Transcript for:
Optimizing Sleep for Enhanced Performance

the science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport play and life Welcome to perform hello everyone I'm Dr Andy Galpin I'm a professor of Kinesiology and the center for sport performance at Cal State Fullerton in today's show we're going to be talking about sleep performance now I like the term sleep performance to really indicate the difference between going from good sleep to great sleep and so what I don't want to spend much time on today is talking about things like complete sleep deprivation so what happens to physical performance when you go 24 hours or 48 straight hours without sleep I don't even really want to talk about what I'll call Extreme sleep restriction so sleeping for two hours a night you know four hours a night things like that or even a single bad night asleep what I really want to spend most of our time here talking about is what really happens does anything happen when I go from 6 or 7 hours of sleep to 8 or 9 how much of a competitive Advantage am I getting over other high performers when I can go from that good to great sleep we're also going to talk about why you should be approaching your sleep with the same Vigor and specificity as you're doing your nutrition or your exercise training I mean kind of think about it this way if you are trying to perform your absolute highest and you had the resources or if you simply look at the model for those individuals who do you would see that they have dedicated Professionals for high performance nutrition you probably have done or would do rather some sort of extensive blood work or testing so that you can get the best nutrition supplementation for your unique body we would take a similar approach right some sort of advanced testing perhaps and an individualized program that is being modified and adapted as our goals are changing as our body is responding as we move throughout our life now in the sport performance world we kind of call this periodization so this is a phrase where we have different volumes or intensities or exercises and goals based upon different phases of the Year trying to get to specific outcome we wouldn't necessarily eat the same thing every day if our training wasn't the same we would adjust our food intake or our calories we would have more volume in our workouts we'd have less volume we would have more days off less recovery and everything else that goes into this so you see what I'm getting at here right this is the idea that what we eat and how we train are highly responsive and adaptive to both our unique physiology as well as what we're expecting out of our body why do we not have the same approach with sleep well the answer is we can and in fact I'll try to convince you here that we should we should be taking the same level of specificity and precision with our sleep our plan and protocols should be adapting and changing based on how our body is responding and what we're asking our body to do now as you can probably tell I'm so fired up about this I'm doing my best to mentally go slow here so I don't trip over my own words I'm completely obsessed with this topic and I've been on it for a while now and that's because the data are so robust and impressive about what happen happens when you optimize sleep performance so again I'm not really talking about the consequences of bad sleep on your long-term health or things like that it's the opposite it is how much of an advantage you can create in your performance when you sleep better one quick example here because is something we're dealing with right now with the handful of our NFL athletes and that is the ability to Aid in injury recovery post surgery as well as even return to play for concussion and other physical problemss when we're maximizing sleep but then there's also the direct performance benefit uh pick your metric here whether you want to look at surrogates and physical attributes things like endurance coordination speed physical strength Etc you want to look at onfield play so basketball shooting accuracy tennis serving accuracy or other markers of again performance directly on the field but then probably the one we use most often is it directly translates into more wins and these data are very well-rounded from a number of areas the NFL the NBA the NHL the Olympics PGA Tour etc etc there is clear and impressive evidence that those who maximize their sleep win more games now I know what you're probably thinking that's great Andy I'm sold I'm bought in I want those benefits but it's just not feasible for me to sleep more any number of reasons whether you're an athlete or not that could be legit and so I want to make it Ultra clear here I'm not only talking about the need to just extend sleep and sleep more hours but how you can mimic the benefits of sleep extension for these performance enhancement for these injury mitigation and return to play benefits without just extending the hours you sleep let me give you a couple of examples here what you may or may not realize is depending on the study you pull somewhere between 20 to 40% of athletes have clinical sleep disorders and so by simply treating those things with any number of simple and specific Solutions you can create such improvements in Sleep Quality that you're effectively extending sleep an easy example here for a major league baseball player I worked with for a very long time we had no reason to think he had a sleep disorder slept pretty well but not great kind of the same thing you'll hear most people say I think I sleep pretty well I'm not having huge issues but I also don't feel incredible either and so we are actually to get a full appropriate diagnostic of him found he was actually having a a large number of sleep issues at night but the solution is the fun part here we were able to actually buy him a very cheap pillow if you will it kind of looks like a fanny pack that you wear in reverse and that kept him from sleeping on his back that reduced the amount of times he woke up throughout the night by about 80% in the very first night and it stayed that way ever since so again just another example of the power of precision and treating your sleep the same way you would treat your training and nutrition allowed us to create an incredibly powerful sleep extension solution with very minimal effort and it didn't require us to change his daily schedule ask him to get to bed much earlier or any other things that are you know sometimes not realistic uh for your personal situation so for those reasons and many many more I'm super pumped to be talking about sleep performance today now in doing that we're going to cover a lot of the research both systematic reviews meta analyses as well as direct studies on this I've also talked to a number of uh professional experts in this field and so I'm going to be bringing you a combination of what the research says what these experts in the field say what I've used in the athletes I've worked with and my personal experience and we're going to bring all that together in a cohesive system to help you do what we always do here and that is address the three eyes so we'll start off by investigate so how do you investigate how do you measure and diagnose and manage your sleep the second eye being of course how do you interpret that how do I know if that's good great okay sufficient I'm good enough or Etc and then three how do I intervene so what do I do about it what are protocols and approaches and solutions we can take uh to solve any of these individual problems as always throughout that I'll try to cover the landscape so we'll talk about cheap solutions uh free Solutions what can we do if I manage a team of people if it's for me personally rather than people I'm coaching all the way up to what are the best in the world doing what are things that are maybe within your financial reach or not but what is the gold standard in all of these things while I'm going to be spending most of my time talking about the research directly on high performing athletes I do want to remind you that it's not necessarily our core interest here that you play sports coach Sports participate orever want to be involved in sports it's just that that to me represents a great surrogate for people that are trying to maximize their total Human Performance whether this is their physical performance cognitive performance mental performance or otherwise and so understanding this gold standard of high performance allows us to use some of the same skills and tools and tactics for folks that are also trying to ask the same out of their individual body but perhaps not applying it to sport so whether this is things like Physicians night nurses military folks judges anyone else who's really trying to ask your body to perform at the highest level possible now before we go too much further I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors because they make this show possible not only are they on this list because they offer great products and services but because I actually personally love them and use them myself today's episode has brought to you by ag1 ag1 is a foundational nutrition greens supplement what's that mean it means that ag1 provides a comprehensive variety of vitamins minerals probiotics prebiotics and adaptogens in an easy to drink greens powder getting your nutritional right is hard for many people I certainly know that I have clients who really struggle for whatever reason to get the proper nutrients from whole food sources now ag1 is not a replacement for eating high quality Whole Foods but it is a great foundational supp for filling in the gaps where needed I've also personally found that with many of my clients ag1 helps move them just in the right direction for eating more highquality Foods because it helps them with Cravings digestion and many other benefits I especially personally like taking ag1 when I'm on vacation or traveling because it helps me just sort of stay on track with my nutrition I know that missing a few days of getting the proper vitamins and minerals and other micronutrients is not a big deal at all that's not really how those things work but for me again I just like knowing that I'm kind of staying somewhat on track when I'm definitely not making the best nutrition in food choices of my life if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com perform to receive five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 plus G2 again that's drink a1.com perform to receive five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 plus K2 today's episode is also brought to you by element element is an electrolyte drink mix that has an ideal ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium but has no sugar electrolytes are critical to proper hydration which I've been harping on for years but you can't do that by only drinking water in fact many of you will probably remember that I featured element in my YouTube series on optimizing hydration all the way back in 2020 which is obviously long before this podcast even existed so I've been a fan of element for a long time in fact as stent listeners will also realize these hydration videos were the Genesis of the Galpin hydration equation named not by me but by the legendary neuroscientist Dr Andrew hubman I featured element in these videos because they're blend of 1,000 milligrams of sodium 200 milligrams potassium and 60 milligram magnesium really is different than any other electrolyte on the market and has great scientific support however I want to be ultra clear 1,000 Mig of sodium is a lot and not everyone needs that much in fact that may be way too much if you don't exercise or sweat much already eat a lot of salt in your diet say from a lot of processed foods or otherwise have sodium related medical concerns I personally use the Citrus and watermelon flavors a ton to preh hydrate before heading out on a full day of training or long hike or a hunt since I know I'll be losing a bunch of fluids and won't have many opportunities to take things with me element has also just released a new line of canned sparkling element which I am all about if if you'd like to try element you can go to drink LM n.com perform to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix again that's drink LM nt.com perform to claim a free sample pack now before we get started I need to clarify a few things as always is the case in science we need to make sure that we're understanding the same words we're operationally defining terms so there's no confusion and so the first one I want to talk about really here is the difference between sleep deprivation and extreme sleep restriction I've mentioned that a second ago but just really wanted to double down and clarify that I'm not really going to be talking about research the benefits what happens to Performance when you go through things like complete sleep deprivation there's actually a lot of research on that a lot from the military when you take people and you have them go 24 or 48 hours without sleep and then you return there's tons of evidence on what happens to Performance in a lot of areas but again I'm really not going to pay attention to any of that stuff because that's not what I'm getting at and I'm also not talking about short-term studies that use extreme sleep restrictions so this is maybe two three or four hours of sleep per night for the course of 3 to 14 days those are important things to do and they have a lot of applications for a lot of individuals but really I'm keeping most of we're going to talk about exclusive to the evidence behind again what happens to this suboptimal sleep this is defined typically as folks that are trying to sleep normally um but maybe only sleeping between six to maybe seven and a half hours versus those that are getting seven seven and a half up to eight or nine okay so it would take us a long time to get through that other research and it is but sometimes it over appreciates or can can conflate the benefits or Consequences of bad sleep in those special situations so just want to make sure you're clear when you're hearing the numbers and the evidence behind what I'm going to talk about later it's not coming from studies using those types of examples and so what we're really talking about here is chronic suboptimal sleep and there's three areas first one being duration so we're talking about is how much time you sleep second one being quality and as you'll see later that is extraordinarily difficult to get our heads around there's no Universal definition there and so we've got to have some uh extensive conversation about what to do about that and we absolutely will and then third is timing and so there's a lot that goes into timing of the day Circa rhythms chronotypes and stuff like that and so that's where we're going to spend most of our time in our conversation today if if you really want I've got a handful of systematic reviews in a number of areas that I think are super effective all coming in the last couple of years I've spoken with a number of sleep professionals these are phds MDS as well as on the grounds practitioners of sleep and professional sports coming from the NFL the NBA the military Special Forces specifically those dealing with the astronauts Etc and they all have given me confidence that these handful of articles are very good so I feel strong in them I've read them extensively those will all be in the show notes available but just want to read the title off of some of those right now first one is sleep and the athlete a narrative review and 2021 expert consensus recommendation um this has got a large number of authors on this if you're unfamiliar with a consensus statement means it generally refers to a number you know typically five to 25 or more scientists in a given area come together and say what are the things we all agree upon and so they tend to be very strong in confidence because you know so many authors from different institutions worked on this so this paper I know um came from Neil walls who's well-respected and extensively published scientist in the area as well as Amy Bender um whom I spoke to directly about this and so this is a great article to get you started on that another is sleep hygiene for optimizing recovery in athletes a review and recommendations again uh from another strong group of scientists um at a UC San Diego go um published in the last couple of years and then the final one is managing travel fatigue and jet lag