Ollie: What if I told you that you could get faster and fitter by doing more of this [snoring]
and less of this? Sound good? Well, in this video, I'm going to explain why sleep is important, how
it impacts your fitness and athletic performance, and also, techniques and hacks that you can use to
maximize it. Before we crack on though, let's have a poll. I want to know, do you pay more attention
to your sleep quality when you're training hard? If you click on the link, it'll take you to the
poll and you can vote yes or no. [music]
Most athletes understand that if you want to get fitter and stronger,
you've got to train but that's only half of it. If you want to reap the rewards and
benefits of that training, your body needs to be given adequate time to rebuild and recover.
Above and beyond, the most powerful recovery tool out there is sleep. Roger Federer
isn't a cyclist but he has attributed his very long, successful, and consistent career at the
top of his sport down to getting 12 hours of sleep a night, which is a huge amount.
The importance of sleep isn't lost on top cyclists either. For example, Team Sky or Team INEOS,
as they're known now, actually have individual mattresses that they take to races for their
riders to sleep on, such is the importance they place on it. They also went a step further and
got Chris Froome his own personal luxury motor home to sleep in or until the UCI banned it.
Typical. What does sleep actually do? Let's look into the science of it.
Now, sleep is a lot more complicated than most people would give it credit for. Scientists
have spent years and years researching it and we still don't fully understand everything about it.
What we do know is that sleep is in four different phases and these four phases repeat throughout the
night in sleep cycles. Typically, you have four to five sleep cycles in a given night's sleep.
Phase one is the dozing off phase. You typically spend one to five minutes doing this and if you
get disturbed in the night, you can reach this dozing off, very light phase again.
Then the next phase, phase two, is light sleep. This is the dominant phase of sleep. People tend
to spend roughly half of their total sleep time in light sleep. During this phase, your temperature,
your body temperature lowers slightly, your heart rate lows, and your brain activity changes. The
first cycle of light sleep is usually 15 to 25 minutes long in most adults. Phase three is REM
sleep which stands for Rapid Eye Movement and it's where the band takes its name. During this phase,
the brain is restored and the ideas and thoughts, and skills that were acquired by your brain
during the day are cemented as memories. Phase four, the final phase, is deep sleep,
also known as slow-wave sleep. From the perspective of athletic performance, this
is probably the most important and critical phase. During this phase, the brain produces a pattern
of waves which are quite characteristic and known as delta waves. It's from this that it gets its
name slow-wave sleep. It's during this phase that the body produces 95% of its growth hormones
including human growth hormone which is absolutely critical for rebuilding and repairing your body
so that it can get fitter and stronger. Slow-wave sleep helps with other body processes too
and is likely to boost your immune system. Slow-wave sleep cycles typically last around
20 to 40 minutes. The amount of human growth hormone that your body produces decreases
with age meaning that the quality of the sleep that you get becomes more and more important.
Morning. Well, now that you understand the different cycles of sleep and the different
phases, you can perhaps appreciate why not all sleep is equal. It really is a case of the quality
is key. If you're interested in the quality of your sleep, how good a sleeper you are, then it's
something you can actually measure using Whoop wearable sleep tracking devices. For example,
I use a Whoop but there are other ones out there. The Whoop measures your heart rate and the gaps
between your heartbeats. This data is processed with clever algorithms to track your sleep cycles,
work out your heart rate variability and recovery. In addition, you can customize a daily
questionnaire to track other lifestyle factors to see how they affect your sleepover time,
such as, did you travel on a plane? Did you drink alcohol, or take any medication? Did
you eat a vegan diet and much more. The app is able to collate this data,
present it to you and suggest which behaviors are beneficial and detrimental to your sleep. As
a nerdy scientist, I absolutely love this stuff but I'm not alone, Taday Pagacha wears one too.
To find out more about how much sleep athletes get and how good quality that sleep is, and also how
this impacts the fitness of athletes. I'm going to speak to Kristin Holmes, who's the Vice President
of performance optimization at Whoop because they've gathered a really useful and insightful
amount of data on this subject. Kristin, thanks. Kristen: Hi. Good to see you, Oliver.
