How to Sleep Like a Champion

Let’s talk about sleep!

The single biggest driver of brain power, muscle power, conditioning, happiness, you name it. It’s important to get good sleep and a lot of it.

When we talk quantity, we want to aim for 8 hours of sleep. That means more than 8 hours in bed, realistically. This is enough time for us to get through several sleep cycles and all of the various stages of sleep so we can recover physically and mentally. People might prefer more or less, but preferences aside, our physiology tells us this is what we need.

Sleep quality is a little harder to measure than sleep quantity. Both are measurable using wearable devices and the like. I am very much not a gadget guy and especially when it comes to sleep, I want things as analog as possible. My personal approach to it is to just use how I feel when I wake up as a very rough gauge of what my sleep quality was. At the end of the day (or night, as it were) I know that I want more rather than less when it comes to both sleep quality and quantity.

My general strategy is to follow through on as many of the steps outlined below as possible and then let things end up as they will. This also takes the stress out of it for me because I have specific boxes to check and most of the other stuff is out of my control.

Now most of these checkboxes that we’re looking to check revolve around this core tenant:

A good night of sleep starts with a good day.

Remember that fact because it will guide your decisions and get you to the best night of sleep you have available to you. Now without further ado: our checkboxes.

Step Count

Whenever someone asks me about sleep, one of the first things I try to learn is what their activity level looks like. The simplest, most practical way to think objectively about activity level is step count. 

Simply put, there are some good minimum step counts to hit on any given day for a lot of reasons, but we’ll just stick to talking about sleep for right now. The 10,000 step numbers gets talked about a lot and it turns out it’s for a very good reason. 

One of the downfalls of getting fewer than 10,000 steps per day is that you just don’t accumulate enough “fatigue debt” without that step count. Think of a day in the life of someone who works behind a computer or the wheel of a vehicle. While there will certainly be mental fatigue associated with these jobs, the body is left with pent up energy at the end of the day, making it difficult to wind down and truly be ready for restful sleep.

Accumulating 10,000 steps is a pretty surefire way of making sure you’ve had enough Non-Exercise Activity (NEAT) to be tired at the end of your day. And for those who exercise frequently, a high step count is extremely helpful for recovering from workouts, regardless of what those workouts look like. 

If you don’t want to keep checking your phone or smart watch to see what your rough step count might be (and I don’t blame you there), then just know that for the average adult at an average speed, 1 Mile is about 2,000 steps. And if you want to get most of the benefits with slightly less mileage, 8,000 steps will get you the lion’s share of these NEAT benefits.

Sunshine

Getting enough sunshine helps set your circadian rhythm and is the primary way our body gets Vitamin D. Getting outside and getting exposure to natural light early on in your day helps you wake up quickly and gets the body and mind on a good schedule.

Luckily if you’re getting enough steps, you’re getting sunshine! If you struggle with getting a good step count by the end of the day, start your day off with a 10 or 20 minute walk first thing when you wake up and kill two birds with one stone.

Caffeine Cut-Off

For some reason this is the one I tend to get the most push-back on. Now listen: I love coffee. Probably far more than the next guy. I love me some caffeine. So I get it. Less of a good thing isn’t fun. But we can’t be dosing ourselves with a ton of stimulant throughout the day and especially the back half of our day and wondering why our sleep is less than ideal.

Now that’s off my chest, let’s get a little more objective and talk about numbers.

Here’s our first one:

Five.

Specifically: five hours, which is the half life of caffeine in a healthy human body, on average.

What that means is that if you have a cup of coffee at 9:00AM with 200mg of caffeine, then at 2:00PM you still have 100mg of caffeine coursing through your veins. Hence why an afternoon caffeine craving is not uncommon.

Research shows that it takes about 10 hours to have caffeine fully metabolized in the body.

So if you finish your coffee at noon and don’t mind having a stimulant in your blood stream until 10PM, you’re good to go. Use your own schedule to make good decisions.