and athletes a review and consensus statement um from 2021 so there are many many many many other papers there but I I chose those three specifically I thought they were easy to read very useful and can get you started in a lot of the major areas and so that being said we need to recognize a couple of final things before we dive into the details of this episode and that is this field is honestly quite emerging people have obviously been studying sleep for many many decades but it's almost exclusively from the perspective of you know disease and overall health in fact over 80% of the research on sleep and athletes has been published in the last decade alone we have other major limitations a lot of it has come from research on questionnaires so using things like subjective analysis of your sleep and they haven't necessarily always been validated as uh quality in athletes so another challenge there research on females specifically is exceptionally limited and so there is some initial indication that the requirements may be different for females maybe not but we just really honestly don't have enough information there to make a firm conclusion so something that needs to to be increased in the future and then lastly it is honestly challenging to control or blind people in sleep studies you going to know pretty quickly if you're in the sleep for 10 hours per night group or in the six hours per night group and so that is a limitation in a number of the studies we're going to cover but that is always the case in science there's no Panacea there's no perfect study so it's always about evaluating the quality of that study other studies in the field from other Laboratories and then making a consensus based on the information that you do have so while the evidence base here is more limited than we would like there is enough there for the authors of these papers as well as honestly myself to conclude a couple of things and the first is that athletes need to be screened for Sleep Disorders we'll talk about why that matters so much and how to get it done a little bit later the second is we have a huge opportunity to create a competitive Advantage by developing more precise and effective sleep plans for our athletes now this needs to be done based on people's unique physiology but even more broadly than that can just be done from sport to Sport and think about it this way the reasons or the ways we can enhance sleep in a football player are probably different than those in a swimmer because the challenges they face in their schedule in their body size in the demands energy expenditure are quite different so giving them all the same Solutions well hey it's better than nothing but that lacks the Precision we're looking for so in both those cases we could create more effective sleep extension by being more precise with what we're asking them to do and probably then have less Road Blocks less problems with adherence and less overall complaints from the athletes with that you get more adherence you get more success and we get more performance benefits now I would love to tell you I'm the first and only one who's on to this secret area but that's not the honest truth the research is growing the emphasis of this in individual sports and organizations is also growing in fact I get asked all the time in interviews what do I think kind of the next big area of human performances and sleep is often my number one or two answer it's extremely clear uh there's a really interesting paper that came out recently by Dr Allison Breer called Sleep is of the muscle by the muscle and for the muscle and in that she called Sleep the um easiest and cheapest way to enhance a the health and performance and I think Allison is dead on there if you look at what's happened the international Olympic Committee um the NCAA have both came out with statements in the last couple of years putting sleep as fundamental to athlete health and putting large emphasis on this we see a growing number of sleep performance special popping up around at least in the United States the University of Washington I know has recently had every one of their football players diagnosed for a sleep disorder um I've been in conversation with a number of professional sport teams who are either trying to build sleep performance programs hire specialists in that area and to really put the same emphasis on this that they have their training and nutrition so while it's not there yet it is clearly something that behind the scenes is being worked on in fact I would even say that if you're not doing that you're going to get left behind pretty quickly uh because this is such a clear and obvious win sleep affects nearly every physiological process whether we're talking about performance enhancement or recovering from injury or concussion it's also really really bad in so many people I've mentioned that depending on the study you look at somewhere between 20 to 40% of athletes have Sleep disorders and then as I've teased a couple of times the solutions to sleep have traditionally just been like hey yeah man sure that's great but try to have my 19-year-old NBA player sleep more good luck that's not where the field is anymore the solutions that are available are way more realistic and effective than that and so as we continue to see these people put a greater emphasis on sleep I wanted to make sure that that wasn't just information hid behind the scenes to some of these high performers that everyone had access to the same tools and tactics so as we start jumping into the details now I want you to remember I think about sleep in three major areas the first is duration so hours or time am amount you've spent sleeping second is quality and third is timing so let's get started with duration now I think what's most interesting here is a field of research called Sleep extension or sleep banking this is the idea that you will add on amount of time you're sleeping so you're asking people to increase the amount of time they are sleeping from anywhere between 30 to up minutes to up to two hours now this always brings a smile to my face and other people's when I talk about this because they're like yeah sure I'm just going to sleep two more hours yeah you're going to and the reality of it is the research on this shows that it is quite effective you will again see studies that have done this they'll ask people to either do accommodation of things they'll simply give them a time and they'll say you know try to sleep for 10 hours per night and so as a result of that they'll increase their sleep by an hour or two hours or wherever they started with others they'll actually just give a number so try to sleep for 90 more minutes or 30 more minutes or something like that and if you look at the results of most of these studies you will see for the most part these groups will increase the amount of time that they sleep from you know plus orus 30 minutes to up to 2 hours so it is very effective and plausible where this all got started was actually around the year 2000 um this kind of study came out initially looking at work in in cognitive function um reaction time and mood and stuff like that but this field really launched off in 2008 with a seminal and classic study that you know quote unquote shocked the Sleep World from the Walter Reed Institute this is a facility that does a lot of research for the Army what they found was effectively huge benefits and people who went through sleep extension prior to known sleep restriction and so this is very interesting now the same year Sher ma from Stanford came out with the Classic basketball sleep extension study if you're familiar with that and this is really what set the field on fire and there's been a ton of work since that but I think it's such an important paper that I want to go through it in detail because effectively what they did was found massive improvements in sport ability so whether you're talking about free throw shooting percentage reaction time three-point shooting percentage in the Stanford basketball team so you're talking about division one athletes that had 9% improvements in shooting accuracy over the course of a season by sleeping two additional hours per night and so there's a lot to unpack there how do you get college kids to sleep two additional hours per night and did you really say a 9% Improvement in free throw and three-point shooting accuracy throughout the course of his season yes yes yes and plenty of things more so I want to go through that paper a little more detail because again I think it really highlights the power of sleep extension as a huge performance enhancing tool so as I mentioned this was conducted at the University of Stanford with their division one basketball players and I want to compliment Sherry and her team having done research like this I know how extraordinarily difficult it can be there are of course limitations to get you started right away there's no control group here um we also don't know how much of a benefit they had in their performance just because of the course of the season and a bunch of other issues but doing research like this on actual High performing athletes is like next to Impossible this actually took her several years to complete because of just how difficult such a process would be so um lots of limitations of course but still lots of things we can glean from this especially because it launched the entire field in my opinion there are other studies that have come out since this both from Sherry's group and others looking at um endurance cyclists swimmers tennis players rugby players and a bunch of other stuff so um yes some limitations to this specific study but let's really rather than worry about the details and the numbers here just just pay attention um to the thought and the exercise of how much this stuff can help so getting us started what they did is they took the athletes and they were able to get 11 of them to complete it they had to screen out for anybody with any sleep issues or use any drugs they didn't allow alcohol or caffeine use the entire time and they had them perform their normal sleep for two to four weeks or so now the reason it's two to four weeks is you know because the challenges of working with real athletes in real time in real Sport Seasons as I mentioned it took them a couple of Seasons so not all the same participants came from the same year of play um so they were able to get folks in and just depending on preseason scheduling testing and other stuff like that the the climatization period there um was a little bit different so two to four weeks the study itself lasted 5 to seven weeks for those same reasons so they had people sleep normally for two or four weeks and then they ask them to sleep for 10 hours per night again that resulted in about a 2-hour sleep extension on average some participants had less some did more they had uh they they tracked their sleep with a combination of sleep logs so this is you know just think about a notebook and the athlete wrote down how long they slept and quality of their sleep and things like that as well as what's called actigraphy you'll probably recognize that as as wearables so think about a a device on their wrist that measured their sleep so not the gold standard polygraphy of course but still a lot of insightful stuff in the application of a high performing athlete what was really cool about this is they and kudos to the coaches too they worked directly with the sport coaches so they had a bunch of physical performance testing so they did one test that's called a 282 foot um test so I think this is they ran from Baseline to half court to back to Baseline to the end of the full court back to Baseline and they were timed on that they had a bunch of other physical performance metrics as well again as I mentioned threo shooting uh free throw shooting and I'll talk about those in a second but they did those because those were a part of their normal standard testing anyway so they weren't asking the participants to do anything differently they weren't having them come to the lab and do additional work and why that I think is very important is because getting an athlete to come to your lab and do testing for a study in season in in my experience I'll just tell you again a little bit behind the curtain here you're probably not going to get a great effort and so when you start looking for maximum results and performance it really comes down to how motivated the person was that day or not but this was different this was in their practice with their coaches so I I promise you they were trying to shoot as best they could not just in the post testing but the preseason testing too right like you want to make your team you want to play more same thing with their conditioning test so really strong uh evidence there for the performance benefits because they're trying to do their best because that's what they're you know coaches are asking them to test there they also um did a combination like I said of shooting I think they shot 10 free throws um and I think they shot 15 threep pointers and they kind of took the you know how many did you make out of 10 sort of thing uh also this stuff was not done one time this was a common performance test done multiple times throughout the year and so they're not just affected by hey was it one bad day was that person sick or hurt or had a bad night sleep the night before or something like that so very robust testing from that perspective they took pycho motor testing as well um this is actually a cool thumb tap test so that this is something they could do on their phone and it measures reaction time and a bunch of other stuff uh where a little thing will pop up on their screen and they'll tap it with their thumb kind of as fast as I can and so they're getting this combination of attention because it happens over a long period of time um so how were they able to focus or or did they lose track of what they're doing and stop paying attention as well as the reaction time so pretty extensive and elaborate study design that maximizes what we call ecological validity um as well as external validity so how would this apply in the real world and this case you know being able to pay more attention and shooting better in practice are are pretty strong standards and metrics that people would care about so what actually happened here I'm going to walk you through the results in both absolute and relative terms if you've been involved or read much Human Performance research you'll know both of those metrics are actually important when you're considering the context whether or not this was you know something to pay attention to or not easy example here is you know sometimes a 1% Improvement in performance may not be enough to reach statistical significance but it might be practically relevant if this resulted in you say jumping two inches higher but it wasn't enough you know again to reach stat Sig here but most practitioners would care about 2 Ines so let me walk you through both so you have the most appropriate accurate information and then you can judge yourself whether or not you you feel like this is worthy of note or not so as I mentioned they did the 282 foot Sprint test that's that you know half court and back Etc test at Baseline it took them about 16.2 seconds to complete and at the end of sleep extension it was down to 15.5 so reduced that time by 7 seconds again I'll leave that up to you to decide but to me that's a pretty impressive Improvement throughout the course of a season free throw shooting percentage again this was out of 10 and remember this is not just one test pre one test post this was done routinely throughout the season and then you're getting an aggregate score here so on average they made 7.9 shots out of 10 so you're call it an 80% free throw percentage which be expected for athletes at this high quality in a in a practice situation and they were up to 8.8 or almost 90% this is the lot you're effectively making one more free throw out of 10 this is huge um and definitely the difference between winning and losing making a team playing Etc three-point percentage was a similar story so again these are out of 15 shots so preseason they were making about 10 out of 15 60 percentage and all the way up to 11.6 so you know added one to one and a half extra makes per 15 attempts again a really important both statistically sign significant Improvement as well as practically important Improvement other metrics