SLEEP IS ONE aspect of performance where the difference in attitude between the sporting world and the ‘real’ world couldn’t be more different. In professional sport sleep is viewed as a necessary, essential aspect of recovery and repair, revitalising the body and mind so that a performer can recover from competition and switch off away from the glare of the theatre in which they play. Sports stars such as NBA star LeBron James, Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt and tennis champion Serena Williams speak openly and boldly about their need for sleep. At least eight hours a night, and often more. Sport harnesses the competitive advantages of getting sleep right, with sports science teams always looking at sleep to improve the performance of their athletes. As with nutrition, if it has an impact on the bottom line – performance – then we extract every benefit we can from it.
Compare this with the traditional outlook in the world of ‘normal’ work. It’s long been considered a badge of honour to declare how little sleep one needs; there are plenty of examples at the higher end of the achievement scale to back this up. People like Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo, and former US President Barack Obama, who each slept for only around five hours a night. Fashion designer and film-maker Tom Ford gets even less, often as little as four and a half hours, while former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously had a paltry four hours a night.
Which end of the spectrum do you find yourself at? Long hours at work, training either before or after, an active personal life… and that’s before considering those of us who have young children – it’s a wonder any of us find time for sleep at all. And, given the options of going to a new restaurant with friends or having an early night to prioritise sleep, few of us are likely to choose the latter. Professor Matthew Walker, Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, describes how people confess to him that they ‘need eight or nine hours a night’ as if it’s something to be ashamed of.
Things are changing, however, with people like Walker and Arianna Huffington – founder of the Huffington Post and self-confessed seven-hours-a-night sleeper – leading a charge to reclaim the night and make time for sleep. Walker points out the perils if we don’t: ‘No aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation.’1 This means things like type 2 diabetes, cancer, heart disease and, in the long term, conditions like Alzheimer’s and obesity.
In fact, sleep has become a buzz lifestyle topic, with people looking to address not only their sleep quantity, but its quality as well, in order to get that pitch-perfect harmony between stress and rest. For what it’s worth, the National Sleep Foundation in the US recommends a minimum of seven hours’ sleep a night2, but each of us is different, and you might need more. Making room for at least this amount of time to sleep would be a good start to address the quantity if you currently get less.
From a nutrition perspective, I am constantly looking at the evolving relationship between nutrition, sleep and rest. Sleep is an area about which we still know relatively little, but some of the biggest brains at universities like Stanford, Munich and Oxford are working on changing that and there is a burgeoning amount of research in the field, which brings regular new developments.
As with many aspects of nutrition, the desire to see results – striving for better sleep quality and quantity – leads to many people investing their time and energy in the wrong areas, including false friends such as supplements, including herbal products, which are subtly (and not so subtly) pushed as a ‘magic bullet’ for better sleep. When it comes to your Energy Plan, it is better to focus on getting your nutrition and activity needs in line first before looking into the ‘marginal gains’ to be made elsewhere.
Remember the four Rs of recovery from Chapter 3: Refuel, Repair, Rehydrate and Rest. Having dealt with the first three, we should now look to the last of these to see how we can recharge our body in the right proportions, just as we fuel ourselves using the correct composition and dose, to give us enough energy to thrive while we tackle our goals.
Sleep is a cornerstone of any athlete’s recovery process. It’s vital to the regeneration of cognitive and physiological function, and not getting enough can prove fatal to a performance: things like shot accuracy, decision-making skills, memory, pain perception, strength and endurance are all affected.3 And sleep doesn’t only provide for muscle and joint recovery. It plays an essential role in memory consolidation and learning; the development of new skills that has begun on the training ground is still going on at night while an athlete sleeps.
Every team and sports institute I have worked with has put an emphasis on nailing the basics around sleep hygiene (the term sleep scientists use for good sleeping practices). Sleep is an area touched by all the various sports science and medical teams: nutrition (what to eat, when and what to avoid), coaching (overall training volume and scheduling of training to allow for recovery), psychologist (specific strategies to improve sleep) and finally the doctor to provide, in extreme cases, medication.
