Upgrade Your Sleep!

The Most Comfortable Performance Enhancer.
Do you ever receive a piece of advice that sticks with you for all time? Here’s one of mine: “Always invest in a great bed and a great pair of shoes because when you’re not in one, you’re in the other.” Too true. As a CrossFitter, you probably have the shoes covered; you rock the latest pair of Nanos, or you pause class to change into your lifters right before the WOD. But let’s talk about the other investment—your sleep.
Secondary only to nutrition, sleep is a performance enhancer that can bring big rewards.

In his article entitled “Sleeping for Performance,” Martin Rawls-Meehan states that “Exercise, nutrition and sleep make a virtuous circle comprising the three essential elements of fitness” http://library.crossfit.com/free/pdf/CFJ_Sleep_RawlsMeehan2.pdf. Rawls-Meehan points to research evidence suggesting that subjects who sleep ten hours 1) have improvements in sleep, strength, agility, and reaction time and 2) retain muscle memory for movements at a higher rate. It benefits both brawn and brain.
Among performance benefits, why not also enjoy your bed longer? Heck, that’s enough to get me to improve my sleeping habits. So how do we achieve this? I’ll address this two ways: practice and products.

Let’s first look at practice. Practical advice about sleep comes in many forms. Recalling from both Rawls-Meehan’s article and personal experience, here are my top pieces of advice for improving your sleep practices:

• Block out 9 hours’ worth of sleep per day. This doesn’t mean you sink into slumber that long. Rather, remove all screens and lights from your bedroom for nine hours to shut down the system.
• Avoid “big” your final two hours awake. Big meals and big workouts should be a no-go. Plan to attack your WODs and food further out from your sleep.
• Charge your phone on the other side of the room. To prevent the distraction of checking your emails and Twitter feed, charge your phone over on your dresser instead. Plus, this will help you wake up to your FIRST alarm. It forces you to get out of the bed to silence it!

These are all small tweaks you can make to setting yourself up for a good sleep. Next, let’s look at products. I’m all about putting good money into my sleep setup. Here are my favorite items:

• A good humidifier. I’m from the South, so the Midwest racks me with bloody noses in the winter. A good humidifier helps the tiny hairs in your nostrils free up good breathing patterns.
• The Chilipad. (https://www.chilitechnology.com/collections/all?rfsn=491580.3acc5) Can you say GAME CHANGER?! Although expensive ($650-$1,000), this product is the number one product recommendation for sleep from Kelley Starrett (author of Becoming a Supple Leopard). This sheet under your fitted sheet controls the temperature from as low as 55 degrees up to 110 degrees. Much more than a heated blanket, it cools you off while sleeping in the summer, too! Despite the price, it’s a product I use every night.
• Magnesium supplements. Taking magnesium supplements helps with bone recovery and energy production. More importantly, it helps relieve stress hormones and insomnia. I pair magnesium with vitamin C right before bed.
• GravityBlanket.  gravityblankets.com/pages/gshopgclid=Cj0KCQiAus_QBRDgARIsAIRGNGgwIDp_OnsZwfn6DxA0SoedG3cEKqHVzSX1klwSsXOdL_edaBYW4wEaAqMtEALw_wcB). I haven’t tried this yet, personally, but you’d better believe it’s at the top of my Christmas List. If you’re like me, you like feeling the weight of ten blankets on you, but you don’t want to be overheated. Backed by science to help relieve stress, this could be a revolutionary product.

Aside from your typical thread-count, pillow-topper bed upgrades, these suggestions will help you increase the quality of your sleep. Worried about price? Remember, you sleep every day; what better product investment can you make?

Never discount what sleep does for your performance in the gym, at work, and at home. Nutrition helps you with energy production, but sleep regenerates the production cycle. If you’re looking for a good New Year’s Resolution or simply a better habit in life, consider what small changes you can make to impact 7-9 hours of your every day. Adding magnesium to your micronutrient supplements is a ten-second act that improves
your 7-9 hours of sleep; moving your phone charger across this room is temporary annoyance that yields successful sleeping and waking patterns. Follow the challenge to see how your sleep can affect your performance!

Challenge: For 21 days, record a scale of 1-10 about your energy level. 1 is “exhausted,” and ten is “energized.” Record this scale in your journal for three periods:
1) during your workout, 2) during your workday, and 3) during your time at home.
Days 1-7, don’t change anything about your current sleep patterns. Days 8-14, add a practice or products change above, but only one! Days 15-21, add a second practice or products change above. On day 22, do a final journal entry about what you observed from the challenge! Post your journal comments here for others to see.

“Sleeping for Performance.” Martin Rawls-Meehan. The CrossFit Journal. Link:
http://library.crossfit.com/free/pdf/CFJ_Sleep_RawlsMeehan2.pdf

Coach Josh Womack