that were included that were cool um subjective rating at practice improved scale of 1 to 10 here kind of seven out of 10 before all the way up to almost nine out of 10 at the end um same thing with their subjective rating at games 7.8 out of 10 all the way up to 8.8 out of 10 so lots of improvements and actual performance and perception of performance and then not going to run you through all of the other metrics in the study but you're going to see a similar theme um with weekly reaction time um daily morning reaction time of this PBT tests I talked about um daily evening stuff etc etc etc so not everything came up as statistically significant but most of it did and all of it was a pretty similar magnitude so it really just kind of looks like this you know call it 3 to 10% Improvement in most variables measured so I don't know about you but if you walked into any performance staff or coaches office or walked into an athletes locker and said I'm going to get you a 10% Improvement in all these metrics throughout the year I think you're going to catch their attention so this stuff has certainly caught mine now if this seems a little bit too good to be true I'll be honest I had the same feelings right when you look at some of those numbers it's like well that's a lot and you look at the study and you're like hey there's no control group and etc etc and so I said man how do I think about this I started calling friends colleagues of mine I called Jeffrey durmer who's worked at the Atlanta Falcons and USA weightlifting and tons of other professional sports I called Amy Bender PhD and and sleep science and worked with tons of professional athletes and they basically all said the same thing okay great let's say the results are slightly exaggerated let's say they're exaggerated by 25% let's say they're exaggerated by 50% wouldn't you still take a 5% Improvement I would and those metrics in that level of athlete where the margin for improvement is so small anyways call it 75% exaggerated that's still a pretty big impact and so when you compare that also with the research in the same area um you're talking about studies that have been done of course that one in basketball players but similar work from Sherry's lab uh in swimmers um similar thing as I mentioned in rugby players and you're all going to find this kind of global you know two to four to up to 10% Improvement in performance depending on how you want to look at it um these sleep extension studies r range from three nights of sleep extension all the way up to 7 weeks and it seems to me as the evidence continues to grow you're just seeing the same thing played out more and more so while again the specifics of can I guarantee you sleeping two more hours improves your um you know Ser tennis serving accuracy by 10% no I can't but am I confident it's going to improve your performance absolutely just to give a little more context about the Sleep extension research and athletes a couple of other studies worth noting one of them looked at an additional 1.7 hours of sleep per night over the course of a week and this was done in tennis players and they found that it improved tennis serving accuracy by about 6% or so another one looked at a little bit less so 45 minutes of extra sleep per night but for a longer duration this was now 3 weeks and they found a Improvement in Reaction Time by 4% as well as a reduction in cortisol by 19% this was in rugby players so a little bit different demand a little bit different test but still are similar story and the final one of note was more similar to the basketball study in which they asked him to sleep for an hour and a half extra per night but just for three total days and so they their sleep time actually went from about 7.1 hours per night to almost 8.6 hours this is another example of I'm not talking about going from four hours of sleep tonight to 6 hours of sleeper now we're talking people already sleeping a decent amount 7 hours and pushing them all the way up to close to 9 hours in this particular study they found a 3% Improvement um in time trial performance this is a 60-minute cycling test um in these highly trained endurance cyclists and athletes so again wanted to share all of those studies because it highlights it's not really specific to basketball it's not just physiology of endurance it's not just skill it is really robust in terms of how much it improves what areas of performance improve how long you need to do it for how much you need to sleep for and so I don't want you to get too up in either the numbers in terms of the percentages of the improvements or even really the protocol how many more minutes for how long I think the take on point is if you can get people to start sleeping longer for a couple of days or even for a couple of weeks and if longer means 45 minutes or 2 hours it doesn't really matter if you can get that stuff you're going to see performance improvements regardless I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors today's episode is brought to you by absolute rest sleep is the Bedrock of human performance which is why I always focus on it with my Elite athletes but despite trying every wearable and even sending people to full-blown clinical testing in sleep Labs we rarely got very far that's why two years ago I co-founded absolute rest which redefines what it means to be a high performance sleeper after tremendous success we are now ready for our next challenge a firstof its kind sleep optimization program that combines Advanced sleep technology with personalized coaching all at a fraction of the cost of a traditional sleep study the Sleep lens program allows you to run a full FDA approved clinical grade sleep study from your fingertip every single night our team of sleep scientists then use your data to create personalized solutions that drive real changes in your sleep no more overnight stays in creepy sleep Labs no more wearables with questionable accuracy and no more wondering if the changes you're making in your nightly routine habits or supplements are actually working or not if you'd like to try absolute rest go to Absolut rest.com / perform to secure your spot in the Sleep lens program and save $100 that's Absolut rest.com perform today's episode is also brought to you by momentus momentus makes supplements of the absolute highest quality because in my opinion no one is even close to their quality and safety standards and they've got the data to prove it for example we've long known about the numerous health and performance benefits of fish oil I've personally been taking it for probably 15 years or more numerous Studies have consistently demonstrated positive impacts of EPA and DHA the two primary fish oils on everything from cardiovascular and brain health to exercise performance and joint pain now you can get fish oil anywhere but personally I only use momentus because it's never once given me a fishy aftertaste and more importantly every single batch is NSF tested to ensure the lead and mercury levels are undetectable for Purity and saf safety their fish oil is pure potent and sustainably sourced another major benefit to their fish oil and you can check the record here because I've been talking about this in my slides in class for over a decade is that you won't find any fillers in their fish soil see the dirty secret in the industry here is that most companies will add non-epa and dhas to their fish oil to keep their quote fish oil count high but to keep the active ingredients and therefore costs low it makes you actually feel like when you're purchasing it you're getting more fish oil at a cheaper price but you actually have to double or triple your dose to get the same amount of active ingredient which means you end up spending more money in the long run or you don't and you get worse results if you want to give their fish oil a shot or any other momentus product go to Liv mous.com perform to get 20% off your order again that's Liv mous.com perform to get 20% off now one more thing I wanted to pass along to you that I thought was actually pretty interesting regarding sleep extension and you're not going to find this in the peer-reviewed research this is an anecdote to be totally caned with you but still really important I I talked actually at length with Dr Jeffrey durmer who's an mdphd in sleep it's been around for decades one of the most profound and prolific sleep scientists really of our time and he did a lot of work in the NFL and he told me that I'll have to say this as like carefully as I can hear but he basically said when working with one particular NFL team that he noticed there was wasn't really a huge Improvement in performance or cognitive function or reaction time that they could really tell but the Sleep extension was incredibly powerful at helping people return from injuries uh the performance staff felt it was very clear that there guys were either getting hurt less often but more specifically coming back from those injuries faster than they were in the Years prior to not paying attention to sleep so again a number of potential benefits here and rationale to exploring this idea of extending your sleep but I know what you're probably thinking okay how do I do that number one and then what if it's just not possible you have got various sleep restrictions now in this particular case I'm talking about athletes as well as everybody else so sometimes people don't realize athletes want to sleep more but they don't have the option to they've got schedules they've got practices they've got flights and travel and they've got the same restrictions that the rest of us have so again as I've mentioned I really feel like the benefits of sleep extension are quite profound the biggest ISS though was really of practicality and what I mean by that is you're probably thinking dude I'm sold I'm in I want to sleep more it's just not possible whether you're an athlete or non-athlete all of us have restrictions on our time you may have other obligations you may not and you just can't sleep any longer throughout the night or have any number of reasons so what do we do if we believe in sleep extension we want to get these performance enhancement benefits out of it but we just are not able to sleep for more time for whatever reason well you got a number of different options here the very first is being more specific and intentional about when you're trying to extend your sleep the reality of it is almost nobody has the ability to sleep for nine or 10 hours a night every day every night the entire year that's an unrealistic expectations you're setting yourself up to fail just like you wouldn't do that with your nutrition you wouldn't do that with your training you wouldn't just run as many miles as you can in a week you wouldn't lift as many reps as you can you would have a periodized approach so go through periods where you're going for more volume because you're going for Less volume volum in other periods you're going to have more calories during this phase and less calories during other phases I would say the same thing with sleep extension and so think about your schedule whether you've got an important travel coming up you've got um a really tight business schedule you've got work obligations um we have a training camp so we're starting preseason training um we're in fight camp for MMA fighters we have some other area of time that is most important to us or is a time of known sleep loss right in that we probably want to go be in front of that and get our what's called Sleep banking in and so we're going to look and say all right great I'm going to remove things in my life if I can or add things in my life like napping or other things that allow me to get towards that sleep extension in the say 3 to 30 days prior to those those big known losses of sleep a really good example of this that I wish I had known about but honestly didn't a number of years ago I was fortunate to travel with a UFC fighter named Brian Ortega that I've worked with for many years and we actually were able to go to Abu Dhabi and fight at a place called fight Island so this is really interesting this was during the covid pandemic and the world is basically shut down and the only fighting and really the only sport happening was the UFC in this specific fight bubble out in Abu Dhabi now the challenge with that is I live and Brian live lives in Southern California and we had to go all the way out to Abu Dhabi so we had time change to deal with we had travel to deal with and at the same time we've got a very extensive weight cut so Brian has to lose a decent amount of weight like every fighter does Brian's pretty normal in that area but he's got a decent amount of weight to lose in the four to five days prior to um that performance in addition to that we have to fight then a five round fight we have just a number of media obligations Brian is the headline event so there's just a lot of challenges that go into this so we've got to go over there and we got to try to manage one of the key variables which is sleep when we get over there and we've got to now also deal with the fact that we have to fight not at local time but because the UFC is an American company for the most part they generally want their fights to happen during American prime time so I think we end up fighting if I remember correctly something like 6 a.m. local time in the morning so that it could be at you know 700 p.m. p.m. PST you know in California or whatnot and so we went over there with the idea of saying okay great and I timed everything out I pre uh prepared I used an app called called time shifter um to help make sure all of our circad rhythms were on the right point and everything was plotted out weeks in advance and I thought we had a perfect system there unfortunately what I didn't realize is when we got there all of Brian's media obligations were still at Abu Dhabi local time so this was right in the middle of our sleep window so we tried to stay on California time but he's been woken up all day to do press conferences and weigh-ins and media and things like that and so it end up being an entire sleep disaster he got almost No Sleep uh I I probably had one night of straight sleep the entire almost two weeks we were there just disrupted uh his body was all over the place every metric we had was just off the charts gone cuckoo he had no idea when he was awake or sleeping it was a really really challenging thing we were fortunate Brian actually went on to perform had one of his best performances ever and won the fight we got to come home but it was an absolute disaster looking back on that there wasn't much I could do right he had to perform at that time he was going to have to do the media obligations there's just nothing we could do about it the only real solution I would have had was to bank his sleep prior to going out there it would he would not have performed at his best no question the research um especially from the military is really clear here when you go through no now we're talking really known sleep uh restriction sleep deprivation which is where we were at if you if you go through sleep extension prior to events like that you can um you can blunt or attenuate the drop in performance which is to say the performance drop will happen but you can have it go down slower if you Bank some sleep going into it so I wish I would have known about that I didn't um this was again many years ago and I just didn't know that information so would have gone back next time if we have have to go through something like that we're absolutely going to bank probably at least three weeks prior to um as much as we can of course we're trying to sleep as much as we can being in fight Camp regardless but we would have made other changes to ensure he had access to more sleep because we knew we were going to have such a challenge over there so didn't know it at the time we were in a unique situation lesson learned but a key tool and tactic I will certainly use in my coaching practice for the rest of my career so why is it sleep extension is such a powerful performance-enhancing tool well it's because of what I call the athlete sleep Paradox and that is despite what you may think athletes tend to sleep less and worse than non-athletes despite the fact that they probably actually need more sleep and so you can look at this from a lot of different ways um there's been a number of longitudinal studies done on divers and rowers and skiers and cyclists and what you're