Kevin’s Corner on Exercise and Nutrition

So, what is one of the most important factor’s that will either positively or negatively impact your health? This applies to normal sedintary folks as well as athletes.

Sleep!

From everything I have read, and trust me, I have read a lot about this topic over my adult life, if you don’t get at least 8 hours of sleep each night, you will diminish your health.

Cortisol is a biproduct of lack of sleep. Cortisol is the stress hormone. This little guy is a monster.

• It causes you to crave sugar and simple carbohydrates
• It causes you to store fat in your stomach
• It causes a rise in cholesterol
• It can negatively impact your blood pressurse
• Your ability to focus and think will be greatly dimished. This is a cumulative effect. The more days without sleep, the worse this effect can have
• And a number of other negative things that will set you down a path of sickness

Needless to say, you want to do what you can to avoid producting this response in your body. We already have a host of other factors in our very stressful lives to cause this little monster to show up in our systems like the stressful work environments, our hectic schedules, etc.  So, why add to it?

For athletes, sleep is even more important if you want to perform optimally. Have you thought about Growth Hormone? Not the stuff that Roger Clemens is being investigated for. I am talking about your own Growth Hormone. Do you know that when you sleep your body produces a boat load of this stuff? If you cut short your sleep you cut short the growth hormone production. Lance Armstrong and a lot of other professional and Olympic athletes game the system by actually sleeping twice in one day. They wake up, strap on a feed bag and go do a workout. Eat another meal and steal a couple of hours of sleep. Their bodies start producting growth hormone and then they wake up and rinse and repeat. So, in a sense, they are doubling the amount of growth hormone their bodies produce in a single day (not actually double, but you get my point) and enable themselves to do more exercise/work in a single day. Now this is not as easy for us mere mortals who have a day job and don’t have time to go grab a couple of winks in the middle of our day, but this makes it even more important for us to understand how important this one thing that we do for 1/3 of our lives is for us to be healthy.

The 4 Key things you should do after you do a bunch of hard work or exercise to promote an optimal recovery process;

1. Within 30 mins, replace the proteins your body consumed during your workout. For a 150 pound person, your body can consume up to 30 grams of protein after a hard workout.
2. Within 30 mins, replace carbohydrates. For a 150 pound person, about 450 carbohydrate calories are needed to start getting your muscle glycogen back to it’s pre workout levels.
3. Replace your electrolytes and fluids.
4. Get your 8 hours or more of sleep / turning on your Growth Hormone Factory

If you want your body to heal doing the above things will have the greatest effect with an emphasis on the sleep. Without the sleep component, forget about it. You will eventually get injured or start failing to improve or both. A number of my friends and fellow athletes that I have talked about this, have all echoed this conclusion. Joel Friel in The Triathlete’s Training Bible and also in The Paleo Diet for Athletes will tell you how important sleep is to recovery.

One of the best triathlon seasons I ever had was a year where I focused on getting close to 10 hours of sleep a night. When I stepped on the start line / beach to head out into the water it was like I had springs for legs. It was phenominal experience to have this feeling.

Don’t rob your health and set yourself up for failure. Get your rest.

Kevin