Below are the most common sleep hygiene principles and techniques drawn from high-performance sport. Some of them might sound like common sense, but it’s amazing how many of us ‘know’ about them and yet still don’t follow them. It’s vital to get these things right to give ourselves the best opportunity for a good night’s sleep.
SLEEP HYGIENE PRINCIPLES
Sleep is vitally important and forms a core part of the wellness monitoring strategies we use in sport – we track our athletes’ subjective sleep quality, energy levels and mood status. When sleep ‘goes into the red’ on consecutive nights, it manifests itself in a very clear way – it produces a significant reduction in performance.
And it’s exactly the same when applied to any of us. In your own wellness questionnaire here, I ask the same kind of questions of you as I would of a professional athlete, because, if you don’t get enough sleep, your decision-making skills, memory, accuracy and endurance will all be affected. This goes for your life outside of exercise and training too – any new skills you might be developing in your job, on a training course or in an out-of-work environment, such as learning a new language, are consolidated and stored in your memory at night when you sleep, just like an athlete consolidating new skills learned on the training ground.4
While many of us, as 10pm approaches on a Wednesday evening, might be comfortably settled down and thinking about bedtime, a Champions League footballer will just be returning to the dressing room after the match. He then needs to have his treatment from the medical team, shower and have his recovery food, meaning that he won’t leave the ground until eleven and possibly won’t be home until midnight… if it’s a home game. And even then he’ll be so wired from playing that sleep won’t come any time soon.
One study of footballers showed that players in night matches got almost three hours’ less sleep than if they had played a day match, and their subjective feeling of being rested was significantly lower.5 For you in the ‘real’ world, working late or on varying shifts, or exercising in the evening, may well be affecting you in the same way.
Don’t jump straight into bed when you get home after work or exercise expecting to sleep. You’re likely to be stimulated and need to wind down just like an athlete or a performer. Your own way of doing this will be personal to you, obviously, but it is important to spend some time relaxing and unwinding, as well as giving yourself a chance to digest your food, before bed.
It’s not just sleep after your performance that can be affected, either. There is good evidence from both the performing arts and sport that sleep is disturbed during the training and rehearsals leading to a big competition or production.6 I’m sure many of us can empathise. The equivalent for us might be experiencing disrupted sleep on nights in the lead-up to a big event like having to deliver a best man or woman’s speech at a wedding, an important job interview or the major endurance event we’re nervous about competing in at the weekend.
In many high-performance sports facilities across the US and Europe, sleeping accommodation is provided for the athletes. Some football clubs, like Real Madrid, actually have apartments for their players to relax and sleep in. Other places offer things like sleeping pods and ‘recharge’ rooms, an approach that has been adopted in many business environments, which are starting to react to the impact of burnt-out employees on their business.
So sleep is clearly thought of as vitally important in the world of professional sport and in more progressive work-places, as well as to all of us in general well-being terms. It is also very relevant to your Energy Plan in its potential to seriously derail your goal, particularly if it involves the most common goal for many of us: fat (weight) loss.
The hunger hormones leptin and ghrelin are two of the main players in a multifaceted and complex production your body knows as appetite. Ghrelin is released by the stomach to signal to the brain when you are hungry, while leptin is released by fat cells to tell the brain that you are full. Research has shown that a lack of sleep raises ghrelin while reducing leptin – in other words, it increases your appetite.7
Not only that, but a lack of sleep plays havoc with your self-control. Not getting enough rest affects the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that controls decision-making; furthermore, when our sleep has been restricted, food triggers different reward centres in the brain. You’re drawn towards more high calorie, sugary and fatty foods. Ever walked past a bakery or coffee shop on the way to work after a bad night’s sleep and found the smell of sugary baked goods almost irresistible?
So it’s hardly surprising to learn that being sleep-deprived leads to greater calorie intake – which can really mess with your Energy Plan. And the effects of sleep deprivation don’t stop there. Lack of sleep can slow down your metabolism and reduce your energy expenditure,8 which is believed to be your body’s mechanism to conserve energy, and it also knocks your body’s ability to manage glucose and consequently insulin levels.