going to kind of collectively find is most athletes tend to sleep in the neighborhood of six and a half to seven hours per night now the average person is in that range you know maybe in the seven hours or so and so you can see the athletes are a little bit lower but they actually need even more you can Sher ma actually from Stanford the Sleep extension study also published another paper and in that she looked at 620 athletes at Stanford across 29 different sports and found that almost 40% of those athletes reported sleeping less than 7 hours per night during the weekdays and over 50% reported extremely high daytime sleepiness and so again you can chop this up and look at all the different papers but you're going to find a similar note athletes tend to sleep worse and there's a lot of reasons for this some of it's very practical they have early morning practices they have extensive late night games or competitions some of it is because of physical nature athletes tend to be bigger than other people and so their necks are larger and this alone can be um a predictor or cause of sleep disorders um they tend to have worry and anxiety the night before sport competitions and things like that um depending on what sport th they may have caloric restriction or other um excessive training just a lot of other things that go into it and so some of it is behavioral some of it is lifestyle some of it is physiology and some of it is is just the nature of what they go into in terms of competing and so they're in this really hard spot they need more sleep arguably than other folks and yet they're sleeping actually less so puts them in a really big bind so it's really no surprising when even if they're sleeping at 7 hours and we take them to nine we see these giant bumps in performance it's almost like you know minimally or lowly active individuals going from 6 hours a night to eight and a half right because they're almost in a little bit of a pseudo sleep debt because they're simply not matching the demand what they need let alone going all the way up to the top to maximize recovery and performance and as I mentioned this is really not extreme sleep restriction so there's a lot of really cool papers and the line seems to be somewhere in this like seven to 7 and a half hours range there is a significant difference in in all things um that there was one study looking at getting a cold or being sick and found that an additional 30 minutes a night uh increased or decreased rather your chance of getting a cold by fourfold right so huge in performance there there's a really cool paper on tweeting I guess we'll call it Xing now but tweeting in NBA players and all they did was look at just publicly available tweets on NBA players and looked at how late they were tweeting at night postgame and found there was a 1.7% Improvement in shooting accuracy and those who are not up tweeting late at night and so just that alone like a really low quality indicator of sleep you know how much you Tweeting at night was explained almost 2% of shooting accuracy again you take any NBA coach you take any basketball coach and say we can give you 2% bump in shooting accuracy this is a really big number especially in a high performer who doesn't have much room to go um again rugby similar thing right there was a really cool study looking at rugby in kind of a three-week preseason training phase and they found both body composition and aerobic performance were significantly better in those athletes who slept more than 7 and 1 half hours relative to those who slept less Les than S and a half hours right and then finally U there there's been a number of studies kind of on injury and then the line there is again you go from s hours to sleep at night to eight hours of sleep per night and then this one study in particular U found that that increased injury Risk by 1.7 fold so again there's lots of examples I can come up with here but there is just a lot of information suggesting it really is not the same sleeping 7 and 1/2 hours or 7 hours is like okay I feel fine I feel normal or I'm a little bit sleepy but it's not that big a deal would 30 more minutes really matter would an hour really matter and hopefully I'm convincing you that yeah yeah it does it matters a lot so I could keep going here and share with you more research but I think you're getting the point generally athletes are not sleeping enough for their demands what actually is I think really interesting is this sets up this athlete sleep Paradox I talked about a second ago and that is athletes don't sleep enough even though they actually probably need more that second part though is a little bit more confusing why athletes need more sleep there's not a strong relationship at least scientifically that we know of yet between energy expenditure say calories or you know how much work you put in and minutes needed per sleep it doesn't seem to work like that so you can't simply say I ran a few more miles today or I was a little more active my steps were higher therefore I need x amount of minutes per sleep or maybe you do but you actually won't sleep that much more so there isn't a tight relationship there clearly seems to be some relationship between energy output and SL some sleep but again it's not a onetoone relationship and so when I talk to a lot of the people in this area I kind of pressed them on that and there's a couple of different reasons one of them is those studies really just haven't been done and they haven't been done in high performers so there may actually be that relationship there may not we don't know that's an omission of the research at this point but there's actually enough bi chemistry here for you us to Inuit it that there's probably something happening here and so a couple of things to think about one we're not talking about returning to Baseline we're talking about people who are trying to create new adaptation so it is not just recovering it is now optimizing or maximizing so that's one the second thing is think about what we're asking athletes to do so let's remember some basic or let's learn some basic biochemistry of exercise here now everything in biology uses a single molecule for energy called ATP stands for adenosine triphosphate so it is an adenosine molecule with three that's why it's called Tri phosphates attach to each other it doesn't matter where you're getting the energy from to create that ATP fats proteins carbohydrates doesn't matter what animal you're in frankly or what you're using the energy for digestion exercise recovery brain function it's irrelevant it's all using that magic energy currency called ATP all right now the way that this operates is there are high energy bonds that connect one of the phosphates to the second phosphate to the third phosphate so you can kind of think of this Iden in the middle and this little tail of the three phosphates when you break off one of those phosphates from the other you end up with a molecule that is not adenine triphosphate is adenine D phosphate because it now has two phosphates and then you have that third phosphate is what we call an an organic free floating phosphate okay now by breaking that phosphate off you broke that bond that has a net release of energy you put some energy into the system to break the bond but it gave out more energy after it broke than it did to break it and so that's an exonic reaction you've generated energy use that energy to you know power your exercise or recovery or whatever you're doing so as a net result of that every time you've asked your your body for energy you have created an ADP and that phosphate okay the fate of the phosphate we'll talk about in another episode or conversation if you were to ask yourself for more energy or ask your body for more energy rather you would break that ADP again so you snap that second phosphate off and you would turn it into a Denine mono phosphate at so one of them you do it one more time now that third phosphate is gone and you just simply have a Denine well why does that matter a Denine is a little molecule that binds to little Lian receptors all throughout your body particularly in your brain and this controls fatigue or rather sleepiness and so what happens and this in fact this is exactly how caffeine works right so adenosine or caffeine rather competitively binds to those adenosine receptors and so that it blocks the perception of fatigue so when more adenosine accumulates throughout the body on those receptors more sleepiness more fatigue and so throughout the day as you're going through metabolism you're creating you're generating more energy you're creating more free amounts of adenosine more of it is binding to those receptors and you're increasing what's called your sleep pressure so you're sleeping a and fatigue is building over time and this is great when you sleep at night you remove those adenosines you recycle them create them back into ATP and so you've recycled your energy your sleepiness goes away your grogin goes away and your energy comes back up the next day this is our sleep wake cycle right when you wake up the next morning that feeling of grogginess that feeling of sleepiness is called Sleep inertia this is getting up in the morning right this is related to how much adenosine you've effectively cleared throughout the night this is one of the many many reasons why sleeping better at night or sleeping more effectively sleeping more allows you to feel less groggy the next day sleeping of a higher quality Etc it's also why as I'll talk about in a little bit bit things that people tend to think are normal with their sleep are not so it is not common to feel groggy all day it is not common um to be able to sleep kind of on command throughout the day those are strong signs that you are probably not clearing all the adenosine um there could be other things going on but that could be one of the things that's happening it is still left there it's why you also potentially don't have as much energy the next day because you don't have the adenosine to make enough HP that becomes a problem so where caffeine enters the picture is caffeine competitively binds to the same receptors so when it is stuck onto that receptor the adenosine can't bind there so you don't get that same sense of fatigue and so that's why uh it caffeine has both a stimulation effect as well as an anti- fatigue effect so there it's also again why if caffeine is consumed too late or not metabolized uh sufficiently enough that you're going to have a hard time sleeping at night because you're not getting that same adenosine binding not getting that same um signal for sleepiness so it would then make sense and we could Intuit it someone who's going through more ATP Recycling and production throughout the day like an athlete like somebody who's more um Physically Active would need more sleep more time for the lymphatic system to operate um more time to clear um our overall adenosine now again we do not have direct studies of this but the intuition says this this makes sense there have been some studies looking at things like endurance athletes versus other um say strength and power athletes and it initially suggests that the amount of time um during the sleep stages were were particularly effective um at clearing this stuff is enhanced and so that's again another indirect information and so I think at this point there's enough for us to say all right we can um we can turn the mechanism when we don't have direct human trial evidence then this is an appropriate time to look at mechanism since we don't have those trials for energy expenditure and and high athletes and sleep duration we can look at the mechanism and the mechanism makes sense it makes theological sense um it makes intuition sense we have some other similar studies like with the endurance athletes and so you kind of combine that story on top of the evidence that we know that athletes still don't sleep enough as normal people um or even less than and it makes sense for us to say okay you need to sleep more and you're probably not sleeping enough as it is and you probably have an argument for needing more sleep than everyone else anyways I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors today's episode is brought to you by eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling heating sleep tracking and more I've had one for years and it is glorious I even put one on the bed in my guest bedroom because as you'll hear me talk about endlessly here on the perform podcast there really is nothing you can do that makes a larger impact on your health and performance than getting tremendous sleep the eight sleep is a GameChanger because I run hot or as my wife calls it I'm a furnace and that's particularly driven by the fact that I often have to do my exercise training in the evenings which is honestly not always great for sleep but this is also the case of many of the athletes that I work with who don't have a choice when they compete and so being able to cool down immediately in bed does wonders for both sleep latency and Sleep Quality eight sleep recently launched their newest generation of the Pod cover the Pod 4 ultra the Pod 4 ultra has two times more cooling power yet is virtually silent and even has snoring detection that will automatic Ally lift your head in a few degrees to improve the air flow and stop you from snoring go to 8sleep.com perform to save $350 off their pod 4 ultra eight sleep currently ships to the USA Canada UK and select countries in the EU and Australia again that's 8sleep.com perform let's move on now and talk about Sleep Quality now as I mentioned this is very challenging because there is no specific set definition for what quality means in fact scientists argue about this stuff constantly so as we go through this research keep that in mind I also want you to keep in mind that not all Studies have used the same methodology some have used what's the gold standard so polygraphy actual test where they hook up electrodes to athletes and you know clinically diagnose them and others have used things like questionnaires that have been scientifically validated but they probably result in a higher percentage of diagnosed disorders than the direct test but nonetheless I'm just going to give you some ballpark number here based on the collective amount of research right so if you look across the studies that have been done on uh division one football players the NFL uh the NHL Olympic athletes rugby and things like that you're going to see the number um at 20 to 40% or so meaning that percentage of athletes have clinically diagnosed Sleep Disorders but what's crazy is over 80% of those will go undiagnosed and that's the same in the general population so the overwhelming majority of sleep disorders are never actually known are identified and then of course because of that um they're not solved which is a huge problem in terms of which disorders are most prevalent You've Really Got The Big Three that is obstructive sleep apnea um you have insomnia and then the third one is restless leg syndrome how much of these exist in each well in Osa or sleep apnea is pretty common most common 10 to 20% probably has a lot to do with physical size of athletes um but can be around quite often insomnia is the second most common and that's somewhere between four and 12% of athletes will exhibit signs at some point in their life of insomnia um this is you know particularly problematic in sports like wrestling and swimming who utilize a combination of late night or afternoon or evening training sessions as well as very early workouts so 4 5 600 a.m. workouts Um this can either exacerbate insomnia symptoms for those that have it or in some cases unfortunately create it we'll talk about solution steps for that a little bit later restless leg syndrome is also somewhat common you know somewhere between 4 and 133% so another one um to keep up for this is why in many other the consensus statements you will see people advocating for athletes to get tested at least once a year for Sleep Disorders because this is a really high number uh let's even say that some of this is a little bit exaggerated it's not 40% but it is 25% that still means once one on every four or five people um in your room on your team in your locker room has a clinical sleep disorder and almost surely again 80% likely they're never going to know about it so we're leaving a lot of health and performance on the table by not addressing our Sleep Quality