Sleep Hacks

Increasing quality and duration for better health and recovery.

...like a baby

Whilst it’s hard to put a finger on the actualities of sleep, everyone knows when they haven’t had enough. So what you do you do to increase quality and duration aiding both mental and physical processes?

When sleeping, the body goes through processes that help you deal with stress, both physical and mental. Information is processed, a hormonal milieu is produced – including growth hormone and testosterone.

Sleep has been shown to have an effect upon short term markers of health like ability to mentally focus, coordination, reaction times, as well as longer term effects such as body composition, glucose metabolism and of course the ultimate – life expectancy itself.

What s sleep and how does it work?

Sleep is akin to a reboot and defrag that you might use on your laptop. It is partway between clear out & indexing, mixed with a physical overhaul. The brains ‘programming’ takes it thought a series of cycles whilst sleeping, indeed it has been suggested that it is not duration that counts, but rather the number of cycles you go through. Read more..

The world class warm up Part II: An example

A good warm up stands between you and much safer, much more effective training. But what does one look like?

..no…not like this

In part one I went over the components of an elite warm up but off the  back of that I was asked  for a sample warm up – here’s what I often give out to strength athletes it is good for bodybuilers of most people weight training.

Fist raise body temperature

This aids oxygenation, mobility of muscle tissue and joints and generally prepares the body for work

• 5 mins incline walking or light, flat jog
• 5 mins ergo/rowing machine
• if you have it you can push a sled as well for 3 sets of 50 feet with 30 second rests

Second is tissue quality

Foam rolling the hot spots or problem areas on the body, this will ‘free up’ the muscle to fire more efficiently which means more work and more work = a better body: Read more..

World class warm up Part I: Components

A seriously effective warm-up can transform your training. Are you guilty of skipping over this important part of training?

Question: when was the last time you read a sample workout routine or article that included a detailed warm up? Last month? Last year? Never?

Your warm up prepares you for the training or competitive session ahead, it’s a soup of ingredients aimed at preparing the muscular, nervous and cardiovascular systems for action allowing them to function at a higher level. A good warm up makes a training session not only safer but more effective. So why don’t more people write about it?

Whilst plenty of column inches taken up discussing different training sessions, training cycles, periodisation etc the warm-up is generally skipped over.  Think about it though, it’s the thing that ties all your training sessions together, it includes the movements and drills you will practice most often through the year!

So what ingredients should you include and in what order? Read more..

The vegan shopping list

What foods do you buy to safeguard body composition and health whilst following a vegan diet?

Where is the steak? My kitchen top after a vegan food shop

I’m currently following a flexitarian diet. It’s been, uh, interesting.

Flexitarian means you eat as few animal products as possible so, meat once a week or once a month depending on how hardcore you are. In practice I’ve been eating only vegetable based products at home and when eating out I go with meat choices – this makes life a lot easier as vegans are so poorly catered for in restaurants.

However, given the fact that if you go vegan you’re not going to be eating a lot of food we were (arguable) designed to eat, what do we do to guard against nutritional deficiencies? By structuring our diet choices and looking at macronutrients and the sources and types of micronutrients that we’re getting from our diet we can try to cover the bases and work from there.

Missing Micronutrients Read more..