-: When we look at sleep, the most important thing with this
is it starts with buy-in.
So essentially you not in control
of your client's sleep, right?
I mean, you know, you can't follow them home and, you know
tuck them in at night and force them to stay in bed
and hold a pillow over their face to make it dark, whatever.
I mean, may want to do that sometimes
but it's usually not within our power.
So when we're looking at sleep, there's no diet change,
no training thing that we can do that are gonna add hours
to the day or increase the amount of time,
someone is willing to invest in their sleep.
So we have to get them bought in
to investing the time and the lifestyle changes to sleep
because if we have to constantly handicap, you know
whatever we're doing from nutrition
whatever we're doing from training
and be manipulating those strategies to compensate
for poor sleep habits.
Basically we end up sacrificing the goals
that the client hired us for in the first place.
So a big part of winning on the train ability side of things
is getting people to buy in to the recovery aspect
of the programming, because you know,
your clients basically paying you to do whatever it takes
to their diet or whatever it takes to their training
to get to their, you know, physique change,
their performance goal whatever,
it is basically, they're paying you
to impose a stress on them.
Part of that agreement from you needs to be like, look
if I am going to add this stress to you,
the reciprocal part of that agreement
means that you need to invest in the lifestyle steps
and nutrition, et cetera the things outside of here
to recover from that stress.
That's basically their side of the coin
other than like being compliant.
But like that side of the coin is what's needed
to make progress and to get results.
So that's just something you have to establish
right off the baseline,
or basically none of this other stuff matters
because it doesn't matter
how well you can assess their sleep
if they don't find it important,
they're not gonna do the things,
they need to do to make the changes, so buy in is huge.
So with that, let's kinda walk through
how you get sleep buy in, for different goals.
So if somebody's got a physique goal,
then one of the things that we can talk to them about,
is the ratio of lean to fat mass loss
that they're gonna experience in a deficit, right?
Same thing for a surplus, but more so for a deficit.
So basically you lose significantly more lean mass
in a calorie deficit when you aren't getting good quality
or sufficient sleep.
So if they're looking to improve their body composition,
they're looking to improve that the way they look
via fat loss, right?
Muscle loss is not the direction they wanna go.
So sleep is gonna be imperative
to losing a higher percentage of fat
during their weight loss.
Now, when we look at calories and all that stuff
it's not as big of an impact on weight loss
and it does have an impact on weight loss.
But the biggest difference is that
it has a huge impact on fat loss.
And that's when we're talking controlled settings
I would say in real world,
it has a big impact on weight loss too.
But when we're talking about controlling for calories
and activity and all that other stuff is, you know
constrained and like laboratory, or reach search settings,
or somebody who's just, you know willpower through it,
the big difference is gonna be the body composition change
with that weight loss.
So the next thing is the impact on neat
and the calorie deficit.
So when you start with the calorie deficit,
whether you calculated that,
whether you're coming in based off of, you know
their current nutrition, whatever it is, okay,
you have your deficit,
let's say you're in a, you know, a 350 calorie deficit.
If they are not adequately sleeping,
they are going to actually close that gap of the deficit
because they are gonna do a combination
of decreasing their needs
and lowering their metabolic rate more
because of that poor recovery and poor sleep.
So basically they're going to progress
to being able to make progress
on fewer and fewer, and fewer calories
or needing fewer and fewer calories to make progress, right?
So they're going to shift their body into the point
of not being able to make progress
in the same amount of calories
and have to be lowering their calories faster, earlier.
And that's, that's not sustainable.
That's not where we wanna be for performance,
sustainability of the diet,
the overall body composition that we're gonna end with,
that's gonna play into that equation too.
And then it also poor sleep is gonna negatively impact
both metabolic and anabolic hormones.
This happens not in a single night sleep, but it happens,
you know, when you basically, it's like,
once you get beyond like five days for some hormones
other ones may take a little bit longer
but basically if you're getting chronically poor sleep
you're gonna have hormonal disruptions.
So if we are concerned about muscle mass
and we are concerned about, you know being able
to maintain a higher calorie intake
while still being in a deficit so that we can feel good
have performance, have good overall health.
Those things are gonna get eaten away
by the hormonal changes over time, too.
So, you know, a like missing
or having a really bad night, asleep one night
isn't gonna hit the hormones very much
but chronically bad stuff is definitely gonna make
that an issue.
And anybody that knows about hormones knows that
once those get out of whack, you don't just like wham, bam.
And everything is all better again,
the next day after one good night's sleep,
is that it takes time to disrupt them.
And it also takes time to bring them back.