and addressing most specifically Sleep Disorders again no specific definition exists for Sleep Quality but there's a lot of metrics that people will use to infer that um some of the things that jump out are efficiency so this is like what percentage of time you spend sleeping at night versus awake another one called wazo wake after sleep onset is a very common one there's latency how long it takes you to fall asleep and then fragmentation and you look at the research on all those and these globally tend to be worse in athletes so you may or may not qualify for a clinical Sleep Diagnosis but that's not really what we're concerned with right so the analogy here would be an X-Ray so your knee hurts you go in to the doctor they take an x-ray and they say well it's not broken therefore it must be optimal that that's not how it works I'm still in pain I'm sub suboptimal right so there's a difference between getting a clinical di agnosis or meeting a threshold for sleep disorder and still having very poor or low quality sleep so one actual study I'm thinking of is colleague of mine Corey peacock did this and this was cool because this was in UFC fighters he tracked them for an entire I think it was somewhere between like a six to eight week camp for a actual UFC fight and they found that sleep latency was one of the telltale signs of problems and so this continued to get worse um throughout the camps and it was actually directly related to a number of performance metrics so their sleep latency was negatively correlated to V2 max heart rate recovery vertical jump height and then what's probably most important which is the amount of workouts or training sessions that they missed and these correlations were strong all of these were about 08 or higher one is the highest you possibly get and so that alone is a phenomenal thing to take a look at and and pay attention to as a way to identify are I sleeping at the highest quality maybe or maybe not clinical disorder level so in addition to sleep duration and quality another lever we can press to enhance performance is sleep timing now this is actually really cool a lot of people think about this simply as the context of jet lag but it is more than that there is circadian rhythms that you perform the best in and it tends to be your local time tends to be your afternoon and so if you're traveling and you're changing time zones this matters but if you're also manipulating when you're performing even within your time zone it can mimic the same effect so what I'm getting at here is if you can optimize timing you can get the benefits of sleep extension and improving Sleep Quality without changing either of them and what I mean by this is the the the research is so cool here because it comes directly from games one there's a lot of research U across a bunch of different sports the NBA the NFL Major League Baseball the NHL there's a bunch of studies going back um through 10 years 30 years up to 40 Years of historical games and they look at these things and they say okay can we predict who's going to win more games based simply on a combination of are they playing in their right circadian time or not so the example here would be let's imagine you have a West Coast team and they're normally used to competing at 400 p.m. on the west coast and they travel to the Midwest or the East Coast but they compete at a time that is still 4:00 on the West Coast time so it's their normal circadian rhythm they have a big advantage over the other team because they're playing in their normal Rhythm despite the fact that they've changed time zones so it's more complicated and more interesting than just you know jet lag which is obviously very very important so this Rhythm um this there's a ton of information here Steven lley from Harvard uh he's been around for forever published a ton in this area was Monumental in developing the Circadian rhythm and light timing um for the International Space Station um he has a great app I have no affiliation to this but it's called time shifter which helps you set your your supplementation and light and food stuff for if you're traveling internationally I've used it for years I've paid full price for it lots of stuff there but he's done a ton of research on this stuff and it's really compelling so Steve has done so much cool work in this area but I'm going to condense it to just hit a couple of points um one study I think of in particular was they they went back and looked at performance in Olympic swimming from 2004 to 2016 and they were able to predict 3% of Performance Based simply on on circadian timing right so again we're not talking about who slept more or who had Sleep Disorders or anything is simply can you play and perform in the right time for your body I think more interesting is Sher ma from Stanford who I've mentioned before um spent I think about three years working with ESPN and what she was able to do is predict somewhere between the neighborhood of 70 to 80% accuracy of who would win NFL games based simply on the team's time zone so this is this is incredible obviously this is stuff that people use in um those in the sports betting worlds behind the scenes a lot part of the information if you ever wonder why a betting line is where it is on some teams this is a huge component to that certainly not the only one but it's really cool stuff so um again be able to understand and enhance your performance if sleep extension is out of the question if sleep diagnostic is out of the question if Sleep Quality you're trying and it's not working whatever another way again you can get yourself to per huge performance enhancements is manipula your timing the more you can stay consistent and performing in your own local space whenever you used to performing the better you're going to be let me give you one tangible example so you have something to lock on to here the University of Washington football team my hometown team candidly is going to be dealing with the unique challenge they are right now in the Pack 12 which means every team they play is on the west coast they're moving to a division that is in the midwest so they're going to be playing Ohio and Pennsylvania and Iowa and Minnesota and things like that so let's imagine this let's imagine the University of Washington typically played their football games as they do either at 4:30 p.m. or 7:30 p.m. Washington time okay great so if they played a team at 4:30 at home and that team came from the East Coast or Midwest University of Washington has an advantage the other team traveled and now they're competing at their normal local time huge win for the University of Washington but another scenario gets more interesting let's imagine that they're on the road and let's imagine they went to Ohio State as an example and they played that game at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time zone now this is actually still despite the fact that they're on the road this is still a huge Advantage for the University Washington because 7:30 East Coast time is still 4:30 West Coast time so not only is the University of Washington competing on their normal circadian rhythm but Ohio State in this case is competing at a way delayed Rhythm um typically those teams are going to be playing at about noon local time so instead of playing at noon local time they're now playing at 7:30 local time they've shifted their performance window 7 and a half hours so in this particular case despite the fact we would be on the road we'd have a three-hour time zone difference there would still be a slight 1 to 2% uh Advantage for the University of Washington third example here would be the opposite let's imagine again University of Washington typically plays at 4:30 p.m. Seattle time and they go to Columbus or Ohio State and they play a game at Columbus or Ohio's normal time which is noon Eastern Time right this is now 9 o'l in the morning for the University of Washington this is now many what are we uh almost eight hours earlier than normal would be a massive Advantage not only because the time shift change the travel being on the road but because the circadian rhythms um you would probably be looking at you know maybe a four to five to six% Advantage just on that fact alone to the Ohio State team so something to really pay attention to those of you that have the opportunity or ability to manipulate this I would encourage you to do so but something again we can really pay attention to when sleep extension or Sleep Quality are not on the table as variables that we can improve it's now time for us to really get into the details of the three eyes the first eye being investigate which is how do I assess and analyze my sleep the second being interpret so how do I know whether that's good bad great terrible or otherwise and then third being intervene so what do I do about it what protocols and solutions do I have to solve these problems so we'll start with the first one and that's investigate now the consensus article I talked about at the very beginning of the show here has a really nice model at the end to kind of walk you through the steps so the way to think about this is I'm probably not going to be able to send every person I know or even myself go to a sleep lab and get a a full sleep study done you know every month or every week or even every year and so how do I actually use a combination of free to maybe moderate Le to all full-blown sleep studies and how do I decide who to use that and so they have a really nice uh overall testing model that we'll do now to me this is really important because I've talked to you already about uh how prevalent Sleep Disorders are the other thing I haven't mentioned yet though is is how bad people are at assessing their own sleep you can look at any number of Publications here but specifically those on athletes show that they are notoriously bad at estimating both their Sleep Quality their sleep quantity um how long it took them to fall asleep as well as and this is one that matters how much it's actually affecting their cognitive and physical performance colleague of mine Ian denkin has done a number of studies in this area and it is mind-blowing how bad athletes are at this and we actually just recently completed a paper together where we uh assessed sleep and nutrition and training in combat sport athletes across the entire Globe both professionals all the way down to in Elite and we saw the same story they are really bad at understanding the basics of sleep knowledge as well as really estimating their Sleep Quality and the effect it has so all that to say really worth your time to do something here I generally recommend getting a sleep study done at least once a year but this is really the model that that consensus paper laid out so kind of level one is basic sleep education and I'll talk about more details of that later why you want to do it how effective basic sleep education actually is despite what you may think and then from there you go on to your next level and that's some sort of free or low cost in this case completely free screening see these are questionnaires um the one I like the most is called the athlete sleep screening questionnaire is as ssq this is a validated study in athletes again I'm emphasizing that point because there are lots of validated sleep questionnaires but this one is specifically in athletes or high performers and again that's something you can deploy to anybody um as often as you'd like you could use it you know monthly or once a year daily really if you wanted to at almost no cost from there that's going to help you kind of triage where you put your emphases a little bit um the model they've got here is if they identify No Sleep problems whatsoever in that screener then you go back to First Step which is you still continue to educate because sleep problems can start just because they don't have one now doesn't mean they won't have one later and just because they don't have a sleep problem that qualifies on that questionnaire doesn't mean they're not suboptimal doesn't mean they're not 80% or 90% and as we've talked about earlier hopefully I've made the case that even those last few percentage points absolutely matter so that's one order No Sleep issues whatsoever according to the questionnaire now according to the questionnaire if they have mild sleep problems then in that case you can go on to more advanced questionnaires um the one here you're going to go after is called the asbq so athlete sleep Behavior questionnaire a little bit different than the previous one um but this can help you kind of identify um if some other issues are going on if data comes back from that and says hey everything's all clear then you go back to step one which is education if not then you may want to invest in some sort of long-term either sleep log or wearable tracking device something like that now you're going on to either continue to use free tools sleep logs you know this is just a journal you're writing stuff down you're tracking how good you feel you're tracking how bad you felt your sleep was how long you slept you know things like that totally free or you've invested somewhere between you know maybe a couple of hundred dollars to five six hundred bucks on some sort of wearable I'll cover those here in a second if we go back to the beginning now and we've identified from our asq a a either moderate to severe sleep issue we've got different steps here now what's important and I want to say that one more time is this is not just severe this is moderate to severe either one of these get the same next couple of steps which is you're going to refer to some sort of sleep specialist um unfortunately there's not a lot of high performance um sleep trained people at this point you're really going to have to kind of go the medical route but worth it if they have a medical disorder um you're going to do some sort of Consulting and testing then you going go into differential diagnosis you know do they have a sleep disorder if so which one etc etc you're going to treat that athlete or have the physician treat that athlete and then go right back to step one with education so overall as a framework I think this hopefully has been helpful um if those of you that are working with many people either you're setting up a clinic or a coaching practice or something like that or even if you're yourself and you're trying to figure out man you know should I spend money on a sleep study should I spend money on a Tracker or well maybe just start with these free Visions first and then if you don't flag for anything you can continue to just um use uh High Sleep Quality behaviors and hygiene and things like that but if you do flag for anything even what's considered to be again moderate or severe then maybe invest exploring into um higher Fidelity types of analyses now something really important I want to point out if you were to use something like the assq in of itself does not determine whether or not you have a sleep disorder it is just information that gives you a likelihood another ways to say this is hey you should probably go get checked out from a true full clinical analysis well you may be then thinking to yourself I don't have a sleep disorder I'm not even going to take the questionnaire but I'm trying to really convince you that that's the wrong approach because like I said a second ago one prevalence of sleep disorders are very high in everybody and over 80% go undiagnosed two we know athletes or anyone who's really pushing high performance or physically larger is more susceptible than the average person 20 to 40% so high numbers right there three athletes in general are very bad at understanding and recognizing how poor their sleep is and that's generally because there are a ton of signs and symptoms that you go through and you deal with in your day that you think are benign you think are normal you think that's just how you are you think that's just how your body is you think you're tired because you're training so much you think um you're fatigued and sore because of what you're doing in practice and all that is partially true it's all also signs of sleep disorders So you you're probably going to be pretty surprised if you take this questionnaire at what they're asking and how they can actually ask these questions and based on your response to these alone are validated ways to identify Sleep Disorders remember that's what validated means it says when we gave people this questionnaire and we