Every week someone asks me which supplement they should be taking. Protein? Creatine? Some powder their mate swears by? My answer usually surprises them: before you spend a cent, fix your sleep.
Sleep is free, it has no side effects, and it improves almost everything we work on together in the studio. Your strength, your energy, your mood, your appetite and your ability to stick to a plan all run on it. Yet it’s the first thing most of us sacrifice when life gets busy.
How much is enough?
For most adults, the recommendation is seven to nine hours a night. Older adults tend to sit closer to seven or eight. Some people genuinely feel fine on a little less, but they’re rarer than they think. If you need two coffees just to feel human and you crash on the couch at 8pm, your body is telling you something.
It’s not just about hours, either. Quality counts. Eight hours of broken, restless sleep won’t do the same job as seven solid ones.
What sleep does for your training
When you train, you’re not actually getting fitter in that moment. You’re applying stress. The getting fitter happens afterwards, while your body repairs and adapts. A big chunk of that repair work happens while you sleep, particularly in the deeper stages.
Cut your sleep short and that repair process gets cut short too. You walk into your next session still carrying the last one. Weights feel heavier, your coordination is off, and the sessions you should be enjoying feel like a grind.
I can usually tell who’s had a bad night before they say a word. They’re a step slower in the warm-up, their form gets sloppy sooner, and they’re more likely to tweak something. Tired bodies make tired movements.
What sleep does for your appetite and mood
This is the part people don’t expect. When you’re short on sleep, your appetite changes. The hormones that drive hunger and fullness get a bit out of whack, and research consistently shows people tend to eat more, and reach for more sugary, high-energy food, after a poor night.
Think about the last time you were exhausted. Were you craving a salad? Or were you hunting for something sweet, salty and fast? That’s not a willpower failure. That’s biology.
You can’t out-discipline a body that’s running on four hours of sleep. Fix the sleep and half the cravings fix themselves.
On top of that, when you’re tired you move less through the day, you’re more likely to skip training, and you’re less patient with yourself. It all adds up.
Sleep and mood are tightly linked. A run of bad nights makes most of us more irritable, more anxious and less able to handle stress. And stress, in turn, makes it harder to sleep. It’s a nasty little loop.
If you’ve read Just Another Muscle, you’ll know I think of willpower like a fuel tank. Sleep is one of the main things that fills it back up overnight. Start the day on a half-empty tank and it’s no wonder the wheels fall off by dinner time.
How to actually sleep better
None of this is complicated, but it does take consistency. Here’s what I recommend to members, and what I try to do myself:
- Pick a wake-up time and stick to it. Even on weekends, within an hour or so. A steady wake time does more to set your body clock than an early night here and there.
- Get light in the morning. Ten minutes outside soon after you get up helps tell your body it’s daytime. A morning walk with the dog counts.
- Cut caffeine earlier than you think. Caffeine hangs around in your system for hours. If you’re a poor sleeper, try keeping coffee to the morning only.
- Go easy on alcohol. A couple of drinks might help you nod off, but it tends to make sleep lighter and more broken in the second half of the night.
- Keep the bedroom cool, dark and quiet. Block-out blinds, a fan, earplugs, whatever it takes. Your bedroom is for sleep, not for scrolling.
- Give yourself a wind-down. Screens down, lights low, something boring. You can’t sprint all day and expect to switch off like a light.
- Don’t train flat out right before bed. Exercise helps sleep overall, but a hard session late at night can leave some people wired. Find what works for you.
Plenty of our members train at 5:30 or 6am, and I love that commitment. But if you’re getting up at five, you need to be in bed at a time that actually makes that work. Early sessions on six hours of sleep, five days a week, will catch up with you eventually.
If you can’t get to bed earlier, it might be worth swapping one or two early sessions for a later class during the week. Training at a time you can sustain beats training at a time that slowly wears you down.
Sometimes poor sleep isn’t about habits at all. If you snore loudly, wake up gasping, feel exhausted no matter how long you sleep, or have been struggling with insomnia for weeks, please talk to your GP. Sleep problems like sleep apnoea are common and very treatable, and sorting them out can change your life.
The bottom line
If you’re training hard and eating well but still feel flat, look at your sleep before you look at your program. Give your body the time it needs to repair, and everything we do in the studio will work better.
Start with one change this week. Set a regular wake-up time, or move your last coffee earlier, or put the phone on the other side of the room. Small things, done consistently, add up.
And if you’re wondering whether that pre-training coffee is helping or hurting, read Coffee Before Training: Help or Hype?.
