In February 2011, Dallas wrote an article for Performance Menu, the “journal of nutrition and athletic excellence” published each month by Greg Everett of Catalyst Athletics. The article focused on the impact of sleep (or lack thereof) on your health and athletic performance.
Today, thanks to the generosity of Catalyst Athletics, today we are offering Dallas’ article for free – available to those without a subscription to PMenu. (Although if you don’t yet have a subscription, we can’t help but wonder why. Your health, performance and taste buds would all benefit from PMenu’s high caliber monthly offerings, and who doesn’t like the instant gratification of an on-line publication? The best part? You can subscribe for the whole year for only $30. Seriously – go do it. We’ll wait.)
Here’s a preview from Dallas’ article.
Sleep: An Undervalued Ergogenic Aid
We all know we need sleep, and most of us would admit that we probably need more. Unfortunately, that knowledge often isn’t enough to compel us to take action to improve our sleep habits (or lack thereof). In many Western societies, the hard-charging, go-getting executive takes pride in sleeping less than his or her competitors, purportedly “getting more done” in any given day. (From a raw productivity perspective, that may be true, though research suggests that being chronically sleep deprived significantly impedes psychomotor function, memory retrieval, and… work productivity. So spending more hours getting stuff done – at the expense of sleep – makes you get less done in any given hour. Ah, the irony.)
In the realm of athletics, sleep seems to be the red-headed stepchild: clumsily acknowledged, generally overlooked, yet permanently part of the family. To the detriment of our health and performance, we often don’t give sleep proper priority. I think it’s high time that we help sleep come in from the cold.
Download the full PDF
You can download the full Performance Menu PDF here.
And as you couldn’t comment or post questions on the original article in PMenu, we’ll host them here – so feel free to post your thoughts below.
Enjoy – and tuck yourself in a little early tonight, okay?
Love it. I’ve been incredibly interested in sleep/sleep cycles since having my baby. He’s 13 months now, wakes up anywhere from 2-5 times a night, and yet I’m totally rested and bound out of bed in the morning. The key is cosleeping – when moms and babies bed share and breastfeed, their sleep cycles sync up (mom’s cycle shortens) so mom is never woken out of a dead sleep. In fact, most of the time I wake up about 10-20 seconds before he does. He latches on, and we’re both back to sleep within a minute or two. The biggest surprise of motherhood was that I *wasn’t* tired even though I woke up almost every hour at night. I’m sure I would be if I were getting out of bed and heating up a bottle a few times a night, though…
I think I’m one of those lucky ones who get 7-8 hours of sleep everyday. I make sure I get enough or else I get cranky (lack of) or headaches (oversleeping). When I was still in university, “normal” sleep is 4-5 hours daily, and add schoolwork madness into that. I lost a lot of weight and was generally unhealthy. Now that I can afford a healthy amount of sleep, I’m feeling much better and of course, healthier both in mind and body.
Susie – I can imagine why sleep would be of huge interest to you – I’m already dreading the loss of my precious 10 hours a night when we decide to have kids. Co-sleeping sounds like a great strategy – thanks for sharing!
Charlotte – I can’t imagine going back to my “normal” 5-6 hours of sleep a night from my old job. I’m certain you feel so much better now – and are healthier for it as well!
Melissa
Thanks for the article, I really enjoyed it! A lot of people certainly do take sleep for granted, and it serves them poorly in the long run. I am currently in an accelerated and very challenging nursing program, hit the gym 5 times a week, have a 5-year-old son, and my husband is a full-time student as well. Over this past semester I dedicated myself to getting 8 hours of sleep EVERY night, regardless of how much studying or housework I still wanted to do. It turned out to be the best decision I made. I ended up much less stressed than most of my classmates and pulled straight A’s, along with hitting new PRs at CrossFit and feeling great in general. I relate much of my successes these past few months to the additional sleep I’ve been getting on a regular basis.
On a second note, can we get the references for the article? I love to look up the original sources and see what else I can learn from them.
Thanks, and keep up the strong work!
Aileah,
Thanks for your kind words, and I’m glad you found the article helpful. To be honest, I don’t have a comprehensive list of references for specific articles I write (though I probably should). I piece together various perspectives and studies I read into a (hopefully) cohesive thought process, but it’s made up of a huge number of tiny pieces. I would recommend some quality time with Google Scholar; some useful search terms might be “sleep deprivation”, “growth hormone”, “interleukin-6″, and “cognitive performance”. (Use combinations of these and other related terms.) If there’s a very specific aspect that you can’t find a study on, shoot me another comment and I’ll see if I can dig one up for you.
Best,
Dallas
Great article Dallas! I always make sure I get at least 9 hours of sleep a night or I get very cranky. Personally I’ve never understood why people are sleep-deprived. The way I see it, sleep is one of the few things in life that is completely free!