compared that directly to the gold standard polography this is all the wires and electrodes hooked up to you the full sheam that the people who score certain way on this questionnaire also then have actual Sleep Disorders that's what it means to be validated okay so again I would still say you know get that doubly verified but that's what it really means okay so if you start looking through the questions and you start seeing things like do you snore most people just think that is a normal thing or it's not a big deal when in reality it is it is a not a guarantee but it is a sign of sleep disorder how much caffeine do you use how rested do you feel throughout the day we talked earlier about other symptoms like it shouldn't not take you more than 20 minutes to fall asleep at night that's your sleep latency another commic sign how hard is it to get to sleep how long does it take you to fall asleep um you shouldn't wake up with there's going to be some inertia in the morning a little bit of grogginess but it shouldn't be extreme it shouldn't be prevalent you should not be able to fall asleep all day at any point in time throughout the day those are other common science sords so it is some very basic questions and you may be thinking to yourself oh yeah I don't have a sleep disorder I don't sleep as much as I want or maybe a little bit slower but I wake up really tired all day oh yeah I do snore oh yeah I I'm fatigued um I wake up more than once per night most nights all of these are signs of if not clinical sleep disorders certainly suboptimal sleep that all said I hope I didn't dramatize or overly attempt to scare you and thinking you all have Sleep Disorders it's not the case it's just more the point of look this is an opportunity for some pretty tremendous performance enhancement the likelihood of you having worse sleep than you think is reasonably High and the cost here is nothing takes a few minutes to do easily scalable the solutions are easy to find in terms of how you scored and so to me it just seems to land on the boy we should absolutely do this the benefit is really huge and the cost is quite low okay so to recap for most people starting off with a questionnaire is a really good strategy now the upside of it as we mentioned is it's free quick and easy to interpret the downside of it is it's really just subjective data it's not an objective look at what's actually happening to do that you've got to go to the next level you're introducing some cost there but you're going to trade that off for accuracy so the next kind of Step Up which is in this moderate again usually two to you know $400 $500 range is using what's called actigraphy Fe these are your wearables all right I'll talk about the pros and cons of those in just one second so those commercially available devices are objective um some but most aren't clinically validated or FDA approved to actually be able to diagnose Sleep Disorders but some are but they have other value and stuff that I'll talk about here in one second the highest level up and now you're talking the most cost the most invasive but most accurate are clinical sleep studies this is used as a technology for the most part called polysomnography and this can be done at home or in a clinic and there are many pros and cons to that as well so what I'd like to do now is really quickly talk about each of these different objective methods discuss the pros and cons so you can make the best decision possible for you in your given scenario I'm going to start off with polygraphy or what I'll refer to from here out is PSG now some of the benefits here are it has a ton in fact more than anything else data behind it so there's a lot of comparisons you can make there's a lot of science there's a lot of support and you can really get a true sense of what's going on it is objective it is something that can be done in your home or in a hospital setting um now the hospital setting is the overwhelming majority of psgs but more and more companies are and Technologies are coming on board that allow you to do this from your home and so the ability to diagnose and interpret clinical sleep disorders is really high here the downside though is you know it's kind of the same thing as the upside one if you're doing this in a you know hospital or clinical setting it's not a realistic picture of what's happening in your life it's you're not going to sleep the same when you've got these electrodes hooked up to you and you're in a funky bed um you're probably only going to be able to do it one or two maybe three nights and so we're getting maybe not a great picture of exactly what's happening we're also basically scanning just for disorders and so if you don't meet those certain thresholds which are honestly somewhat arbitrary then you may be kind of basically told hey you're fine this is similar to the X-ray thing I talked about earlier so they're coming in saying hey I don't see a broken bone so you're fine but just cuz your bone isn't broken doesn't mean your joints functioning correctly either and so there's some downside there they tend to be pretty costly and the the weight line can be very long but they are again the most accurate picture and because they are clinical then you're able to work with a physician that can help you treat anything if you do have something that is worthy of medical consideration so a lot of prosen cons to that if we move to the PSG in home you know still pretty expensive typically still people are only doing a night or two maybe three of that but we're getting a more realistic uh picture and setting of that so um options are available depending on where you're at sometimes you can get it covered from insurance which is nice and other times not but PSG would generally be the gold standard now another way to approach sleep at the highest standard is to use a method called cardiopulmonary coupling now this has actually been around for long time it's got dozens and dozens of studies behind it though most people have never heard of it it's a little bit different than PSG a approaches different things it has a different Target it's looking more at your physiology your autonomic nervous system your respiratory rate and things like that um it was developed by Dr Robert Thomas uh from Harvard and again it's been studied in a lot of areas it's FDA approved as a way to diagnose Sleep disorders and so there are some pros and cons to each of these approaches I would recommend if you're interested in that to talk to your physician or medical team to decide which approach PSG or CPC is better for you based on the questions you have and trying to get answered but I wanted to make sure you knew that both of those options are available taking it down to the next level is what we call actigraphy there are commercially and research grade available devices to be candid with you we use the research grade ones a lot and more and more of those are actually becoming commercially available and so that's something to pay attention to but the other ones uh you're more familiar with these watches and rings and uh wrist straps and chest straps and different things like that that can be used depending on which one you want to talk about the data are quite different they all have their own you know unique value benefits and things like that I don't want to get into the details of all those um quite right now but I think globally you can think about actigraphy or wearables as hey they are a couple of $100 and they have generally some pros and cons many of them are pretty accurate at measuring things like whether or not you're asleep and in fact some of them are really accurate over 90 95 some of them higher than that percentage accuracy of measuring when you're asleep measuring when you're awake becomes more challenging and so they tend to have problems in those areas those can range between like 50 to 80% accuracy again really depending upon the DI you're in so using it to identify whether you're asleep or not great but past that we start to get into problems now the reason I don't want to honestly spend a lot of time here is because I believe even the technology I think it's going to get better so I'm not super concerned that either any of those given devices are at 90% because I probably going to figure they're going to be 95% soon enough anyways or closer than that and so it's really not that big of a deal at the current moment the issues with actigraphy I think are different and that is really they're trying to put together with the best intentions Collective scores for optimization for quality and as we talked about earlier that is very challenging um I don't necessarily need or want or should have the same amount of time in each and one of my sleep stages it's probably dependent upon what I'm doing and in fact sleep stages themselves have some problems maybe that's a conversation for another day but if you poke into the research here you'll find plenty of sleep scientists who just fundamentally disagree with the idea of trying to optimize or maximize a certain amount of time spent in slow wave sleep or deep sleep versus rem or things like that we don't necessarily know what those optimal numbers are we definitely don't know what they are in athletes there's no data on that almost whatsoever and so really being overly concerned with your score on your wearable is where problems start to come in and in fact there is something that's that's growing in this community called orthosomnia which is insomnia that is induced by people trying to optimize their score on wearables and so I don't want to paint a bad picture here because wearables can be incredibly beneficial uh we we see tons of evidence of people getting better at their sleep simply because they're more accountable they are more calibrated they thought they were getting more sleep than they actually are they're tend to make better habits and choices because they know they're going to look at their score in the morning and they and they want to get better and so this is not all bad it is like anything else we've talked about and like anything else we probably will talk about ever in this podcast and that's pros and cons right so way the downside with the balances it's maybe not as accurate but it's an order of magnitude cheaper and instead of of having to do one or two nights you can now do every single night at the same time maybe there's problems with that you don't necessarily want everyone I I could tell you countless stories of athletes and clients I've worked with where we take their trackers away from them or maybe we keep them tracking but we block their ability to see their own score because it just leads to all kinds of problems and so it's a viable option use what's best for you in your situation okay so at this point hopefully I've covered a tool that's accessible for just about everybody listening here we talked about screeners which are completely free to low moderate cost wearables all the way up to the highest standard of either polysomnography or cardiopulmonary coupling testing done at your home or in a sleep lab also to continue on with that I'll share with you a little bit about what we do with our professional athletes and Elite Executives that really don't have time or cost limitations but want the best possible solution what we actually do is build full functioning sleep labs in their home as as well as a scalable version that they can take on the road so we are running FDA approved clinical sleep studies on them almost every single night and we're measuring everything about their sleep uh we're doing things differently based on their sport so our golfers go through a little bit different protocol than our UFC fighters and that's different than our major league baseball players Etc and so the testing that things we're measuring and monitoring are slightly different and all that tells us in the highest Val possible how they are sleeping but we also care about why they're sleeping that way so as a part of that we're running four separate analyses so we're always looking at the environment uh hopefully by the time you're listening to this U my paper's been published so we've got a literature review out right now in review and that covers 11 unique factors like CO2 and a bunch of other things that are involved in your environment um that can be influencing your sleep and explaining why you're sleeping the way you are outside of that there's physiology so there's a bunch of specific sleep blood work and blood panels that we've created um things that go after thyroid and iron and um a bunch of other stuff that you may be not paying attention to there's a behavioral component to it and there's also psychology so all four of those unique components are going to tell us why you're sleeping the way you are so we do this again pretty extensively and the reason we put so much effort and energy into this is well everything I've been talking about it is really a huge performance magnifier so Solutions like that are available for those folks that uh want to go to the end degree here with their sleep optimization so now that we' fully investigated or analyzed our sleep how do we interpret the results so let's move on to our second eye there please also remember we're not talking about how do I interpret my sleep from a risk of disease later in life or anything like that we're talking about how do I interpret it from the perspective of maximizing performance so what should my sleep look like if I'm trying to get the Optimal Performance results in terms of duration the number seems to be about 9 hours of course there's lots of individual variation here some folks May truly be at their best at 8 hours or seven and a half and some might actually need nine or 10 but nine seems to be the number that came up a lot in the research also in my conversations with these sleep X where it's like Amy Bender and Steven lley and Jeff durmer they all basically came back and kept saying 9 hours so I think that's a pretty good starting place in terms of other metrics of quality we mentioned latency 5 to 15 minutes seem to be the sweet spot if your latency again this is time it takes you to fall asleep at night is under 5 minutes this is probably an indicator of the fact that you're underslept if it's longer than that we're probably in an area of maybe suboptimal sleep routines or habits or environments or something like that it's delaying us from getting into sleep we also may be doing something throughout the day like excessive caffeine training too hard too late at night or other issues like that that are Ling our time to sleep efficiency if you're getting that metric on your wearable um you're going to see again the medical numbers are say hey be above 85% I personally and this is just my Andy's interpretation here I always like to see it above 93% efficiency is generally a problem of sleep latency um or waking up too often throughout the night those are the two biggest contributors and so I I want to see that number above 93 if I can above 95% wa events I've already talked about it is absolutely normal to wake up once a night but we're not trying for normal here I actually my goal is to get people to sleep through the night every night in other words say I don't want you waking up at all that's the target we should be able to sleep through the night on most nights that doesn't mean if you're waking up every night you've got a disorder or anything close to that again we're pushing for optimal here as you age this gets more challenging but certainly waking up twice or more per night um is almost always in my book going to be suboptimal sleep and then finally we want to have some subjective measures of how are you feeling how does that make you perform the next day so how is your daytime sleepiness I want you waking up with a little bit of sleep inera but not a ton I want you to feel pretty refreshed when you get when you wake up you're going to be a little bit sleepy throughout the day especially early afternoon but I don't want you walking around all day the ability to fall asleep on command Okay so daytime sleepiness is how we kind of coxes so for me that's the general picture of what I'm looking at for Sleep Quality now I need to mention this again because it comes up so commonly and that is your sleep stages people are very concerned about how much time they spend in say deep sleep or REM sleep or any other styles of sleep now this becomes really challenging and I have to