If you aren’t making enough time for sleep, or you aren’t putting measures in place to get a good quality of sleep, you are fighting your body. This is a huge handicap to attempt the Energy Plan with, especially if your goal involves reducing your body fat. So what can we do to improve our sleep, aside from making more time for it? Let’s have a look at what nutrition has to offer first.
In Chapter 2 we talked about warning signs like ‘RED-S’ – caused by either training too hard, dieting or a combination of the two – which knock your physiology sideways. Sleep quality is one of the things that can take a hit, and it is yet another reason for planning when to reduce body fat. I work with my clients to assess clear times throughout the year when we will target fat loss. This is generally at times when stressors in work, travel and other aspects of life are low.
As I work with a number of clients with atypical working schedules and irregular sleeping patterns, I’m often asked, ‘What can I eat to help me sleep?’ I think the expectation is often that we can simply introduce something into our diet to provide that magical eight hours – but in practical terms it’s often just as much about taking things out of our diet. Let’s take a look at some of the things we can do with nutrition to help our rest – and the hindrances we can cut out.9
It is of course vital to bear in mind that, while there are some promising results with some of the nutritional aids we’re going to look at, the bank of evidence to draw upon isn’t huge as research in this area is still in its early stages. So don’t get your hopes up too much – nothing here is going to magically fix your sleep, but some of these things might well help, in combination with some of the sleep hygiene principles here.
Generally speaking, diets high in protein may result in improved sleep quality and diets high in carbohydrate may result in shorter sleep latencies – that’s sleep-science speak for the time it takes to fall asleep.
There are more specific substances that may promote good sleep too. One of the most interesting developments of recent times is in foods containing tryptophan. Your body’s ability to synthesise serotonin – the neurotransmitter that plays a leading role in dictating mood – is dependent on the availability of tryptophan, which is an amino acid, part of your maintenance (protein) intake in your food. Tryptophan and serotonin also play their part in producing melatonin, the sleep hormone, which is released by the brain when it gets dark.
Doses of 1 g of tryptophan – the equivalent of 300 g of turkey or 200 g of pumpkin seeds – help to improve sleep latency and subjective sleep quality.10 The Energy Plan’s food-first approach means that you should aim to get as much of your tryptophan as possible from complete protein foods, in other words those that contain all essential amino acids; eat foods such as meat, poultry, eggs, soybeans, nuts and seeds in each meal or snack (especially at dinner and as an evening snack, if required), before considering supplementation.
Montmorency tart cherries are part of a group of foods containing melatonin. They have recently garnered a lot of attention for their potential to play a major role in recovery from heavy training thanks to their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. There is some initial evidence to show that the juice raises melatonin levels and is beneficial to sleep quality and duration.11 One dose is 30 ml of concentrated cherry juice, also produced in capsule form, which helps to reduce sugar intake. You should start with one dose an hour before bedtime.
When total calorie intake is decreased, sleep quality may be disturbed. So an energy deficit to lose body fat should be managed carefully.
Diets high in fat may negatively influence total sleep time. Follow the principles in the Performance Plates (see here) to gauge the fat content of your food.
Caffeine, which we covered in Chapter 5, can interfere with sleep depending on your tolerance to it and the time of day it’s consumed. Caffeine has a half-life of three to five hours, so that 6pm coffee could still be having an impact when you go to bed.
Alcohol, although it might help you to fall asleep faster, can reduce restorative REM sleep – which is vital to memory consolidation – and also impacts sleep patterns and quality. A recent sleep study carried out in Finland demonstrated that as little as one drink was shown to impair sleep quality, and that the more you drink, the greater this negative impact is.12
I’m not for a second suggesting that you must cut alcohol completely from your Energy Plan. As we discussed in Chapter 5, a well-earned drink is part of living well and – within government guidelines – can be a safe part of an active social life. Refer back to ‘Rocket Fuel: Alcohol’ here for a reminder of how to plan for nights out and incorporate sensible alcohol consumption into your Energy Plan.
Considering nutrition’s role in sleep doesn’t just mean eating food that can help with sleep itself; it can also mean consuming fuel that can go to work on other aspects of your body’s needs while you sleep. It’s the equivalent of putting the car in the garage for maintenance overnight. So let’s take a look at our diet’s main source of maintenance: protein.
