Sleep (6 tips to improve your fitness)

Your sleep sucks and that is why your fitness is suffering. You are not able to recover properly, and it is causing you to plateau in your training.

This is something I have seen far too often in the CrossFit world. I’m going to give you 6 tips to help you get better sleep, so you can get more out of your training sessions.

Before we train hard to reach our full potential and perform our best, we must first focus on the basics of health. Most athletes want to dive headfirst into the deep end when it comes to high volume training, especially in the competitive CrossFit world. But that is putting the cart before the horse.

Let’s take a look at how sleep can improve your health first, and then your performance.

Sleep is essential in regulating hormones and repairing the muscle damage from all the conditioning, high repetition gymnastics, and heavy weights you are lifting. Our brains need it as well to help us learn new skills and improve our problem-solving ability. Getting any less than 6 hours is basically a form of torture for your body and can cause lower cognitive function as well as an increase in the risk of injury. If you haven’t been prioritizing your sleep, you are definitely making it harder for your fitness to improve. You could be getting better, at a faster rate if you just put in a little more effort into the quality of your sleep.

So how do we sleep better?

Start with building a routine for your sleep. I would highly recommend reducing your screen time 2 hours before bed, but one hour will at least help. The light from screens can stimulate your eyes and convince your body it is day time even when it is dark out. Thick curtains to make your room extremely dark will help as well. The darker your room, the better it is for helping you fall asleep and stay asleep. Also, cooler room temperatures will improve the quality of your sleep. Keeping the room to a nice 15 degrees Celcius is a good place to start. Then you can adjust based on your individual needs.

Most people need more than 7 hours to function properly, and 8 or more to perform at an optimal level. I would recommend 8 hours a night. Try to get to bed early enough that you can get all the sleep that your body needs. It is best if you wake up without the need for an alarm clock so you can experiment with how much you need. But make sure you are going to bed at the same time each night to make this experiment effective.

So if you follow those simple tips, you should start feeling better and that will help you give more to your training. You will have more energy and feel like your recovery is improving quicker than before.

Here is a recap:

1) Reduce/Limit screen time before bed

2) Keep your room dark

3) Keep your room cool

4) Go to bed at a consistent time

5) Get at least 8 hours of sleep a night

6) Make the routine so consistent that you don’t need an alarm clock

Try these tips and comment below if they help you get better quality sleep.