6 December 2016

Failure to sleep 8hrs = failure to train




This is a fantastic lecture by Kirk Parsely on why you need (NEED!) 8 hours sleep per night, and why if you don’t get it, your training, studying etc is at best impaired and at worst a complete waste of time. Kirk lays it on the line. But if you don’t have the hour to watch it right at this moment, here are a few headlines that I hope will encourage you to watch it at the first opportunity:

1. The research shows that everyone settles out at 7.5 hours sleep or more. Genetic exceptions might be more resilient to short term sleep deprivation, but that’s all. They are still slowly breaking themselves by chronically sleeping less.

2. The sleep deprived adapt to feel like they can cope with the deprivation and perform normally. But the research shows that they do not. Their performance remains significantly depressed. They just don't realise it.

3. Are you sleep deprived? It’s extremely likely.

4. Digital screens, caffeine, light in your bedroom, noise in your bedroom are all problems. If you want to respond to your training, you need to address them. Thankfully, they are all fixable.

5. To sleep, cortisol must fall to low levels and melatonin must be released. Nutrition plays a role in both and you can easily manipulate this to make sure you have the raw materials to make what you need.

6. Can’t lose/control weight? It may well be the sleep.

7. Injury risk skyrockets for the sleep deprived. Dose-response relationship.


8. The bottom line - failure to sleep = failure to reach potential. It is therefore the foundation on which any training plan must be built. Don’t kid yourself otherwise.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Totally agreen! I work various shifts days & nights. Getting up around 04:30 not getting home till gone 20:00. On a night shift sleep csn be interupted in so many ways averaging only z few hours, this screws you up. The constant feeling of tiredness and very little drive to do anything. It's very hard to get motivated to do even the most basic training

matt said...

I'm sure you will have already read widely but here are some links on the subject collated by a group of cognitive scientists working to relate their field better to education
http://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2016/7/3/weekly-digest-17
Best wishes