Are you building a house of cards?

Are you doing all the things right in training, but under performing and struggling in other things in general? There could be a simple explanation.

When we normally think about training there are a few things that come to mind when we think about our foundation;strength, endurance, strength endurance, and conditioning come to mind,. These are important however, that are not things that we can be affected by everyday and while they are part of our foundation they are not the cornerstone piece that without which everything comes tumbling down, and your performance falters.  

These four cornerstones are sleep, nutrition, stress, and fluid intake. If we are neglecting one or more of these aspects it will affect us sooner or later.  

More often than not it will be a gradual slide rather than a sudden implosion.  Sometimes because it is a such a gradual slide we don't notice the changes or we put things off as an off day, or we look for other excuses.  It is not until we change or fix the issue that we realise you were lacking something. But, because we are not changing we keep pushing on until we are at a point where we are stuck in the bottom of the rut.  Getting out is a long process. So ideally we don't want to address the issue so late.

One of the easiest way to see if you are getting enough sleep is to monitor your sleep.  There are various free sleep apps or activity trackers will also tell you how long you slept and how effective it was. When you wear your activity tracker when sleeping the movement sensor that measures your activity will measure if you are moving a lot in your sleep or even if you are getting up and moving around.  These tools are great, as they allow you to monitor your sleep without changing how you sleep.   However, it is important that we don't just take one measurement, as with training we are looking for a collective gain and are trying to avoid a constant loss, so measure your sleep over a period of a week or so and take the average of it.

But of course you don't need as much sleep right because you're fit, effective,  dynamic, and a machine. Right? Good thinking, but unfortunately (or fortunately)  we are all human and most studies have shown that seven hours is the required average amount of sleep for an adult.

Speaking from personal experience anything less than that is going to affect you. For the last two years I've been averaging around five hours of sleep due to going to bed late and being woken in the night or early.   Despite this I'm not always walking around like a zombie and often I still have a lot more energy than a lot of people who are sleeping more.  However, my performance does suffer as a result and I'm not just talking about my sporting performance I am talking about general performance I.e. thought patterns,  ability to brain-storm,  and normal daily activities.  The interesting or strange thing that I've found is not that constant, it is not a case of me feeling that I'm constantly rubbish or feeling terrible. There are often days when everything comes together or clicks and the day flies by, there is always energy there, work gets done with ease, and I can train like a pro.  However, on other days it just doesn't click.  

When someone has a constant lack of sleep,  water, good nutrition, or stress relief the days when it doesn't click are going to be a lot more often than the days where it is easy.

 If you think of your body as a car and your nutrition is the petrol for the engine, water the oil, sleep the pressure in your tires, and stress is whether the handbrake is on and how high.  If any of these four things are falling short of the required levels it is possible that the cars still works, but it will be inefficient and in the end it will break down.

This will be the case for a lot of people, they really struggle throughout the day; with their energy level during the day, their ability to concentrate,  their ability to move, and how they deal with stress.

What is the appropriate amount of sleep?  There have been a lot of studies on sleep, but the last few all seem to point to that most adults need 7-7,5 hours of sleep.  A little bit more or a little bit less is not that bad, but too much or too little can be damaging.  Speaking from my experience 5 is not enough.  Under 5 is really bad.  I can still do a lot of things very well, but if I really wanted to perform it was a hit or miss case.  Thankfully before I lead things get too worse I stopped training for myself, and tried to reduce the amount of effort I was doing, so that the little energy I did have I could use for positive things and function normally through the day.

Now that I am aware of it I try to balance out the sleep.  I think it will be a long work in progress, but I do try to top up on sleep where I can, but it is not possible to do that all the time.  Therefore, I look at balancing out my training, so where I know I am going to be getting tired (towards the end of the week) I don’t push things, which often means that the weekends are often spent resting while most people do their big sessions.  However, I am know I don’t have to do really big weeks to run well anymore, so I just try to build some consistency into things week on week and month on month.  However, until the sleep levels are over 6 hours per night I can forget trying to get to a high level again.

Here is a summary of my sleep pattern through December 2015.  As you can see there was a average of under 5 hours of sleep and only 4 of those hours we rated as quality sleep.

In June of this year I had improved this by over an hour, and in this month I was able to put in some very impressive sessions, and knock out a very very good half marathon in terms of performance.  The time was not a personal best, but it showed that I was possible to push my body to another level for a long period.

This November I was able to still sleep a little better than last year, but I was also able to be more active.  Things are getting better, but I need to get more than 2 sleeps of 7 hours or more per month.

This way I am able to start build a foundation, so that the my house of fitness is not going to be so shaky, life will be better, I will function better, and I can perform at a level I know I .  am capable of.   Sleep is my weak point at the moment, but it could be something that you can always get a lot of.  However, it could be that your diet or stress levels are really effecting your able to perform, so make sure you evualate your 4 pillars.