How does sleep impact performance and your body?
Sleep is our bodies number one anabolic source. Anabolic meaning restoring, repairing, recovering. Thats why anabolic drugs are taken, to speed up the recovery and growth response of our bodies. Sleep gives us our biggest natural anabolic response. If we take the mindset of sacrificing sleep for external factors (fill in activity of choice here) in time, we disrupt our natural biological clock of self regulating hormones. These hormones are responsible for our physical and psychological recovery.
All of us who train and are athletes know that recovery, feeling fresh and healing from injuries (or mitigating injury) is a way to take our performance to the next level...whatever that means to you. Non sport specific athletes also know that energy, mental clarity and an over all sense of well being is a necessity in feeling good for our "performance for life." When we continually sacrifice our sleep we lose our ability to be at our best for our sport or life demands.
You can sleep when you're dead mentality leads us to a disregulation of repair hormones, increased physiological stress and ultimately a suffer in our performance. This is a great graph from The CHEK Institute showing the natural circadian rhythm (healthy sleep cycle) and a disrupted one (sacrificed sleep)
The top graph shows our optimal hormonal timeline throughout our day (stress hormones-black line, recovery/growth hormones-white line). Showing that if we do not diminish our sleep, we start our day with a raise in stress hormones, which we need to complete tasks, train, work, and deal with our every day demands. As the day goes on and goes into the evening when we are naturally supposed to wind down our activity and begin resting, the stress hormones should decrease and we should see an increase in our recovery and repair hormones. You can then see that there is a nice timeframe (starting around 10pm) in which sleep contributes to our bodies physical repair and then our mind/psychological repair (starting around 2am). This gives us the freshest mind, and puts our bodies in a position of healing and growing. Majorly important for performance.
In the second graph, you can see the physical repair is starting later (closer to midnight) but our mind/psychological repair still starts at 2am. Due to our bodies natural instinct to stay alive, it will always prioritize the psychological repair over physical repair. So, if sleep is sacrificed, our body will naturally reject physical recovery in order to have the best chance of survival. The mind is priority. So now, our physical body also takes a hit for growth and recovery. This slows performance goals no matter what it may be. (gain muscle mass, recover from soreness, heal from surgery or an injury, weight loss, etc.) Working out at high intensity too late in the evening also can disrupt this rhythm as your body will start to raise its stress hormones again to deal with the stress/demands put on it from the workout. This can also play a role in decreased recovery.
Based on our natural circadian rhythm, the first half of the day would be a more optimal time to do any higher intensity training, winding down later afternoon and into the evening with a bedtime that is conducive to full physical AND psychological repair. I understand sports, training, work schedule and life are individual to each of us and are factors in our lifestyle and sleep. My suggestion would be to adopt other recovery methods if a general sleep cycle is challenging or not possible to maintain. Listening to your body and watching your performance may also give some insight into when you may need a recharge.
Yes, you can sleep when you're dead, but if you don't sleep well now, sleeping when you're dead may come sooner than you think! (My attempt at a dark humor joke).
If you have any questions regarding performance training or how to add in recovery/performance methods into your life don't hesitate to reach out!
See you after the nap,
Coach Rif
"performance for life"
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