Six Ways to Sleep Tight

 

Getting enough sleep is hard.  Here are six ways to make it a little easier.

 

1.     Cut down or eliminate the caffeine.  This may sound like crazy talk to those of us who worship at the local Starbucks.  Kicking the habit can be awful in the short term, but in the long term it can help us build a better relationship with sleep and a more realistic idea of what we should be doing.

2.     Get in some cardio.  There is a pretty strong correlation between getting enough exercise and improved sleep.

3.     Find a mindfulness practice.  One of the big barriers to falling asleep is what I call Hamster Head—that little rodent won’t stop running through all the things on the to-do list or the litany of embarrassing things I’ve done since I was three or random song lyrics.  Learning to meditate can help chill that little beast out.

4.     Turn off the tech.  I’ve been working on this one myself.  Instead of binge-watching more cop shows in the evening, I’ve been doing some old-fashioned reading with an actual book.  I’m falling asleep faster.  (Note:  this is anecdotal evidence and not scientifically valid, but real scientists have done studies that indicate that turning off the screens an hour or so before bed improve sleep latency, which is the time between going to bed and falling asleep.)

5.     Schedule it.  This one can be hard, especially for those of us who enjoy sleeping in when we can.  However, bodies like routine, so if we practice going to bed at a regular time and getting up at a regular time, our bodies adapt and learn to sleep during those hours.

6.     Get comfy.  Some of us want all the pillows.  Some want cool sheets.  Some need total darkness.  We can take the time to find our own best practices for sleeping and create that environment.  When I was sick as a kid, my mom would come in and smooth out the sheets and untangle the blankets, which made the bed comfortable again; now we get to be our own moms.

 

As we say in our house, don’t bite the bedbugs; they hate that.

Defining Rest

Yesterday I wrote a little about how we need to temper our enthusiasm for working out with periods of rest.  Today I want to dive into what rest looks like, because it doesn’t always look like lying on the couch like a slug (although there are times when that is a perfectly valid way to rest!).

 

When we first start working out, we want to be building the habit of working out as much as we want to be building up our endurance and our strength.  It is better to do short workouts almost every day than one long workout and then nothing until the next Monday rolls around.  For fresh-off-the-couch fitness enthusiasts, I recommend starting with fifteen to thirty minutes of cardio on five days of the week and maybe one weight workout per week.  That leaves one day for the couch.

 

As we get more fit, our workouts can get longer and/or more intense.  We may not have a couch day every week, just days when we take the intensity down a lot (walk versus run, yoga instead of heavy weights, etc.).  We also may realize that things that used to be workouts aren’t really all that strenuous anymore—that walk to the coffee shop that used to take half an hour round trip now takes half the time and we don’t even sweat—so now it counts as activity rather than exercise.  Activity can be a form of rest, too.

 

One kind of rest that should be (but isn’t, here in Reality Land) nonnegotiable is getting enough sleep.  It is hard to fit our 7 to 9 hours of sleep in with all the other things we have to get done, but without it, we are hamstringing our ability to make progress with our workouts, not to mention the even more important parts of life.

 

Work hard and then get some rest!

Beware Enthusiasm!

I am enthusiastic about… enthusiasm!  I love it when clients want to work and learn and grow because then we can focus on getting stuff done and I don’t have to reach into my bag of motivational tricks (they are invisible and came with my personal training certification, just like all the invisible Pilates tools that came with that certification!).  However, even enthusiasm has a Dark Side (loud breathing optional).

 

The darker side of enthusiasm is obsession.  None of us can work out all the time, and we shouldn’t.  Growth requires both work AND rest.  Our bodies use pain to send us this message; that soreness after a hard workout is notice that we need to rest before doing it again.  When we ignore those bulletins from our muscles, we are risking injury.

 

It is hard to be patient when we are excited about all the new shiny workouts we get to do.  It is worth it.  Slow, steady tortoise progress is not as thrilling as hare-brained all out sprints, but we know who won that race.

 

We can use our enthusiasm as power for the long haul.

 

Go play and then rest.

Monday Workout: Oblique

This week we are working some obliques with the single arm clean and press, the woodchoppers, the renegade rows, and the quadruped.  This is good for making our waists look trim and for our balance.  Three rounds.

 

suitcase swings	30
flies	20
Arnold press	10
1 arm clean and press	30
deadlifts	20
renegade rows or rows	10
woodchoppers	30
lateral raise	20
quadruped	10

 

Five Things to Track to Maximize Success

What we want to track about our diet and fitness depends on our goals, our patience, and our tools.  Olympians need to pay more detailed attention than the rest of us.  However, most of us could benefit from tracking at least these five things:

 

1.     Sleep.  Enough sleep is crucial to workout performance, recovery, and even weight loss.

2.     Food.  People who track their food tend to lose more weight than people who don’t.  There is also the I-don’t-want-to-write-that-down-so-I-better-not-eat-it effect.  A lot of us eat far more calories than we think we do and we need to keep a log as a reality check.  This can be a pencil-and-paper thing or there are lots of apps out there to make it easy.