Protein is a must-have for your evening-meal performance plate. And you may be having another protein dose later in the evening, if you have a heavy training session and have your dinner early. In the protein section in Chapter 2 (here), we talked about using protein in regular doses in the form of snacks throughout the day, as well as in your meals, as this is the most effective way for the body to use it – and a dose before bedtime can prove particularly powerful.
The longest period over the course of 24 hours that our protein balance is in the negative is overnight, which leads to muscle breakdown, as there are insufficient amino-acid building blocks available. A leading protein metabolism lab in the Netherlands, led by Professor Luc van Loon, recently found that when 40 g of protein was ingested following training and before sleep, it increased muscle protein synthesis rates by 22 per cent,13 and there were also gains in strength thanks to the increase in amino-acid building blocks available to ‘drip-feed’ the muscle overnight.
So protein in doses of around 40 grams before bed – which is more than most of us might normally include in meals and snacks throughout the day – can drip-feed the muscles and improve your gains following hard training.
Let’s put that in context. The first priority is to have enough protein in regular doses from meals and snacks every three to four hours during the day, which can be achieved with three meals and a mid-morning and -afternoon snack. That’s the biggest win.
Then, if you are training hard and your goal is to increase strength and muscle mass, an additional protein dose an hour before bed may also help. The most convenient way is probably through a protein shake (either whey protein or the slower-digesting casein protein, which was used in the Netherlands research).
Although, as we’ve discussed, everyone is different, evidence generally tells us that around seven hours’ sleep a night is the level to aim for to best support the body’s physiology. There are also some non-nutritional aids you can use, which, along with some adjustments to food, can really amplify the efficacy of your Energy Plan.
Daytime napping has generally been somewhat frowned on, to say the least, in many working environments, but it’s long been considered a useful recharging tool in sport and for people with demanding jobs such as air-traffic control, airline pilots and NASA workers, or in forward-thinking tech companies like Google. Taking a 20–30-minute nap in early to mid-afternoon (around post-lunch slump time) can offer improvements to alertness, memory and performance, and can undo some of the effects of a bad night’s sleep the previous night.
Nap for any longer than this, however, and you risk entering the deeper stages of sleep, which means that you are more likely to suffer from sleep inertia – waking up groggy and disorientated. By keeping to 20–30 minutes, you should enjoy a welcome boost without that groggy feeling, and by keeping it to the mid-afternoon, rather than early evening, it shouldn’t interfere with your sleep at night.
Now let’s look at how nutrition can make an intervention and take the nap into a new realm. The caffeine nap14 was put to the test in a study by Loughborough University. When sleepy drivers were given 200 mg of caffeine and then a 15-minute nap before a monotonous two-hour drive in a simulator, their caffeine nap eliminated all trace of sleepiness.
The term ‘caffeine nap’ might sound paradoxical, but caffeine actually takes 20 minutes or more to start taking effect, so during that window sleep is possible and, thanks to the nap clearing some of the adenosine in the brain (caffeine works by blocking this chemical – see here), you’ll benefit from the boost delivered by both the caffeine and the nap itself.
If you want to try this, you need to make sure you drink your coffee briskly so it doesn’t start taking effect before you start your nap. A typical coffee shop’s double espresso offers a caffeine dose of 150 mg or more, and is ideal as it can be consumed quickly. Two capsule coffees from a home machine contain around 120 mg. Refer back to Chapter 5 ‘The Fuel Injection: Caffeine’ for more details on different kinds of coffee.
But what about drinking coffee later in the day? Is that espresso after dinner in a restaurant a good idea? It really comes back to context once again.
Let’s take a look at footballers preparing for an evening kick-off. About 45 minutes to an hour before kick-off, some players will strategically take between 1 and 3 mg per kg body weight of caffeine, so that it peaks in the blood for the start of the match. So for a player weighing 76 kg that would be a dose of between 76 and 228 mg – roughly the equivalent of between a single and triple espresso.