Ollie: Thanks for coming on the call. My first question, how much sleep do athletes tend to get?
Kristen: Spending eight hours in bed, that's kind of the recommendation by the National
Sleep Foundation, but how much time we need to spend in bed is going to vary for everyone.
If I can spend seven hours and 42 minutes in bed and only spend 30 minutes of that time awake,
and then spend almost 50% of that total time in deeper stages of sleep,
I'm winning, I'm in a really good spot. Oftentimes, because people are really poor
sleepers because they haven't managed their day appropriately or they're inconsistent with their
sleep-wake time, or they don't have a cold, dark, quiet room, hygiene is really important,
they might actually have to spend more time in bed in order to get that quality sleep.
Ollie: There's a lot of people that lead very busy lives, they've got maybe children or whatever,
that they struggle to maybe have 10 hours available for sleeping time.
That's really interesting, you're saying, if you have good habits, maximize the window of
sleep you have and make that more quality sleep. How can you tell if you're getting enough sleep?
Kristen: If you take caffeine out of the mix, you shouldn't feel sleepy during the day.
Adults should not feel sleepy during the day. Unless you're doing huge training so if we've got
folks who are training for a massive event or in a preseason or in
a functional overreaching stage where they're really putting on tons of volume and intensity,
they might feel sleepy and need a nap. Naps are amazing recovery amplifiers. If you are training
super hard, like you're doing double sessions, for example, morning and afternoon workout or you're
a triathlete, naps can be incredibly powerful. The normal adult should not feel sleepy during
the day. That's the quickest, dirtiest way to understand if you're in fact getting
sufficient amount of sleep during your nocturnal nighttime sleep.
[music] Ollie: How
does sleep affect athletic performance? Well, there have been several studies in particular,
several studies looking at cycling performance, one of which is a study from Deakin University,
which took competitive endurance cyclists and then looked at how their time trial performance was
affected with respect to sleep. First, they gave them their standard night sleep, which was around
six and a half to seven hours. It then added 30% extra sleep on to that which brought them up to
around eight and a half hours on average, and then looked at their performance with restricted sleep
at less than five hours a night, which was 30% less than what they got on average.
The test involved a blind time trial effort with a fixed amount of work to do and lasting around
an hour. Now the crazy thing from the results is that after just two nights of sleep restriction,
the riders completed the time trial in an average of 16.4 minutes versus 58.8 minutes with their
normal sleep. That's a significant amount of difference and a 3% decline in performance. On
the other hand, when they got extra sleep, you can see with three nights extra sleep, they finished
their time trial at nearly two minutes faster than they had before, a 3% improvement there
in performance swinging the other way. The perceived level of exertion remained
the same. The Time Trial felt just as hard, the riders just went quicker, but with extra sleep,
they were also recorded as being in a better mood having quicker reaction times and a longer
attention span. When you consider that all three of the Grand tours this year were won
by a margin of less than two minutes, it really does make you think. I guess the take-home message
is that if you've got a big cycle event where you want to do as well as you can,
then if you can get up to 90 minutes extra sleep the three nights before it,
well, it's not going to do you any harm at all. I was intrigued to find out more about how
nutrition can influence your sleep so I arranged a call with Dr. Stacy Sims who's an
exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist. She's a also co-founder of a company called
ERW with the chef, Hannah Grant, who you may remember from previous GCN videos.
Now one of the goals of ERW, which stands for Eat, Race, Win,
is to help top athletes with their hydration so that they can sleep and recover better.