Our other number regarding caffeine is 200. Specifically 200mg being roughly the optimum amount of caffeine for maximizing all of the benefits and avoiding the majority of the downsides of caffeine consumption.

That’s why a lot of pre-workouts have a 200mg dose and a lot of energy drinks tend to be around there or slightly higher. Conveniently, that’s also a pretty normal sized (10 oz, not 30oz) cup of coffee.

If you feel like you need more than that to function, cutting back would probably do you a lot of good in time because you’re probably desensitized to caffeine. Chasing the dragon and drinking more and more to get the same effect is tempting in the short term, but a pretty poor strategy in the long term.

This isn’t me telling you that you need to remove caffeine from your life permanently. You’ll probably never hear me say that. But if you’re not sure if you’re caffeine desensitized or not, you probably are. And if you’re not sure if caffeine is affecting your sleep or not, it probably is.

So if you want to sleep better, cut your caffeine off early in the day and try going some days where you have no caffeine at all.

If your quality of life is really negatively affected or if you have headaches when you do this, that’s a really good indicator that if you get your caffeine under control, you can get feeling a whole lot better.

Evening Routine

Now we’re getting to the wind down portion of our day. There are a lot of little things that can be down here that all add up when it comes to winding down well.

Electronics off 1-2 hours before sleep.

This means screens, phones, music, etc. If it has a remote or a touchscreen, it should probably be off by this point. At least turn on sunset mode (amber tinting timed with whenever sunset is on that day) or bedtime mode (full on grayscale based on when you set your bedtime for.) so that you have less blue light input into your eyeballs.

Soft tissue work on big muscles groups

Break out the foam roller! Turns out the best time to lie on the floor and give yourself a massage is not directly before a workout when you’re trying to upregulate. It’s shortly before bed when you’re trying to downregulate.

Big inputs into big muscle groups such as foam rolling your quads, calves, lats or the good ol’ gut smash trigger your parasympathetic nervous system to run the show a little more. This is the rest and digest side of your nervous system. Think of this as the equivalent of eating a big meal, but for your muscles. Your body naturally wants to relax afterwards.

Parasympathetic breathing

A longer exhale than inhale helps you relax and triggers your body to down regulate. When mixed with deep soft tissue work like a gut smash or quad smash, the effects of both are compounded. Your body relaxes more effectively and you get closer to sleep much more quickly, while also helping the muscle groups that you’re working into relax and affect change in that system.

Try something like a 4 count inhale and an 8 count or longer exhale while foam rolling before bed.

Get cold!

Cold helps you relax and lowers stress hormones in the body, cueing your body that it could be an appropriate time to sleep. You want to turn your room into a cold sleep cave. There’s research that shows what some optimal levels of cold tend to be for sleeping, but I’ve seen this vary a lot from person to person and certainly season to season. Crank the fans and the AC and find out what an appropriate level of cold is for you. If it’s a hot time of year, take a cool shower a little before bed to kickstart the process.

Lights dimmer as the sun gets lower.

Besides cold, you know what a sleep cave also needs to be? Dark of course. Switch to dimmer lights as the evening goes on and turn off unnecessary lights.

No meals before bed.

Eating a full on meal before bed will throw your sleep for that night completely out of wack. It may not hinder your ability to fall asleep (though it could) but it will sabotage your sleep quality. A large meal shortly before bed can have the same or worse effect on someone’s HRV (Heart Rate Variability) as consuming alcohol shortly before bed.

HRV is often used by wearable tracking devices as a very general measure of someone’s recovery and readiness to exercise. So to put it simply, a big meal before bed significantly lowers your odds of waking up feeling ready to face the day the next day. Finish eating a few hours before you plan to sleep.

Conclusion

And there you have it gang! An extremely long but not exhaustive list of a bunch of impactful things you can control to stack the odds of a great night of sleep in your favor.

Nothing can guarantee a great night of sleep, but you can at least remove all the obstacles.