71. The Science of Sleep Hygiene: Optimizing Rest for Peak Athletic Performance

Hey there, dear friend! It's Mike again. Thank you for exploring my last blog post, “Building Endurance: Training Methods to Increase Stamina and Cardiovascular Health”. I'm thrilled to reconnect, and today, I'm diving into a fresh topic: “The Science of Sleep Hygiene: Optimizing Rest for Peak Athletic Performance”. Your insights are always appreciated, so let's start by sharing how many hours you usually sleep below in the comments.

People don’t realize how important sleep hygiene is in our daily lives. Honestly, there are a lot of misunderstandings about this topic. Creating great habits will optimize our rest, enhance our physical condition, and improve performance. So, I’m going to explain how you can implement good sleep hygiene and offer some general recommendations.

Exercise is fundamental to increasing strength and conditioning, but it's during sleep that we recover from the damage caused by exercise. This is when the body repairs itself. However, if we have poor sleep hygiene, we won’t generate enough power to train in our best condition.

So, you should consider the following recommendations. First, identify your starting point: How many hours do you sleep? What is the quality of your sleep? Do you usually wake up tired or motivated? Do you usually watch movies or use your cellphone before bed? All these questions are necessary to create strategies to change your situation.

Second, many professionals say that it is necessary to sleep between 6-8 hours, but you might need more hours on specific days, and there may be times when you can only sleep for 6 hours. It depends on your context, and the objective is to wake up when a sleep cycle is complete. For example, each sleep cycle resets between 80 to 100 minutes. So, you can calculate when a cycle will be complete and wake up refreshed.

Third, it is crucial to eliminate the use of laptops, videogames, and cellphones before your sleeping time. Honestly, this is a part that causes a lot of problems for me and my clients because it is so normal to use these devices, and you might think that it won’t affect you. However, try to identify the negative impacts and eliminate them.

In conclusion, with these recommendations, I believe you have the basic tools to change your sleep hygiene. As I said, it is so normalized to have few hours of sleep, but it is not the best way of living. Please identify your habits and take action to transform your context.