Dr. Stacy: You've heard things like don't have alcohol, don't have caffeine, all these things
around like it's going to interfere with your sleep, but what it comes down to is if you have
a lot in your stomach or your digestive system within two hours of going to bed, you're not
going to get into a deep repetitive sleep which is what we want. Because ultimately when you have
a lot of food close before bed, then we have more of what we call a sympathetic drive to
really keep your body working to digest the food. All the aspect of the rest and digest as
order of sleep goes to digest the food. Instead of being able to get into that slow-wave sleep
and the REM sleep, your body just can't do it. It doesn't have enough of the signaling to get
into that reparation sleep because it's trying to digest the food. Regardless of all the wives'
tales that you've heard or people telling you to eat this and not that it really comes down
to the timing before is really important. That when we think about during the day,
what can you do to improve your energy levels and then to get into a really good sleep pattern?
You want to think about eating watery fruits and veggies because
that really helps with your gut microbiome which again feeds food into metabolic considerations for
sleep and getting into good sleep, staying hydrated so that your body works well.
Going easy on the booze, of course. Caffeine is a funny one because some people
are really receptive to caffeine and get overstimulated with one shot of espresso.
Other people have a genetic predisposition to being a really fast metabolizer so they’ll
have a shot of espresso before bed and it doesn't interfere. It's pretty simple, it's just thinking
about backing up your calories earlier in the day so that you're not eating right before bed
including that snack that so many athletes try to get in as a casein or a protein drink before bed.
That even interrupts [unintelligible 00:12:42] and when you’re thinking
about it from an athletic standpoint, you need that good sleep for reparation.
Ollie: Yes. That's really interesting because that is something that a lot of athletes are told. It's
probably advised that we've even put out on GCN that is this thing about, yes have your casein
protein in whatever form it is before bed and that's like a key thing. You're saying that that's
not actually a good idea for a sleep pattern? Dr. Stacy: No. Unless it's just casein and water
but most people won't do casein and water, they mix it with something else. When you start mixing
things with the casein, it creates food that needs to be digested quickly, and then that's
what pulls away from the parasympathetic aspect of getting to sleep. If it's casein and water,
it's not such a big difference because casein is so slow to digest, it doesn't pull a lot.
Ollie: Is there a rough rule of thumb that people can take away in terms of the time
window, the gap you would give before going to bed before eating something?
Dr. Stacy: Yes. We say, give yourself two hours before you go to bed and that's the last time
you get something. If you're planning it well, you can still get that last dose of
protein in before you go to bed but just make sure that it's not right before bed,
that's extended that two hours before bed. Ollie: How can you get the most out of your
sleep? Well in no particular order, here are quickfire top tips. The darker your room,
the better you will sleep. Light influences your brain so the darker you can make your room, the
more time you will get in the restorative stages of sleep. Temperature set your room temperature
at or around 20 degrees Celsius. You'll fall asleep quicker when your bedroom is slightly cool.
Also, use your bed for sleep, avoid doing work or watching TV in bed. The more you can train your
body to associate your bed with sleep, the more adept you will be of falling asleep in that space.
In addition to this, screens are stimulating and keep you awake. Avoid using your phone or computer
in bed because screen time makes it more difficult to fall asleep. Yes, if you're watching this video
in. that's not good. We'd also recommend setting a caffeine cut off. For greater sleep efficiency,
consciously refrain from caffeine consumption at least four hours before bed. Be wary of alcohol,
too. Just like caffeine, alcohol can impact the body hours after you've consumed it.
Ideally, you can booze at lunchtime. Alcohol is a sedative, but it does decrease the quality of
your sleep and impairs recovery. Sleep consistency is important, too. Studies have shown the quality
of your sleep can increase if you fall asleep and wake at a similar time every day. Finally,
you can use wearable tech. I've been using Whoop for the last couple of years and it's really
helped me track my sleep and find out what affects it and how I can then learn to improve it and get
into good habits. I find that a sleep tracker like this makes you more accountable for your sleep.
There you have it. You can sleep yourself faster. I hope you found this video useful
and informative. Let us know in the comments section down below what your tips and tricks are
for getting a good night's sleep. Let us know any videos you'd like to see in the future around this
topic. But, in the meantime, I wish you all a very good night's sleep. I'm going to practice what I
preach and try and get a bit faster. Good night. [00:16:25] [END OF AUDIO]