The Importance of a Good Night’s Sleep:
One of the single most important aspects to achieving your health and fitness goals, is the vastly undervalued “Good Night’s Sleep”.
Many of us are accustomed to taking what we can get as it pertains to sleep, both in regards to quality and quantity. But a proper, good quality sleep is an invaluable aspect to good health. Your body is designed to heal and rejuvenate, both physically and mentally while you sleep. Proper rest and recovery improves cognitive function, maximizes athletic performance and promotes better immune function.
Insufficient or poor sleep quality is associated with higher body weight, an increased risk of heart attack and stroke, impaired glucose metabolism, reduced insulin sensitivity, and is linked to depression and increased inflammation.
If you find you have hit a plateau in your gains, but your diet and exercise routine are on point, consider looking at the amount of recovery you are getting and the quality of your sleep.
Stress, diet, hormone imbalances, and a poor sleep environment all have an influence on sleep patterns.
10 Ways to Improve the Quality of Your Sleep
You can improve your nightly sleep in the following ways:
- Standardize your bedtime and wake time. Be consistent with these times, and try to not let circumstances alter them. The amount of sleep hours each person needs will vary, so try to find out what your ideal amount is. Experiment on weekends if you can, to see how much you need to feel refreshed and not groggy upon waking.
- Relax your nervous system before bedtime with stretching and/or meditation. Try to stay away from loud music or exciting programs as this can be stimulating to the nervous system.
- Have a small carbohydrate snack shortly before bed to change the time of the late night hormone spikes. This could be a small bowl of oatmeal or melba toast.
- Try not to eat heavy meals at least 3 hours from bedtime.
- Shut down screens (phone/tablet/computer/tv) at least 30 minutes before bed as the lights from screens can be stimulating and can make it hard to fall asleep.
- Eliminate or minimize light and noise pollution. To do this, I suggest covering illuminated clocks, and/or keeping electronics that emit light in another room if possible. Keep your phone in another room, or place it face down and on silent/DND. You can also invest in blackout curtains to reduce ambient city light.
- Examine your next day and make a list so that you don’t spend precious moments, when you could be sleeping, going over things you may have forgotten to do.
- Keep a notebook (pen and paper, NOT a tablet), so that if you do happen to wake up in the middle of the night you can jot down your urgent thoughts and hopefully get back to sleep.
- Position your body comfortably using pillows to alleviate pressure in parts of your body that are uncomfortable when lying down. For example, under your hips, tilting your pelvis inward or between your knees when lying on your side to combat back pain, or a memory foam pillow for proper neck alignment.
- Practice meditation on a daily basis as this will allow you to maintain a more consistent feeling of calm throughout your day.
To summarize, never underestimate the value of good quality rest, it is your body’s mechanism for rejuvenation and healing.
Tracey Cooke
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Soul Training, the workshop designed to teach you that there is more to health and fitness, than just working out and eating right. Tracey leads an engaging workshop that discusses a holistic approach to fitness covering meditation, stress management, sleep, mobility and adherence.
Stress cannot be eliminated, but there are ways to cope with and decrease the negatives effects from it. Tracey discusses the wonders meditation will have on your physical and mental state, and even walks you through a quick, guided meditation.
Many of us have heard the importance of a good night’s sleep, but what benefits does it really have on our body, both physically and mentally? Tracey dives into why getting proper sleep and proper quality of sleep is critical to your health. She also discusses ways you can optimize your sleep to ensure the best quality.
Stretching and mobility work is inherent to our body’s functionality, but why do people only focus on it after an injury? Tracey examines why daily stretching is so important to our body’s wellbeing, and provides you with a few quick and easy exercises you can mix into your day.
Follow-Along Soul Training Stretches
Tracey explores the importance of staying consistent, and ways to adhere to your goals, even when life gets in the way.
Tracey wraps up Soul Training by reminding you of the four main topics we covered, how these are just as important to your physical and mental health as exercise, and how these areas will start you on the path to treating your body more holistically.