So you're definitely digging yourself a hole
that is gonna be harder to climb out of
when you're, you know when you have bad sleep
for a longer period of time
because of the impact it has on your hormones.
And obviously it's gonna attract impact,
training performance, which is going to impact
your ability to achieve the stimulus.
So if there is more of a muscular portion
to this physique goal, they wanna change their body shape.
They wanna build, you know, delts or glutes or arms
or, you know, whatever body part they want to,
they wanna put on muscle mass or retain maximum muscle mass
during this period
or maybe it's a perch free person
that decrease in training performance
is a decrease in stimulus.
So you're affecting both sides of the hypertrophy equation
because we're under recovering and also under stimulating.
So that's like, it's a perfect way to completely
blunt any hypertrophy gains and much like the ratio shifts
unfavorably in a deficit.
If you compound all these things, poor hormones
you know, the fact that we're gonna get less stimulus
and we're getting less recover.
If you add a calorie surplus for hypertrophy client,
guess what they're gonna gain a lot more of fat, right?
And a lot less muscle.
So now let's look at more of kind of the gen pop,
where a big part of their success
is gonna be their compliance
and just the overall experience that they go through,
through that transformation process.
So when, and a lot of these things happen fairly acutely
like even after one bad night's sleep
or one night of insufficient sleep,
is poor sleep affects our impulse control and our craving.
So it makes it harder to stick to the diet you're going to
not only you're gonna crave that food
but basically you're essentially,
you're inhibiting your prefrontal cortex
and we're listening more to the amygdala and stuff like that
when we don't get enough sleep
because our brain chemistry
and just the way that we function changes.
And so what happens is that
not only are you craving food more
but your logic, your ability to think logically
and be like, no, I have this goal.
So I'm not gonna choose to eat that donut or whatever it is
because it's not on my plan like that is also taken away.
So your, the odds of you going off the diet
or having a harder time staying on the diet are much higher,
if you're not getting good sleep or good quantity of sleep
both emotional stress balance
and threshold also are compromised.
So there's, you know, there is emotional eating
but one of the things is, is that like,
when our tolerance to stress goes down
then we also seek comfort more, or we seek reward more.
And when you're in a deficit or in you're in a diet
and all of a sudden, like, you know
we haven't had something, the thing that would make you feel
really good is that food you haven't been eating,
those carbs and calories you haven't been getting
or whatever it may be, right?
So basically any stressor that you come into contact with
because you have a lower threshold to that
you're more likely going to want to seek to, you know
kind of reward yourself or balance out that stress
with you know, some food, some calories,
stuff like that, right?
It also is gonna negatively impact hunger
because basically ghrelin is gonna go up
and leptin is going to go down, right?
So you, literally are more hungry, you have more cravings.
You think less logically about the food that you eat.
And any stress that you come into contact with,
is gonna say, God, just, you know eat some cake,
you deserve it.
So if we're talking about a transformation client
that is coming to you, mainly
you know, for you to help keep them accountable
across those process, letting them know
that their life is gonna be so much easier.
Like if they've been failing on diets before,
it could like sleep could have been a huge part
of you know, why they had poor success.
So maybe they built themselves beat themselves up.
They didn't think they had good willpower, you know,
or, you know, they just, they weren't meant to do this
or their body just doesn't like,
or maybe they didn't focus on their sleep well enough
so that, you know, they basically set themselves up
for failure when it came to actually complying
with the diet.
Wakefulness and training drive.
So basically if we're not getting enough sleep
it makes it harder for us to get up and be active,
that's one of the reasons our need is gonna go down.
But because of that, you're more likely to skip a workout
because your training drive is gonna go down.
So if part of the, you know, part of the compliance thing
is actually getting all their sessions in.
So say maybe they have sessions without you,
maybe you work with them or maybe it's an online client,
where they have to go all to the gym all the time,
without an appointment.
They're gonna be more likely to miss sessions
or kind of like, you know, drag their feet in those sessions
and not really push themselves in those sessions,
if they're not getting enough sleep
and that's gonna affect both the energy balance
and the stimulus thing
but it's also going to affect their confidence.
So if they're struggling with the diet, you know
and that's really hard, they're using all that willpower.
And then they go to the gym,
they just don't feel like they're doing a good job.
Like, even if they're like succeeding
by willing themselves through it,
because they're not performing well,
their performance is not going up.
They look they have no wins, all they do is feel like crap,
and they're just willing themselves through that.
Confidence is gonna go down and that's sustainable.
Sustainability is really gonna get low
because you were asking a lot in terms of willpower
not to mention they are not gonna be seeing
as good a results likely with all of this stress
and poor sleep, and poor recovery, and less stimulus.