3.     Water.  Dehydrated people are unhappy people.  They also can’t work out as well as those of us who keep hydrated.

4.     Workouts.  This can be as simple as a checkoff or a detailed list of what kind of workout it was, how long it was, what weights and reps were involved, etc.  In general, it is best to start small to get in the habit.  However, if we have a goal of reducing our mile time, for example, we need to track that to see our progress.

5.     Measurements.  This can be as simple as tracking weight, or we can add circumference measurements (most common are chest, waist, hips, upper arm, thigh, and calf), body fat percentage (if we have a scale or other device to calculate it for us), BMI (which is a math problem based on height and weight), or any other measurements we think we might want to know about.  This allows us to see our progress.

 

Try it and see how it works!

It needs to be fun

A lot of us don’t like to work out much.  I get it.  It’s hard work and we have to get sweaty.  That’s true.  But it is also true that there are so many kinds of working out that it really is possible to minimize the parts we don’t like.

 

I will use myself as the example, because I’m handy.  If working out meant that I had to run, I would never do it.  (Last time I ran, I ruptured my plantar fascia and crutches are a deal-breaker for me.)  When I found biking, I realized for the very first time how much fun working out could be.  Some people feel this way about dance or skiing or swimming.  Even within those things, we have our niches—ballroom or ballet, downhill or cross-country, backstroke or butterfly.  It is worth playing around (and I mean playing—not everything has to be all serious) to find something that is enjoyable.

 

Sometimes we need to play around even after we have found something we love to do.  We may discover, when we revisit something we tried back when we were first starting out, that we like it better now that we have gotten stronger or faster or lighter from doing the first thing we loved.

 

Also, we may find out that doing something we don’t like very much (looking at you, again, lunges) is worth doing because it makes a big difference to what we do like to do.  Those of us who love weight lifting can benefit from finding some sort of cardio to build up endurance and those of us who want to dance all night could use a little strength training to help us out.

 

Go play.

Consider Tracking This!

I am, personally, a reluctant tracker.  I deeply dislike logging what I eat and do.  My Wristy Overlord (aka Apple Watch) takes some of the calculating away and I have a trusty app (LifeSum.  I use the free version, which does everything I want.) that figures out the calories in what I eat.  I am only willing to do this much because, unfortunately, it works to keep me meeting my health and fitness goals.  Given my general reluctance, it should carry some weight that I’m seriously considering tracking one more variable:  heart rate variability.

 

This metric is the kind that is only worth tracking with wearable fitness trackers.  I know Apple Health and Samsung’s version both calculate it, but my Fitbit knowledge is not up to date.  It is not so important that anybody who doesn’t already use a tracker should rush out and buy one, but, as I am about to explain, I think it adds something useful to our toolbox.

 

Heart rate variability is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.  It’s measured in milliseconds and it correlates with cardio fitness.  The higher our heart rate variability is, in general, the more fit we are.  However, it fluctuates from day to day, so it is also a good indicator for how ready we are to do a difficult workout. 

 

A note here on the reliability of data from wearable fitness trackers:  they are not usually as good as the big expensive kinds that hospitals use because hospitals don’t need to wear their equipment on their wrists.  However, the wristy overlords are pretty internally consistent, so we can still use them to measure progress.  It’s like using an idiosyncratic tape measure; as long as we use the same one every time, we can still see what has changed and how much, even if we’re measuring in Bigfoot feet or heptimeters.

 

The natural movement in heart rate variability plus the nature of fitness tracker measures means that step one in using wristy overlords to help us tailor our workouts is a boring and frustrating one:  we have to get a baseline.  To do this, we need to look at the data at the same time of day every day for at least a week and take the average.  That’s not very hard, but the thing is that we have to do it without changing what we are doing.  So those of us who are about to embark on a whole getting-in-shape journey need to spend a week eating and moving the old way to get the baseline before jumping on that new treadmill or weight lifting habit.

 

Then, with our baseline data in hand, we can get to work.  We still need to look at the number daily at more or less the same time (first thing in the morning is best).  Then we compare it to our baseline average.  If the number is significantly lower than our average, it is likely that we are not sufficiently recovered from our last workout and should take it relatively easy (swap the weights for yoga, do the flat run instead of the hill workout, etc.).  If we’re at or above our baseline, we can feel confident that we can handle the tough stuff.

 

This may be more than any of us really wants to deal with.  That is all right.  We can use subjective assessments (I am still really tired and sore from that workout on Saturday, so I’d like to go easier today…) to choose what we do today instead.  I am just a little excited to find something that measures recovery.  In other words, I intend to experiment and see what happens.