Roadmen, listen up, I want to talk to you today about three little…
Roadmen, listen up, I want to talk to you today about three little tips and hacks for improving your sleep. Let's get re-indralled. The big question is this, how do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Hello roadmen, welcome back to another roadman bites short form podcast. I hope everybody had a chance to listen back to the long form podcast this Wednesday gone that was with performance nutritionist and nutritionist to the stars Barry Murray. I love when people said that nutritionist to the stars. What does it mean? It doesn't really mean anything but it's just one of those titles. Barry has worked with some super successful riders from Steve leave comments to the BMC, Squards, Luke Dorribridge, bunch of other guys, who worked very closely with them. And he's got some amazing results and it was great to have a chance to pick his brain and just see, dig into some of the myths that we have around nutrition because I think it's one of those areas. It's almost like politics that it's so loaded and people are so defensive of certain food groups who knew that something like a macro nutrient engendered such passion. why are we so passionate about carbs folks? Like I like a pizza or a baguette or a bag as much as the next man, but I don't have this almost militant like obsession with it, a little bit bizarre, but if you look, there you go. And when research comes along to contradicts, people's militant obsession, they dig their heels in and they're often not very open to understanding or changing their habits. So that's definitely something I found feedback and blowback from the Wednesday podcast. I'm sure as more people listen, I will continue to get more feedback and I do love getting DMs and stuff from you guys. I don't always get a chance to write back to them. Some days there's just a couple of hundred DMs. I don't get a chance to write back to them. Oh, but please do send them. I try my very best to write back to them all, even if it's not at the day. You might get a message back from me two months later when I'm just sitting on a bus somewhere and I'm flicking through them all. There we go. Today I want to talk to you about sleep and I've of treedle little sleep hacks that I think can really improve the quality of your life. Because if you make these little changes, change your day, it really does change your life. Before I jump into that, I just want to give you that gentle quick reminder about patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch patreon. It's the place that it's the heartbeat. It's the engine. It's what keeps us taken. It's, you know, there's no ad revenue on this podcast. There's no sponsors on this podcast. If you're listening to a Joe Rogue podcast, you're going through 10 minutes of sponsors at the start. We don't have show sponsors. What keeps us going is your client donations. So please, I would encourage you to head on over there and make one of those client donations. The price of buying me a beer helps keep this podcast going. If you've donated already, I thank you very much for that. Today's topic is super important, a short form again. So we're not going to dive into the crazy depths, but maybe this is one that in a couple weeks time we do take a full look at because I know Matt Walker if anyone is a reader or if anyone or Audible is great as well. Get audible on your phone if you're out trying and on your own and you can hammer through books so I can give you the gift of time folks. Audible Matt Walker why we sleep is a great book and a lot of the stuff on the importance of sleep is covering Matt Walker's book and so I'm not going to get into that today.
What What I want to talk to you about today is ways to improve your…
What What I want to talk to you about today is ways to improve your sleep and give you three real tangible ways to improve it. There's one real sciencey word in there and I know if you're anything like me, if you hear a word that you don't understand, everything after that word your brain just shuts off and you stop listening. It's like when you're talking to a car salesman or something, they start with this techno-bub of VA, so it's like, it's gone. I know what you're talking about. You've lost me because you've started using techno-bubble. So I want to head this one off at the door because it's the only sort of ward that will put you off in this. It's melatonin. I mean, you hear the word melatonin, it's a hormone that enhances your sleep. So without melatonin, we have very poor or broken sleep. In the presence of melatonin, we have very good and peaceful sleep. That's the prerequisite to understand the morning I'm going to talk about here. So eating going to bed is kind of, it's nearly covering, I want to give you a tree tips And both tip number one and tip number two are boat relating to eating around bed because if you have something like, you know I know it's common for a lot of people have like a bowl of cereal gone to bed Or you know a sandwich something like that because they think they'll be hungry during the noise But in fact the exact opposite is true if you eat going to bed what happens is your blood sugars are raised So obviously you're in bed sleeping for two three hours, and you're not eating while you're in bed, so you enter into a hypoglycemic state. That's just a state of low blood sugar. What typically happens during the day, if we have a state of low blood sugar, everyone calls this the 11 a.m. dip, you wanna go and reach for that sugary snack, you wanna go and reach for a carb as a bit of a pick me up, but you're in bed, you obviously can't do