So yeah, like you add all those things together
and it's like this is the recipe for somebody
not to, you know, not to do well with the diet,
not too stay on it, not to complete it,
not to be compliant with it, et cetera.
And then cognitive performance
and memory confidence, et cetera
So lack of sleep, it doesn't just affect our emotional,
like it doesn't just affect our brain emotionally
but it also affects our mental performance.
And for a lot of people that plays
a lot into their confidence.
And so if they're not remembering things,
they're not as quick and responsive, they can overall
just like they get less successes
and less feelings of performance and progress
in the rest of their life
and their overall emotional well-being,
just starts to decline.
Like basically if you don't sleep,
you're not setting yourself up for wins in the department
of like having a good time on this transformation journey.
You're setting it up to be a miserable process
which isn't sustainable
and is gonna provide lower results.
So we wanna get people bought into sleep
by just letting them know, not just the physiology
of why sleep is important, but just the difference
in the experience that they are going to have
on this journey, by having enough sleep.
It's the difference between suck and sustainable, right?
And people want sustainable, they don't want suck.
So we need to convince people to do
that is in their best interest, not just for results
but for just the quality of life
and setting themselves up for success
to really prioritize, you know
sleep from both the quantity of time,
and then the lifestyle interventions
that they'll need to optimize that sleep,
especially if they come in
with a really poor initial sleep score.
So last part when we were focusing
more on health-related goals, okay
so insulin and blood sugar management.
So it immediately, one day of poor enough sleep
or limited quantity decreases our insulin
and blood sugar management.
It decreases our output of insulin,
decreases the impact of that insulin.
So overall we get larger and longer swings
in high blood sugar which then that carries
into the cascades of, you know
cravings and stuff like that.
We already talked about dysregulated hormones
that obviously can impact our health over time,
cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer's,
psychological disorder, all very highly correlated
and even research a lot of things causative
in terms of poor sleep or poor quantity of sleep.
Basically they, once you kinda hit
under that seven hours of sleep
the odds of all of those psychological
and mental dysfunction starts to go up dramatically.
So does essentially like all core, all cause mortality
for the most part, like heart attack and cancer risk
are associated with, you know poor sleep or, you know
shift work and things like that, where, you know
your circadian rhythm is really bad.
There is even a possible correlation
in the research that the gut microbiome is shifted
more towards that of an obese person, more fermentable
like gas producing bacteria and stuff like that,
start to dominate and people that are sleep deprived.
My, like looking at the research,
I'm gonna say that's possibly correlative, not causative
meaning that it's the sleep is causing
that probably that change in the gut microbiome
more by all of the all of the dietary and lifestyle
impacts of sleep.
Not so it's not direct, but it's indirectly causative
because sleep causes the things further up the stream
that we just talked about, you know
in terms of, you know, blood sugar management,
in terms of appetite, cravings, you know,
all of those things together
that is all gonna have a negative impact
because you're likely gonna be eating different foods.
Your gut motility is gonna change and stuff, and so that
rather than the sleep itself
being the direct mechanisms,
an indirect mechanism via multiple steps is my theory.
But either way, there's a pretty strong correlation
in there that, you know, you will have, you know
so I don't think that like, you can say like,
well if you start sleeping, your gut health magically,
gonna improve is what I'm trying to say there.
I think you should improve your sleep regardless
but I think improving your sleep will put you
in a position to improve your gut microbiome.
I just don't want you to think that those things
are directly causative that like, okay,
if I sleep better than my gut heals itself,
per se you're gonna still need to make
the dietary interventions
and other lifestyle things as well.
Okay, moving on from that.
So box, because this is not the gut week,
this is the sleep week.
So let's talk about sleep tracking.
Cause there's a lot of limitations
when it comes to tracking sleep.
So in general, people are poor
at reporting their sleep quality.
If you ask them like, you know, how good they sleep,
how many times did they wake up, et cetera?
You know, how, how well do they think they're performing?
You know, when they're wake up rested and recovered,
do they think they are,
in general people aren't very good at reporting that,
cause we tend to have a short-term memory for this stuff.
Like, you know, people will be like,
oh I haven't felt this good in ages.
In reality, it's like, maybe that's, that's hard to tell
because it's hard to know how we feel today
compared to seven days ago or a month ago
maybe we can compare it to yesterday or the day before,
or, you know, like, you know, maybe the last week on average
or something like that.
But we're not very good at kind of judging overall magnitude
of like how good is my quality of sleep?
How like, compared to my optimal performance
where am I right now?
