Sleep

You count your calories, you time your cardio and you chart your weights. What about sleep? Sleep is so important and most of us don't get nearly enough. It really can make or break your physique and your performance.


I am writing this after the 4th of July, I have had interrupted sleep now for three nights due to the fireworks. I have been just absolutely skittish thinking that I can sleep tonight!

I never appreciated how important sleep was until several years ago, and now, I plan my sleep as much as I plan my food, training and supplements, they all go together. 

SC used to always tell me to get more sleep, and I thought he was just being a lazy bum making up excuses for lazing around in bed on weekends, now I know he was right.

I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle where researchers from Stanford University conducted a very small study with the Varsity basketball team. The study has been published in the journal Sleep.

Basically every single one of the players showed improvement when they increased their sleep, not some of them, not most of them, but all of them. 

Collectively, they took almost a full second off their times in 282 foot sprints on a basketball court, that's equivalent to the length of a court three times- and they improved the accuracy of both their free-throw and three-point shooting by 9%

The Stanford study seems to demonstrate that athletes- elite or not - might seriously consider making sleep a part of their training programs, alongside nutrition or weight lifting, sleep experts said.

Read the entire article here, then get some extra shut eye!