This week The Kilted Coaches bring you the importance of a good nights sleep and how you can have a great nights sleep.
Top tips;
- Switch off lights and electrical devices at least one hour before bed time
- increase sleep inducing vitamins and minerals
Avoid caffeine before 3pm – as it stays in your system for roughly seven hours
Make a plan on how you can get the best nights sleep to help you achieve your health and fitness goals and remember STICK TO THE DAMN PLAN.
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Transcription
As we know sleep is very very important and if you’re deprived of sleep, you’re not going to be a happy coach. Because I’m a bit of a dick, Coach Stephen, is getting a bit of a rude awakening.
It’s in my ear, it’s in my ear.
That’s proper in my ear.
As promised one of our subscribers kindly commented on our video about getting abs after forty and he said “What about sleep?” Yeah. What about sleep?
It’s a fair point. Good on you. Because we didn’t mention sleep but it is actually vital for anybody to get into shape. Whether you’re above forty or below forty or exactly forty.
People say well you can survive on four hours of sleep a night and that’s true you can. However, we’re not talking about surviving here, we’re talking about thriving.
Oooh thriving, or surviving. Especially in your training because when you’re training hard like that routine that we were describing in that video you need the muscles to, you need to give them time to rest and recover, and sleep plays a massive role in that.
It does, it does. So this comes down to the subconscious. So, if you think about it, if you cut your finger, you’re not going to think about healing the finger it just does it, it’s your subconscious that does it. Now the more that you can allow the subconscious to do its job the more effective it is going to be. Meditation is very good for you it then allows the subconscious to come through and deal with any sort of problems and I’m not just talking about cutting the finger this obvious thing that you can monitor. However, you’ve got to think about damage to muscles all these different systems that you need. The ones you can’t see, right? Exactly.
So, we’ll talk more about meditation on another video but if you think about when you’re sleeping there’s always that balance, meditation you really get into that subconscious, now the conscious mind is still there. Sleep is like the extreme, ok, the subconscious can just go to town on healing and recovery because the conscious mind is completely switched off because nobody remembers sleeping. Yeah.
So on a chemical level one of the main hormones that help to repair the body is the growth hormone. Now, when you’re young like children young your body is producing lots of growth hormone to grow. When you get into adulthood your body produces less growth hormone guys grow until we’re about 18/21 and then your bones fuse and you’re at your set height but every time you go to your bed at night your body produces 1 to 2 ius of growth hormone every night. If you do not get your sleep your body will not produce that growth hormone which is there to help the bones, the skin, the cells, it is vital that you get that.
Another little trick that you can do sleep wise and the benefits of this, you know I can’t speak about them enough, is a power nap. The only way I can describe it is have you ever had issues with your computer? You restart it and re-boot up your operating system and sometimes it takes five to ten minutes, damnit something’s not working, the screens frozen restart it boots back up and it’s good to go again. You know I’ve had days where you’re tired but you don’t really have time to go for a proper nap, sometimes a ten-minute power nap lets the brain re-boot gives those ten minutes where, Stephen’s talking about meditation.
Yeah absolutely it switches the conscious mind off enough that the subconscious can come in an reset a few little systems and get the brain back in gear. I talk about the benefits but I actually can’t power nap.
So if you are serious about being healthy, getting in shape, getting those abs after forty, then sleep is going to be absolutely essential.
One of the things you can do to ensure a good night’s sleep, just say you’re a troubled sleeper, foods that are high in tryptophan, so you get turkey that’s high in tryptophan, and what else? I think bananas with peanut butter, milk is high in tryptophan as well. Basically, when that’s released into the body it helps you relax, calm and if you have trouble sleeping it’ll definitely help you along the way.
One of my favorite minerals, magnesium. Magnesium, is going to be absolutely essential make sure you’re topping your magnesium levels up constantly every single day. So, you’re looking at your green vegetables, if you get plenty of those in then great but you have to have them on a daily basis if you’re not getting your green leafys in there are a few other sources of course but you want to be looking at an Epsom Salt Bath at least once or twice a week, or like I do, is just take a magnesium supplement every day and I usually go for an hour before bed four of those just before bed and it gives me enough magnesium, I think you’re looking at roughly 500mg of magnesium every single night, it helps you recover nd helps you sleep.
Another nutrient you can look in to is, GABA, its opposite in the brain is glutamine. Now glutamine excites all the neurons and fires them up and keeps you alert. GABA’s its opposite. Once upon a time you could get GABA readily in the shops but unfortunately certain individuals abused GABA and it eventually got banned as a supplement but you can still get GABA from lots of different sources. It’s free naturally occurring in the body anyway but increasing levels of GABA in your body, just through different foods, can help you relax.
There you are. Is that not what the Hulk, has? That’s GAMMA.