I only really know like kinda where I am
to what I think is kind of my average, which is very skewed,
because I could have been low performing
or high performing for a very long time
and that the accuracy of reporting declines with poor sleep.
So basically the people that we need the most
accurate reporting are gonna be the worst reporting
because they're the people that, you know
are already having poor quality sleep.
And unfortunately they are gonna be the people
that are likely gonna give us the worst quality data.
So that sucks, but it doesn't mean
that we can't use that data at all.
We just have to make sure that like we never, you know
put all of our eggs in one basket
and we look for basically a pattern of things,
just kinda like we did with the systemic training,
is we're looking for a pattern of things
and some priorities, things that we can focus on,
and we're gonna use that to kind of shorten down the list
of interventions, to what we think might be most effective.
So the next thing is that light disruptions to sleep,
like when you're waking up at night,
are often not recalled because they're either really short,
you fall right back asleep.
You know, we just don't tend to remember,
the ongoings overnight anyway.
So maybe you remember you had poor sleep
but if I was like, well
so did you wake up three times, 17 times?
You have no idea.
It's like, basically pretty much
once you get over once or twice
in terms of how many times your sleep is interrupted
like multiple disruptions are near impossible
to track accurately, unless you were gonna like,
have somebody like, you know
write on a thing, like make a check on a boxer
or a piece of paper or something, every time they woke up.
But then you're actually just decreasing the quality
of their sleep,
by giving them an activity to do when they wake up.
And then that would only be possible when they woke up
so alert that they would be cognitively aware to do that.
So overall, yeah, sleep tracking, not that accurate
but we're gonna try, when we look at the devices
that we currently have.
So like the current wearables, it would be so awesome.
Like, oh, well, we can't ask questions,
but if you wear your Fitbit or your whooper Apple watch
or whatever the heck you were wearing,
maybe we could get some awesome data out of that.
And that would tell us everything that we need to know.
Yeah, doesn't that, I mean,
we're gonna talk about these devices.
We're gonna use them for sure.
But the accuracy is also very limited
on these everything from sometimes I think you're sleeping
when you're still up and about or whatnot,
you know, to basically, you know
looking at different software algorithms
and things like that.
And thanks for just calculating weird things, essentially,
I'm really excited for the future of what, you know,
some of the technology can bring us
in terms of tracking things
for our health performance, et cetera,
especially with the trainability model,
we're just not there yet.
So, and then there's the fact
that wearing an electronic device itself
may have a negative impact on your sleep, you know
cause in general, you know, wifi, Bluetooth, you know
even strong electrical currents in your wallet
and things like that can be disruptive to sleep.
So you know, wearing something, you know, on you
that one is electrical
and two, might be putting off some sort of a signal
that in itself could be disruptive to sleep.
So you have to kinda weigh the pros and cons
on whether getting that data is gonna result
in a net positive and the improvements
that you can make, right?
And then when we look at what the wearables,
in terms of like the results that they're giving us,
they don't necessarily give us the full story
of what's happening,
a lot of them give you their own interpretation
of the data, and it's hard to get the raw data.
Like it would be really nice to, you know
be able to take something and to look
at all of the things that it's collecting individually
whether that be like heart rate and temperature, et cetera.
But if it's just kinda putting all that together
and giving you a score or whatever
it makes it hard for you to choose an intervention on just
like your sleep was, you know, good or bad or whatnot.
So if you're gonna choose a wearable, the more detailed
and the less, we'll say the less pre-calculated
that data is by the some softwares or algorithms,
the better it's gonna be for you as a coach.
Now that this doesn't necessarily,
sell a lot of these wearables,
because it makes them more complicated.
It's a lot easier for a person to be like,
oh, I got a seven, I should be working on improving that.
And then, you know here's some generic things
that you can do to improve sleep
and when it goes better, yay.
But you know, that's more consumer friendly,
it's not necessarily more coaching friendly.
So a lot of times it may not be the most mainstream apps
or devices that actually are the most useful
for you as a coach.
And for some people these things
can just be logistically prohibitive,
if they're not going to use them consistently
or accurately, you know, et cetera, right?
So I mean, something as simple as like, you know
I mean, if they're, if you're only gonna get data
like every once in a blue moon
because somebody forgets to put the thing on or whatever
you know, maybe that data,
because it's just the small intermittent snapshots
might be more problems than it's worth
cause you're not, basically,
what these things we need to be able to see trends.
So between the subjective and accuracy,
and the wearable and accuracy,
we need consistency to buffer the inaccuracy.
Just like, kinda like with, with managing our diet, right?
Like there's fluctuations in the calories
and the macros and all the foods that we eat, right?
Even if we're weighing it
and what are we gonna be so accurate?
