Sleep!!!!

Sleep!!!!

"Waking up early is great as long as you are going to bed early as well. If all you are doing is making yourself tired and ruining your recovery, then in the long term, it's not going to be worth it"

Throughout my life I have always been someone who is happy to get up and exercise early (although I can't say I have ever been a massive fan of running first thing in the morning). For the last couple of years I have also been a 6am class guy at Crossfit. But as I wrote last week, for the time being anyway, my priorities have slightly shifted to Triathlon training so I am a bit more sporadic with classes. Accepting that last week meant that I ended up having a couple of days where I had a 2 hour lay in (5:15am alarm becoming 7am) and boy did it make a difference!! The volume or training was still high, from Monday to Friday last week I did 8 well structured training sessions, but my recovery was so much better and rather than feeling run down I felt as if I could keep going. I don't think that's a coincidence at all.

It really got me thinking about that above quote, as someone who works out early in the morning I often get towards the back end of the week and really struggle both to get up and with general fatigue. The result is either missed sessions, lower quality sessions or generally just feeling a bit rubbish. As much as I advocate for people being fit and healthy I also advocate that it should be fun and add to your life, not take away from it, the new programme, with a clear training priority, is already paying dividends in that sense.

It's easy to forget that sleep is our most impactful recovery tool. Anyone can write a programme that is going to simply make people tired, it's much more of a skill and you have to do a lot more work, to get to know people, to write a programme that is going to have optimal benefit and include how people live their lives. Ultimately if the programme isn't catering for your recovery, including sleep, then it's maybe time to think again (and one for another time but that recovery nutrition also plays a big part in that as well!).

Whilst in some circles it's a badge of honour to get up early, get it done, run yourself into the ground and grind it out (and hey there is always a time and a place for that, it's just not all the time!!!) it's important not to waste your effort. One high quality session a day followed with great sleep and great nutrition, in the long term, is going to be more beneficial than two poor quality and rushed sessions a day, followed by poor sleep and poor nutrition, as a result of feeling tired and rushed.

Andy