be honest with you in my coaching experience I've generally found this to be more problematic than it is helpful doesn't mean it's hasn't helped some but this causes a lot of issues I mentioned earlier it's somewhat arbitrary most uh wearables are taking a measure of your sleep kind of once every five minutes or so and then they're arbitrarily defining your sleep based on 30 second Epoch or time domains and they're using standards that are really really old in this case 40 plus years old and they change sometimes the scientific Community says okay now this thing is defined as N2 or N3 or whatever or sometimes they take them out entirely and so it just hasn't been that helpful to worry about I generally feel like if you pay attention to the other stuff your sleep behaviors your sleep environment your sleep um relationship in general what we want to do is not have you obsess over some arbitrary or in this case sometimes proprietary uh equivalence of optimization meaning depending on which company you bought it from they Define optimal differently and there's not even a scientific consensus of that so we're really chasing a rabbit that may not actually be something we want to go after and so I don't want to be too negative here but really people have worked themselves into a bit of a tissy here trying to optimize the Sleep based on those trackers when I don't think that's the best case use for them there's a lot of benefit from trackers like we've talked about earlier but I'm just generally going to caution you against this one in my personal coaching experience we talked about how they are problematic in terms of accuracy some better than others and they're getting better but they're not there and why this really matters is there have been some studies that have looked and in fact Stephen lley stuff have looked at things like sleep deception so imagine being in a study and being told you either slept for 5 hours when you actually slept for eight or the opposite and that research is pretty clear you will perform the next day based upon what you think you slept rather than what you actually slept so imagine what's happening when you're getting false or inaccurate information from your tracker it is absolutely impacting how you're performing the next day and so the people that are just like well I just track and I don't do anything with it okay we talked about orthosomnia earlier now we're talked about the research on Deception this stuff is making an impact on you and so we really want to be judicious and careful with how we're using those trackers my recommendation again one more time to be clear here is just really not to worry too much about the Sleep staging how much time you spent in deep or Ram or things like that and pay attention to the other things sleep latency sleep Behavior use it for accountability making better choices maybe you don't have that extra cocktail maybe you don't do that other thing you know is going to be bad for your sleep because it's going to impact your score tomorrow to me those are beneficial uses of it and just really be cautious and careful of spending too much time worrying about those sleep stages just as one final note before we go on to our third and final eye and that is as always me wanting to be transparent with you and share what I do in my coaching practice if I'm interested or feel like I need to dive deep into somebody's Sleep Quality or look at their what called Sleep architecture I'm going to use cardiopulmonary coupling of that CPC we talked about and I'm going to go after three things and this is not specifically based on the research it's honestly my personal experience and the ones that I found to be most important and the biggest indicator of opportunity to improve sleep and those three metrics are going to be their sleep stability sleep fragmentation and then finally their respiratory rate and effort we're going to talk a lot more about that third one in future episodes there's a lot of interesting things there so to summarize everything about Sleep Quality a lot of ways you can go about it Define it how it's most important for you be careful of the pitfalls and use it to develop more resilient sleepers not more sensitive ones with that being said it's time for us to jump into our third and final eye and that's intervention now frankly we could probably do an entire episode on different ways and tactics and tools to improve sleep but given me this far in what I'd like to do is just focus on a handful that have been shown the research as well as in my own personal experience to be particularly helpful at improving sleep duration quality and timing and so the very first one I like to start with is maybe not going to apply to everyone but I think really important that I don't want to miss and that is the importance of sleep education really specifically sleep education has been shown to enhance sleep duration by anywhere between up to 20 to 90 minutes uh it reduces sleep latency by up to 30 minutes can improve efficiency by over 5% and has been shown to reduce sleep onset variance by almost a half an hour and so it's not just duration its quality as well so really worth your time there's a lot of research on what happens to athletes and individuals sleep duration and quality when you simply educate them so step number one is telling your kids and telling your athletes and telling the people that you're training and coaching how important sleep really is I know what you're feeling it's the feeling I get when I have to talk about sleep sometimes man like I'm going to say this they're not going to pay attention and it's not going to matter but the research shows the opposite the research is really clear when you spend anywhere between 30 to 60 Minutes educating people on sleep you can see pretty important improvements in duration and quality that lasts up to a month with just a single session of education and so this stuff is really important to talk about you want to teach a handful of different things number one the value of screening like we've established earlier checking out whether or not you have a this order um the the need for duration so telling them people don't know that 9 hours is the number that sleep scientists recommend for high performing athletes that fact alone can change behaviors and then third is actually sleep hygiene in fact there's a really cool study on soccer players that asked them to do very minimal I think it was about 10 or 15 minutes before they went to sleep to not use their phone they used an eye mask and then a couple of very very standard noninvasive approaches to sleep and what they found was the groups that did that were able to sleep almost an hour and a half more on the days following a game so what that means is as anyone who's played Sports know when you play a night game it's really hard to sleep that night it's very common for athletes to sleep four or five hours after that and so the group in this study that didn't do the hygiene steps slept for four and a half hours on average that night in the group that did slept for almost six so they were able to add an hour and a half of sleep by having them do just a few very basic sleep hygiene steps but this really is not um an explanation or example of the quality of the hygiene it's the education piece that matters here just telling them they need to sleep more and giving them a few tips really does make a big impact so wanted to make sure that you have that information I realize not all of you in fact probably few of you are coaches but for those of you that are out there I wanted you to have that information so outside of Education the next big rock to move is opportunity and so this is really a conversation with you and yourself for the most part everyone has the ability to give them themselves more opportunity to sleep so when we're talking sleep extension of course just giving yourself more hours is the obvious solution how do you do this well generally we don't like to schedule things first thing in the morning if possible I personally don't use an alarm clock I have not in many many years I get up very early personally but I don't schedule things I have to do within the first couple of hours so I don't have to have an alarm clock more importantly probably is getting to bed at a consistent time shutting things down earlier if you can avoid night exercise very late at night avoid working late at night and things like that if at all possible that gives yourself the opportunity another thing to do is making sure that you are creating what we call a pro sleep culture this could be within you and your team if you're leading individuals and by this don't think about Just Sports think of this as running a business business and a company are you creating a pro or a negative sleep culture right are you allowing people the opportunity to embrace sleeping well or are we still thinking about poor sleep as you know a badge of honor if you will in fact there's a lot of research on this and how important it is and how impactful it can be to just promote sleep as a performance-enhancing tool not just something getting in the way or you know taking away training time this is something that we're going to use as a competitive Advantage so making sure we have the opportunity from ourself as well as the people that we're guiding and leading to have a pro sleep culture the next one is what we've talked about uh a little bit earlier and that is making sure we have a structured sleep plan so what I mean by this is when you're organizing your day like I've talked about or you're organizing your team meetings or when you're working out are you doing it in a way that allows you the chance to sleep appropriately as we mentioned before not doing things at night that we know disrupt sleep if we can do them earlier in the day are we giving ourselves the opportunity to bank sleep prior to Major competitions or major periods of lost sleep so say you're traveling a bunch you've got a heavy workload coming up finals week or whatever the case may be and you know sleep is going to be a problem are you removing things in the 3 days to 30 days before that that are optional so that you can maximize sleep in that particular time in any given day if you can't get enough sleep are you giving yourself the opportunity to take take naps 20 to 90 minute naps are very effective for performance enhancement acutely but more importantly to just add back some of that sleep time so all this falls under the umbrella of you'll never sleep enough if you never give yourself the chance to sleep enough the next set of solutions really deal with improving the quality and timing of your sleep getting started right out the gates the most important thing you can do to improve your sleep quality is treating your sleep disorder if you actually have one there are a number of really easy solutions depending upon what your sleep problem actually is I think about this from the perspective of a football player they're probably more likely to be dealing with things like sleep apnea because they're larger relative to say maybe a swimmer whose issue is more likely to be dealing with circadian rhythms because they're often times practicing and training early in the morning so right out the gates just thinking about what we're asking our bodies to do gives us some strategies for what type of disorder we may likely have and then of course then the solution for that in order to make my Solutions a little bit more straightforward what I want to do is talk about getting to sleep faster and then staying asleep more effectively so what are the reasons why people struggle to fall asleep and how can we improve that it can be a number of different things the obvious ones but still important are we using stimulant or caffeine too late for our own physiology some folks can metabolize caffeine very quickly and it doesn't affect them others really struggle if it's within you know eight or more hours of sleep it can affect their overall Sleep Quality that's a common one a working or doing any other stimulating events at night can be a problem where people really miss this is the best way to probably think about it is novelty so it's not the fact that you're on your phone or the fact that you're watching TV or anything it's seeking of novelty that seems to be the big problem so it's okay for some folks I will be candid with you I watch a little bit of TV basically every night before sleep but what you don't want to do are things that cause you to seek novel and so your phone becomes problematic because something new will pop up and it'll reward that pattern of seeing something new and novel and get you excited and so what you don't want to do is watch TV shows that are that you don't want to watch things that are aggravating or arousing or exciting you want to watch typically things that are more interesting but not overly stimulating uh this is planet Earth this is uh not murder mysteries this is not um things that get you aggravated and irritated like the news and political events and things like that and so um that is what you want to be cautious of eating too close to bed can be a problem however however and this is important people miss this there is excellent research showing small snacks before bed can enhance Sleep Quality and reduce sleep latency specifically kiwis are are well studied as effective sleep aids um higher glycemic index meals pretty close to bed again low amounts can be great we certain certainly don't want to eat high amounts and increased digestion or heart rate and problems like that but small snacks for some people can actually be really effective at putting you to sleep probably most important to all this though is really the pattern and if you look around at any the Sleep research or talk to Sleep Experts they're going to talk about the need to make sure that your sleeping environment is really a sleep Sanctuary arm body has probably one tool better than anything else and that's the ability to pattern recognize and this becomes a problem if you go into two sleep environments and you're anticipating a pattern of sleep issues then that pattern is going to persist if you have the opposite then that pattern will persist so what we see a lot of times our solution strategies for people having a hard time going to sleep despite the fact that they're doing all these other things right and this is common right oh I don't have caffeine I stop working um you know many hours before I don't eat before I meditate before I do breath work I do all these things and I still struggle with sleep okay great I'm not watching TV all those other why am I still struggling to fall asleep well often times it's the fact that you think about struggling to fall asleep that's causing that pattern to persist so how do we solve that we take clocks away you don't get to measure and you don't get to see your sleep score you don't get to see your sleep latency number you don't get to look at the clock and think about how long it's taking you to fall asleep so all of those are also tools to take that out of the equation and reframe the approach into thinking when I get into bed this is an awesome opportunity to sleep rather than oh my gosh I'm going to get into bed and have another night where I can't fall asleep that's a bad framework to be in and you want to get out of that as quickly as you possibly can these environmental pattern recognition things are so strong you can actually use it to your advantage especially when traveling everyone knows of the first night effect which is when you are in a new destination you struggle to sleep the first night but tend to sleep a lot better the second or third and subsequent nights well a lot of that is because you're in a different environment right we are seeing and smelling and hearing the same things we did house so if we can artificially create that in our house and take that on the road we can dramatically improve our Sleep Quality and specifically our sleep onset um think about smell as the easiest one if you take a scent that you like common ones are lavender and you put a little lavender on your bed at night in your house every night you stend to associate that smell with safe secure high quality sleep Etc you take that on the road with you then put that on your new mattress or bed or wherever you go those same s will kick in the same pattern recognition will happen and ideally you have the same quality of sleep you can do a