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..

Training, overtraining and recovery Part 1

What is this ‘over-training’ that people always go on about? What are the symptoms, how does it hamper your training and decrease health, how at risk are you and what can you do about it?

Training

We train the body in order to acquire skill, adaption and/or and condition the body for our chosen task be it rowing, bodybuilding or Olympic lifting. The training stimulus needs to be sufficient in order to requite the body to make an adaptive response, this response, most of which happens between periods of training for periods of similarly structured training (such as a ’strength day’ or session) gives us our heightened performance. Read more..