This is, of course, a very individual strategy that requires practice, but the point is that the caffeine is being used to deliver a return on the performance. In sport everything works back from the performance itself, and caffeine is a powerful agent that, timed well, can enhance performance. Unfortunately, as any performer will tell you, the caffeine combined with the adrenaline of the event can contribute to a poorer quality of sleep afterwards, and where possible we try to give some allowance the next day, such as a later start at the training ground, so the athlete can get back on track.
So if you’re wondering about that evening espresso, ask yourself if you’re prepared to take the downsides that come with it. If you’re having a great time with friends, need a little pick-me-up and it’s Saturday tomorrow anyway and you can enjoy a lie-in, then why not? But if you have an early start maybe just ask for the bill, please.
Simply getting more sleep in the lead-up into an event could be your answer, particularly if you are regularly getting less than seven hours a night. In one study the mood and physical performance of basketball players was found to be improved if they enjoyed extended periods of sleep:15 the basketball players hit more free throws and improved their sprint performance. However, it’s important to note that the basketball players slept for as long as possible, which probably isn’t achievable for most of us, unless you plan on clearing your calendar leading up to an event.
So what about, after a hard week, simply catching up at the weekend? If lie-ins are an option for you then having one on a Saturday or Sunday after a gruelling week at work is very tempting, but is it a sustainable strategy to keep your Energy Plan on track?
There is some recent research suggesting that weekend sleep can make up for restricted sleep during the week,16 with extended weekend sleep appearing to reduce the risk of increased mortality that constantly restricted sleep would offer.
But don’t take this as a green light to go as hard as you like in the week on the assumption that you can just catch up at the weekend. This isn’t going to build a sustainable Energy Plan for you, and you might also run the risk of something called social jet lag.17 If you stay up later on a Friday or Saturday and then sleep in later, you’re effectively living in a different time zone at the weekend; you then have to adjust once again to your weekday hours on Sunday night and Monday morning, which has an impact on your body clock and can lead to a lack of energy and low mood. It’s even been linked to heart disease.
What did the France football team do after winning the 2018 World Cup? They went on holiday. What did Angelique Kerber do after winning Wimbledon in 2018? The same. They need some time to rest and recover (and maybe even indulge in a few off-Plan rewards).
And even on a smaller scale than post-World Cup or Wimbledon, if athletes have a particularly busy week, recovery time is built in for them to adapt (such as extended sleep after an international match or a day off after a match or hard training week). I encourage you to do the same – if you’ve turned up the stress to meet a deadline one week, you need to build in time to rest and recover afterwards. It should be set in stone in your calendar, an appointment you have to keep, just like your lunch and training times, as we did in our monitoring in Chapter 8.
When it comes to your Energy Plan and sleep, it’s vital to get the fundamentals in place first. You’re no doubt very familiar with these by now: fuelling for your demands, recovering from training and ensuring there aren’t any deficiencies in your nutrition. Only once you have this in place, with a balance between stress and recovery and consistently good sleep hygiene practices, should you think about trialling any of the options on the nutrition list in this chapter to boost your sleep. Make sure you monitor your progress to see what is making the difference for you.
And most of all, make time for your sleep. Of course this largely means at night: unless you’re the Tom Ford type, achieving peak performance on less than five hours a night (and very few of us are), give yourself the opportunity to have the quantity you need. But also dedicate some time to it during the day, whether that’s in the form of naps or looking at how you can make a positive impact on the quality of your sleep and noticing the changes that are effective. Because while it is easy to take sleep for granted, with just a bit of self-awareness and change to your habits you could be getting out of bed with a spring in your step every morning and enjoying the abundant rewards that recharging as an integral part of your Energy Plan offers.
ENERGY EXPRESS: BOOST YOUR SLEEP AND REST WITH THESE QUICK TIPS
●Aim for a minimum of seven hours’ sleep every night.
●During busy periods consider ways to supplement your nightly sleep (sleep extension, napping, catch-up sleep).
●Minimise potential nutrition inhibitors: alcohol, calorie deficit, high-fat meals.
●Trial potential nutrition enhancers: protein, carbohydrate, tryptophan and melatonin foods.
●Make good nutrition and sleep hygiene the foundation of your sleep routine every night.
●Consider using protein after hard training to support overnight recovery.