similar thing with temperature right if you have a set temperature of your bed you may not be able to take that entire cooling mattress with you on the road but there are things like cooling pillows so you use that same temperature on your pillow at home take that pillow or pillowcase with you and now you have a mimicked environment you combine a couple of different things like that and you should really improve your sleep latency when you're on the road now when it comes to staying asleep at night there's a bunch bunch of different solutions we can talk about one of my most common ones is hydration if you drink too much water of course you're going to wake up and have to urinate and that's going to cause you to get up a whole bunch but really some folks don't understand that Sleep Quality will be a big determinate upon how frequently you get up to go pee if you waking up more than once and you go to pee there's a large volume there it is clear and that's happening the next morning as well when you wake up and you still have a lot of pee then you probably are in issue of drinking too much pure water in that case just reduce your water intake for a couple of hours prior to bed and you should be fine funny enough we've had plenty of our high performing clients um our high performing Executives and our coaching programs come to us with all kinds of problems with their physiology and performance and brain fog and really all of it boiled down to the fact that they drank way too much water at night it was tanking their sleep we moved that and within days um they're sleeping for 10 hours for the first time in 15 years and I I have so many examples of that where it's pretty silly honestly where I'm like man you spent a lot of money and time to figure out you drink way too much water at night so it can be quite that simple other times though is a little bit deceiving so folks will oftentimes think that's the problem if it's not the case you're waking up and there's not a lot of volume there or there is like one time and the second time it's you know a lot less or it's you know more yellow colored or in the morning you wake up and realize you didn't even pee for 45 minutes after waking up this is sometimes an issue of Sleep Quality and so what happens is typically at night you're supposed to be sending signals to your kidneys that says hey stop filtering and producing urine and so obviously we don't want to be waking up to do that all throughout the night if you're of a low quality sleep though for any number of reasons that signal can continue to be sent and so you can continue to make the urine and so people think that their Sleep Quality is being ruined by the fact that they have to get up and pee when their honest reality is they're peeing because they're already basically awake and so that is another way to figure out H maybe I have a disorder maybe I should get checked out maybe something is going on because I'm waking up to pee a lot and really there's not a lot there I probably should get checked out another really common one is sleep position we see this routinely where 80 plus percentages of people's sleep problems happen when they're on one position of their body most commonly it's your back and so avoiding sleeping directly on your back and sleeping either on your sides as a blanket rule though not true for everyone um can really dramatically improve people's sleep I've told this story earlier uh of one of my professional athletes I worked with having this issue but we have seen this time and time again so getting some assessment or analysis of what's happening in your sleep position um this is a similar story to ergonomics so making sure that your bed and mattress and pillow are all comfortable can also be really important factors uh to your overall Sleep Quality outside of that we start now talking about environmental factors you probably have heard at nauseum about of course temperature um you want to be comfortable there and we want to be probably a little bit cooler than we are during the day but even noise we want to be less than 35 DB anything above that tends to create problems this is where actually things like pink noise start to come into play there's a lot of really interesting research coming out on that um it's a little bit deeper than white noise and it's not really publicly available for the most part but the research thus far is quite impressive the issue with like white noise or sleep machines is the fact that above 35 decimal they can actually create sleep problems because they're so loud and so while it's great to kind of drown out the background information you don't want to be in a position where you're actually too loud depending on where you live if you're especially in an urban environment and you have lots of external um sound stuff going on you may want to actually turn into something like earplugs instead of a sleep machine for that purpose though earplugs May create problems with ear pain and discomfort and stuff like that so again choose the best tool um that that you have for your situation but really below 35 decimal is the gold standard there again ideally in the show notes here we've got the link to my paper that you can go through all 11 factors but other ones that are really common are CO2 there's emerging evidence that when that thing gets above 900 parts per million and then really specifically in in in exaggerated scenarios of above like 2400 parts per million that this can dramatically impact Sleep Quality sleep onset and sleep latency as well as next day wakefulness memory and decision- making and a bunch of other cognitive performance tasks so um many many other factors that go into your Sleep Quality such as your environment and that we'll have in the show notes last thing I want to talk about here is snoring now I don't want to overly concern you everybody snores at some point or another it doesn't necessarily mean it probably doesn't mean you have a sleep disorder though it's not totally benign if you're chronic or excess store that that's really the problem here it's not a normal function it's common but it's not normal now one thing that's actually quite funny that I we laugh about on my team a lot is how frequently people come into our programs because of sleep issues and they've tried everything they've done all the stuff we've talked about they've had sleep studies done before and they came back either like really moderate or nothing at all and they they maybe think their testosterone is low or maybe it is and they just like they've through everything like I just cannot sleep and we do one little test on him and realize wow has your sleep partner been assessed like oh my sleep partner just snores like crazy and we always chuckle because I'm like man I got really bad news for you your sleep is fine but your partner's sleep is a complete disaster and they're ruining your sleep so we've had a lot of people come into our program and then basically switch so the person that paid initially said don't even do me anymore do this on my sleep partner my husband or my wife or whatever fix their sleep and then that original person's sleep disorder quote unquote goes away immediately and permanently and this this happen like you can hear me literally laughing because it's happen so many times and I don't feel bad about it cuz the people sleep perfectly afterwards because we found the real problem and it had nothing to do with them and so snoring can be a real problem with sleep and so really making sure that it's not you it's not your sleeping partner or in a lot of the cases it's their dog um not often cats are snoring that loud but dogs that's really really common and so that that can be really disruptive to overall sleep if it is you personally we'll go back to that example you can try just going with something like mouth tape I've done that a ton I use it a ton uh especially using a combination of nasal dilators so either nasal strips or something like that to open up your nasal passageways as well as mouth tape and and I will be CED with you we we've had a lot of success with that and sometimes that step alone really can improve snoring and and solve AOC ofy problems it doesn't always happen though so if it doesn't then you probably need to go to the next step one way or the other but it can absolutely be a viable solution and is a nice place to start and just to be really clear the next step I'm talking about is usually getting a sleep study done but you can try other stuff as well we've already talked about position is another common solution generally people don't snore on their sides if they do not nearly as much or as loud as they are when they're on their back so just try investing in one of those sleep pillows I talked about earlier that forces you to sleep on your left or right side sometimes that solves the problem immediately um there are also tongue exerc exercises you can do we can actually have a whole protocol here in the show notes uh this is very free it it's going to take typically four to8 weeks to have some sort of an effect but there is strong research behind tongue strengthening exercises to resolve that problem sometimes there is no solution it is anatomical and you either have to have some sort of nasal surgery or put in some sort of mouthpiece uh to resolve that problem and then sometimes not even that works but for the most part something in that solution I just went over uh is going to either dramatically help if not completely solve your snoring problems I'd like to finish with a couple of quick tips for Sleep timing now mostly we're thinking about this in the context of jet lag if you're interested in that I'd recommend checking out Dr Andrew huberman's excellent podcasts and toolkits on that you can go to hubman lab and just search jet lag protocols and he's got a bunch of free information on optimizing and maximizing performance through jetl you can also use the app I me mentioned earlier uh Steven lley time shifter again no affiliation there but really what I want you to pay attention to is not creating jet lag in your own self and what I mean by that is making sure your sleep timing is consistent we generally like to look at 45 minutes maybe up to an hour at most of waking and going to sleep and so if you are you know waking up at 6:00 a.m. during the weekdays and then you're sleeping in till 10: a.m. on the weekends you're effectively creating a 4-Hour time shift every single weekend that's going to be highly problematic it's almost no different than you getting on a plane and changing time zones every single weekend and so really being consistent with your waking time is the best strategy I like to Anchor that it's the easiest one to manipulate it's hard to force yourself to go to sleep when you're not tired at night but you can always wake up at or close to the same time so although you may want to sleep in many times you can do that but try to keep it within an hour so if you need more sleep outside of that try to go to bed earlier the next night or perhaps add in a nap like we've talked about earlier if you're really going to be extending your transition I would use the more diligent approach and I would like to finish here because I think this culminates in exactly what I've been talking about the entire episode here and that is using sleep to our advantage for performance enhancement it is creating optimal plans based on unique and specific solution and treating it like the true performance enhancing variable it is and this is how the United States weightlifting team handled sleep prior to the 2020 Olympic Games Japan now as we talked about earlier if you don't handle this appropriately not only are you missing out on performance games but you're having a serious competitive disadvantage so all the diligence and attention you put into your training for the years ahead of that and your nutrition and your physical therapy and your mental health and everything else like that can completely be smashed by a bad sleep transition approach the the data are overwhelming here and so what they did was number one they hired a full-time sleep consultant and they built them out a sleep plan that started 6 weeks prior to the Olympic Games they did three weeks at home where they transitioned and got them on a training light and eating time that was on Hawaii time and the reason they did that is because they went to Hawaii spent 3 weeks there and then transitioned over to Japan and so remember six weeks total here so three weeks at home to get on to Hawaii time again three things they manipulated was their exercise draining their light exposure and their food they then moved over to Hawaii they spent 3 weeks there getting then on Japanese time so by the time they left Hawaii and got to Japan they were already on optimized Japanese time this allowed them to then land and remember this was during covid so they couldn't hang out in the Olympic Village for all the time like they typically we did these athletes were often times competing 2 to three days maybe 5 days at the most from when the time they landed in Japan before that time they were on their Podium so to me that again that was a great example of taking taking sleep seriously and making sure we're not only not ruining our performance but optimizing it and getting the most out of our system so to wrap everything up let's summarize what we talked about today we started off by going over the power and benefits of physical performance and strength and power and reaction time as well as onfield performance so accuracy of shooting and things like that to actually winning more games but it extends beyond that we're really talking about the ability to maximize our physical performance in any domain or capacity in which we're asking our body to perform remember as always if you have a body you're an athlete and we all want to perform at our best and it would not make any sense for us to think that sleeping okay is okay we want to sleep great so that we perform great in doing that we talked about three major areas sleep duration Sleep Quality and sleep timing and how various strategies can be used based on our own individual needs and demands to create specific solutions to maximize all three of those areas of sleep to get the best out of our body that we can we also talked about how that can help us recover from injury faster and as always we covered a combination of free to moderate to what the best in the world are doing for the three eyes that is how do I investigate or analyze my sleep how do I interpret it and then how do I intervene to make changes on it I hope you enjoyed all this and that you don't use any of it against me when your athletes are competing against mine cuz I want to win thank you for joining for today's episode our goal is to share exciting scientific Insight that helps you perform at your absolute best if the show resonates with you and you want to help ensure this information remains free and accessible to anyone in the world there are a few ways that you can support first you can subscribe to the show on YouTube Spotify and apple and on Apple and Spotify you can leave up to a five-star review given that we're a new podcast subscribing and leaving a review really really does help us a lot second please check out our sponsors the show would not exist without them and they really are exceptional products and services and then finally you can share today's episode with a friend who you think would enjoy it if you have any content questions or suggestions please put those in the comment section on YouTube I really do try to read these and see what you have to say if you have yet to sign up for our monthly newsletter you can do so at perform podcast.com our newsletter provides episode summaries with the key takeaways for each and every episode EP of the podcast this includes topics like how to improve your V2 Max how to build muscle mass and muscle strength how to optimize your sleep for high performance and much more to sign up just go to perform podcast.com click newsletter at the top of the screen and then enter your email address once you sign up you receive access to all of our newsletters I use my Instagram and Twitter also exclusively for scientific communication so those are great places to follow along for more learning my handle is Dr Andy Galpin on both platforms thank you for listening and never forget in the famous words of Bill Bowerman if you have a body you're an athlete