that. So a couple of things will happen. One, you might wake up hungry the next morning, absolutely starving, you have those mornings when you just get up and you can't get that a breakfast counter fast enough. Or secondly, actually my wake up with hunger pangs in the night. And both those are related to that hypoglycemic state. So it's really important that we don't put ourselves into that hypoglycemic state because apart from making us hungry, what it does is it affects the quality of our sleep. So when we talk about sleep, there's obviously two variables, there's quality and there's quantity. The Matt Walker book is brilliant on the importance of quantity, eight hours is the quantity we need. and he explains brilliantly why we need that. I'm talking about things that affect the quality of the sleep. So eating sugar, eating the bowl of cereal before bed, it's gonna put us into that hypoglycemic, low blood sugar state, a couple of errors after we fall asleep. And that really affects the quality of our sleep. So that's a no-go, no-go. The second reason we shouldn't eat on the way into bed. So, you know, we're in, I'm talking 60 minutes, 60, 70 minutes before bed, is blood sugar inhibits the production. So blood sugar turns off the production of our sleep hormone melatonin. We need melatonin to get quality sleep without melatonin. Yeah, we can get a sleep, but the sleep is broken. It's the store, but if you have any of these sleep trackers on, we don't get the same regenerative quality. So if we think back to something that I'm always harping on about in this podcast, training gives us the possibility to get faster, or if we smash ourselves in a VO2 max session. That doesn't make us faster. that makes us weaker. It gives the possibility to get faster when we couple that with recovery and sleep is the absolute, it's the cornerstone of our recovery. It's the most important thing by a mile.
When you're eating sugar, going to bed, it's inhibiting the…
So when you're eating sugar, going to bed, it's inhibiting the production of melatonin, which is affecting the quality of our sleep, which has the knock on effect of not giving us that proper recovery and not getting the benefit from the training session we have done. So you want your melatonin as high as you can, going to bed, to enhance the quality of your And that leads me on to my third point on this. It's another one around melatonin, blue lights and screens inhibit the production of melatonin. So if you're looking at your phone, if you're looking at TV, if you're on the laptop, iPad, in the hours leading up to bed, that stops the production of melatonin. Now if you think about why this is true from sort of an ancestral standpoint for the entire history of humanity. the sun illuminated the sky all day. As the sun started creeping down and getting lower and lower and lower, that was our body's trigger to start going, okay, it's night time. The sun goes down at night and our body started ramping up production of melatonin as the sun went down. So the sun and your melatonin level were inversely correlated. One went up, one went down. Now, recent, recent phenomenon is blue light. When I say recent, you know, hundred years is blue light and it's getting worse obviously with phones and iPads. So now the sun starts going down our body goes woohoo it's time to ramp up melatonin. Right so we start ramping up melatonin, ramping up melatonin and then you flick on the Champions League on your HD 62 inch TV and your body goes oh shit I must have been wrong. If there's light maybe the sun isn't going down maybe it was going behind a cloud. Let's switch off the production of melatonin And so the next result of all this is we're going to bed in the evening after watching TV and having a snack We're absolutely Rowing the quality of our sleep and if we're a time-crunched athlete and we're someone looking to get the most out of our training the most bang for our book This is an absolute disaster because we're trying our best all day to juggle meatens family everything to get that 60 to 90 minutes session in and we're getting that 60 to 90 minutes session in But we're not getting the full benefit of the 60 to 90 minute session because our sleep quality is impaired folks, that was a slightly heavier Well, man boy's podcast, but I think it's a very important one So just to wrap up and summarize those three action points you need the first two are both the same action from you Don't eat before bed because it's gonna stick it into a high bug less aim x-8 and it's gonna inhibit the production of melatonin secondly totally blue light is going to inhibit the production of melatonin. So you know what I'm going to, I'll try and figure out, give me a few days and I will stick in check on roadman resources back in a few days and I'll stick a set of blue light blocking glasses in there. So how you can get around this is blue light blocking glasses in the evening. That's eye chardon me on as soon as it gets dark every night blue light blockers go on and also set an evening alarm for yourself. So So about 60-90 minutes before your bedtime and alarm goes off on your phone, just the same as it would when you're waking up in the morning. And the alarm means it's time to get off screens, turn off phones, you can even turn off lights in the apartment, start dimming them, start using things like candle light. And that just gets us back closer to the ancestral living ramps up melatonin production and helps you sleep much, much better. Because this has been the Roadman short from Bites podcast. I will stick the blue light blockers into Roadman resources and I'm gonna chat you tomorrow. Enjoy your day.