Performance Enhancer

Now there is a clickbait title if ever I saw one. Sorry, if you are Googling around looking for an article on chemical performance enhancement, you are going to be disappointed. Feel free to hang around and read on though. Hopefully it is interesting anyway.

A bit of a tired start to the week. Not fatigue related, more lack of quality sleep related.

I had one of those evenings last night where it was 8:30 and I was thinking, nice, get into bed soon, heaps of sleep tonight. And then it was 9:30 and I was crawling into bed thinking, what just happened.

Then on top of that I didn't sleep all that great. I had this dream where I had to meet people pretty early and I thought, 'that will mean I will have to get out of the pool early, that is really annoying'. But then I kept telling myself, 'its okay this is only a dream, there is no meet up, I don't really have to get out early'. But then my brain kept looping back thinking 'what if they don't know it is a dream and they turn up'. Buhhh???

Yep, I know, that makes no sense, but what can I say, it was a dream. As ridiculous as it was though, It was enough to make sure the last part of my night was disturbed, as my brain kept chasing itself around in circles.

It has been said before, and not just for athletes, but sleep would have to be one of the most neglected performance enhancers available. If somebody said to you, there is this thing, that will make you recover quicker (and, therefore, train more effectively) heal faster and help you avoid sickness we would be lining up to pay out our hard earned cash. In fact I know people who pay good cash monies for supplements that claim to deliver just such advantages (one of those people may previously have been me). But, when it comes to one of the best, easiest, cheapest sources of these advantages around, we let it slip. I mean common, all you need to do to get extra sleep is lie very still in a warm bed for a bit longer. How easy is that?

On top of that, usually we are missing sleep for stupid reasons too, I was watching something on TV, I was just finishing off this thing that could have waited until tomorrow. I was just plain trying to do too much in my day. I know how it goes, I am often guilty of it myself. I was guilty of it last night. In fact I am guilty of it at least twice a week on average. The temptation to just get that one last thing done before bed, rather than just letting it go and going to sleep. Telling yourself that one night of short sleep won't kill you, ignoring the fact that you had a night of short sleep the night before that, and before that...

That cumulative fatigue that usually ends up with you unwell or mentally worn out. Or both.

For me the goal is 7 hours. If I can get more, then that is sweet. I know that if I am aiming for 8 hours then I will be up before my alarm, I just don't seem to be able to quite make it to 8 hours. That is fine, the amount of sleep a person needs is quite personal, most experts agree though that it is at least 7, for a lot of people (my wife) it is 8. The people out in the world that say they only need 3 or 4 hours are just plain wrong. I know they would disagree with me, but I strongly believe they are. There are people who do require little sleep, but they are very rare. Most others are operating in sleep debt and lying to themselves (or they don't realise how much better they would feel if they slept more). It is almost like people see needing sleep as a form of weakness. Athletes need to get away from that and see it the other way around. Getting the right amount of sleep is a major performance advantage. It is one of those 1%ers that will make sure you have a good day on race day. Not having the discipline to make sure you can get enough sleep, and then relying on coffee to try and make up the debt, now there is a weakness.

It can be done too. I work, I have kids and I train a lot. I realised a few months ago that I just wasn't getting enough sleep. Morning after morning I was waking up tired. I knew that if I wanted to train like I wanted to I needed to change something. Since then I have gone to a lot of effort to try and re-arrange my day to avoid the temptation to do more in the evenings. I have tried to simply my evenings as much as possible. My aim is to have the only thing I need to do after the kids are in bed is go to bed myself. I often don't go straight to bed, since it is usually 7:30pm, but I try not to hang around too long. I often don't bother turning on the TV, knowing that getting sucked into a show is a major reason why I am often late to bed. Plus there is usually nothing on. Some nights I don't manage to be in bed as early as I would like, but plenty of others I do.

I never once regret it.