you train, what you're doing in the gym, how cold your ice bath is or what you're eating.
The best performance enhancer out there is SLEEP!!
It’s something everyone does but most people don’t actually think about it, they just sleep.
A good quality sleep is the best possible recovery your body can have, both physically and mentally. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just had a hard session in the gym or on the field and your muscles are sore or if you’ve been studying/learning something new, getting a good quality sleep will help you improve.
There’s two key things that you need to think about when it comes to your sleep.
Duration (Quantity)
Quality
It’s no good getting 8 hours of sleep if it’s all really light and you're tossing and turning all night. This doesn’t actually help us, other than letting our muscles and joints relax.
On the other hand, a 4 hour sleep that is of high quality will leave you feeling refreshed but in the long term you're not actually allowing full recovery to take place. We need longer than this.
Duration
We’ve all been told, you need 8 hours of sleep every night. But why is this? What does the research say?
There are plenty of study’s around sleep, looking at a number of different factors.
But these two would have to be my favourite.
The first one is about the total duration of sleep and the impact it has on injuries. It has been found that if you sleep less than 8 hours per night you have a 1.7 times greater risk of being injured. This was discovered in a study by Milewski et al. in 2014. I find this really interesting because everyone is out trying to find the best exercises to prevent injuries, when sleeping has a direct relation to injuries.
The other study is a more recent one from Craven et al. 2022, which shows that an acute sleep loss significantly impacts your physical performance. It was found that if you have less than 6 hours sleep across a 24 hour period it not only negatively affects you the next day but every hour spent awake can result in a -0.4% decrease in physical performance. So imagine you’ve got a game Saturday afternoon and you don’t get to sleep until midnight Friday but have to be up at 6am Saturday morning (6 hours). Firstly, you're not going to sleep for that entire period. Secondly, your performance will be decreased but by the time you get to your 2pm game (7 Hours after waking up) you will be at a -2.8% decrease in your physical performance (This is just at the start of the game, not to mention the end).
So not only will insufficient duration of your sleep increase your likelihood of injuries, it will also decrease your physical performance.
Quality
A lot of people understand that they need to get close to 8 hours of sleep each night but don’t understand how to improve the quality of their sleep.
Firstly, we must look at the different stages of sleep and what they are used for.
Deep Sleep- In short this period is useful for short & long term memory, learning and your body releasing growth hormones (Which allows the muscles to grow and develop). You should be looking for 13-23% of your total sleep to be deep, with the majority coming before midnight. If you don’t get enough deep sleep this can lead to serious health conditions like Alzheimers’s, Diabetes, Stroke, Heart Disease, etc.
Rapid Eye Movement (REM) Sleep- This stage is where most of your dreams happen, your brain activity actually looks very similar to if you’re awake. You should be looking for about 25% of your total sleep to be REM. During this stage your brain is able to rest and repair itself, it is associated with better mental health and stronger immune system. You should wake up feeling refreshed and alert if you’ve had enough REM sleep.
The way I look at improving your quality of sleep is by making your room a bit like a cave; dark, cold, quiet. The other things to think about is decreasing your blue light, night time activity and having your last big meal 1.5-2 hours prior to sleep.
Going back to making your room like a cave. Firstly, you want the room to be dark and when I say dark you don’t want to be able to see your hand in front of your face. If you have light coming in or in your room your brain is going to think it is the light of the sun and slowly wake you or not let you sleep. Secondly, the cold is the temperature you want your room, we have adapted over time and have so many ways to keep us warm at night (We have a blanket, you may have thick PJs on, an electric blanket or a partner in the bed with you) so ideally we want to air temperature to be fairly cold, 15-19 degrees is the recommended temperature but I prefer colder (everyone is different). Lastly, the room being quiet is fairly self explanatory I think.
The other 3 things (decreasing your blue light, night time activity and having your last big meal 1.5-2 hours prior to sleep) to think about are all related to allowing your body time to relax and switch into more of a parasympathetic nervous system. This will allow the body to slow down and begin the process of repairing itself.
So there you have it, a look into the best performance enhancer out there!! SLEEP.
If you're looking to become 1% better every day then you should definitely be able to take something away from this blog. Implement one thing at a time and take advantage of your life compounding.