It's the consistency that provides the accuracy
that we need that same thing here.
And then when it comes to assessing the data,
sleep is massively multifactorial
like pretty much, you know, name, some sort of issue,
and chances are it either as caused by sleep,
can cause disruptions in sleep or both.
So, and there's just so many things going on.
So some sleep problems they even become circular.
Like you don't know, like because it could be the cause
or a result.
Like it could be the symptom or the cause you don't know,
and now it's just this circular thing where it's like
because it is an issue on one side,
it's an issue on the other side,
but we don't know which is the cause of which,
it's just like this circular thing
that just goes indefinitely.
So when we look at, when we look at the data
we're gonna have a ton of options.
And so we're gonna go through refining those options
rather than trying to dig down super deep rabbit holes.
What you're going to try and do is, you know
try and just come up with like,
what's the most logical thing,
based off of what we have available.
And there is gonna be some trial and error
when it comes to interventions for sleep.
Our modern lives are full of things
that are detrimental to sleep.
So the list of possibilities of things
that could be causative or correlative are huge.
Everything from, you know, the changes in the stress,
the light exposure, all of these, you know, phones and apps
and the thing is that have negative impacts
on not only just like from the light perspective,
from an emotional and a stress perspective
and a dopamine reward perspective
all sorts of things that can be messing
with our brain chemistry and our sleep.
So accuracy of both subjective
and device data can be very poor
on top of all the multifactorial stuff.
And assessing can be a nightmare,
if you are one of those people that are gonna try
and overthink every piece of data.
So my goal is hopefully to get you on the end
of not overthinking the data
but maybe filtering the data so that you have less
that you could possibly overthink about.
Now, because there's so many things that impact sleep,
it's very multifactorial, we can often make improvements
in a wide variety of ways.
That means we have a lot of options for intervention.
And because, you know, there's a lot of circular things
and a lot of overlapping things in terms of the physiology
and the psychology, you may not have to hit a bullseye
to make an improvement
because all you're doing is providing some positive input
into the system, somewhere in that chain of events,
you know, that biochemistry pathway, whatever it may be
somehow we're improving the resiliency,
and so a lot of times the wrong guests
can still have a good outcome.
And when I say wrong, I just mean not the most, right?
Like you didn't get the perfect intervention,
and sometimes there just is multiple things
like a lot of times, because it's so multifactorial
there's never gonna be just one thing
that's affecting somebody's sleep,
a lot of it, it's gonna be a multitude of things.
And so that gives you a greater chance
of choosing something that will have a positive intervention
or a positive impact, but it may not be the only thing
or it may not be the best thing,
so consistency and tracking, and trial,
and error of interventions will be the reality
of dealing with sleep issues.
And, you know, some things are gonna provide an improvement
for unlimited time
and then they're going to stop providing that improvement.
And so you can't get attached
and you can't let your clients get emotionally attached
or starting to think that they need X, Y, Z,
in order to get good sleep, okay.
Because a lot of times, as we start correcting things
or we start getting a net positive,
a lot of interventions and lifestyle changes, et cetera,
is that we should get to the point,
where maybe we can make life a little bit more simpler.
We can decrease some supplements
or we can have a little bit more flexibility
in training, in nutrition, et cetera.
We don't wanna get our clients in the mindset of that
oh, I can't say like, I need this
or I can't sleep because then we start creating
that kind of, that mental thing
where if they don't have it, they won't have bad sleep,
not because of the physiological reason,
but because of the psychological reason
that because they don't have it,
they think they're gonna get bad sleep,
therefore, they're gonna end up having bad sleep.
So just get your clients on that, this is a moving target
and what we do in the approach we take,
is gonna change what may work amazing now,
may not work at all,
may even be a bad thing in the future.
So don't get attached to anything,
there will never be a magical arrow in your quiver
to getting the best sleep.
So when we look at sleep, sleep and stress,
are gonna kinda function in a balance like this.
So basically when we look at sleep,
it's the stress and recovery thing again.
So we're either gonna try and address sleep
by decreasing stress or doing something
that is going to enhance recovery.
Just the same thing that we're looking at
from a training perspective, you know
these are the two possible ways that we can intervene,
find a way to decrease stress,
find a way to improve recovery.
The actual, like nighttime, like the hours
that you are in bed are not like interventions at that time
or right pre-bed are not always going to be the answer.
Sometimes it's going to be, you know
doing something during the day,
doing something during your training or whatnot,
or doing something that's avoiding
some sort of stressor during the day.
Like those are the things that are actually going to result
in the improved sleep cycle over night.
We won't be directly going after the sleep cycle.