We're back! Today we're talking about the importance of sleep and the role it plays in your training. Should it be considered a component of training? Today's lifestyles don't always allow for a lot of sleeping time, so what are best ways to get the most out of our sleep and how can we improve the quality of sleep we're getting in order to maximize recovery for training?

Coach Parry gives some practical tips on how to optimize your sleep habits, that go beyond just finding more time to sleep longer.

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How important is sleep for your training?

BRAD
Welcome on to this edition of RUN with Coach Parry. I'm Brad Brown and we've got the coach Lindsey Parry with us once again. Today we're going to be talking about one of my favourite subjects: sleep and the importance of sleep when it comes to training. Lindsey, how's it, good to have you on.

LINDSEY
Yeah, we haven't done this for too long. So I'm glad we're getting started again, and we'll make sure that they are nice and regular.

BRAD
Absolutely. Today's question is about the importance of sleep and the role it plays in training. How important is it? Some of us have have hectic lifestyles and we've got to train and if we get six hours of sleep we're lucky, and as a component of training is it its own component? And talk to me a little bit about sleep optimization. How can we get the best out of our sleep and improve our quality of sleep?

Sleep plays a pivotal role in recovery

LINDSEY
So this is a really fabulous question and I always talk about recovery being one of the non negotiable pillars of training and making sure that you get to the next workout able to do it without breaking down with injury and without getting sick. Sleep really plays a pivotal role in recovery. The two most important components for me of recovery are sleep and nutrition. Sleep and rest go together but, again, the most important component to that is sleep. Now, you've already touched on something quite important, and that is that in the modern lifestyle, sleep is actually quite hard to come by. The number of hours of sleep, but very importantly, the quality of sleep that we have is particularly poor.

A few small changes can go a long way

So I like to encourage people to make a few small changes, which will go a long way to impacting recovery. So for me to sit here and say that we should all get 10 hours of sleep a day, people already start to chuckle and they're probably turning off because what's the point of listening any further? So, for me, it's about saying, right, let's look at how long we do sleep for.

When we're training for a specific event, particularly in those kind of six to eight weeks of peak training that we do around 10 weeks before we go into the event, prioritize sleep and try to get 30 to 60 minutes more than we normally get. So that little bit more will make a big difference to our recovery.

Preparing your sleep environment

However, what will make even more of a difference is when we go to sleep, and how we prepare our sleep environment. So the earlier you go to bed, the better. Again, that's often quite a difficult thing to do and I'm not asking people to get into bed at eight o'clock at night, however, understand that the later you get to sleep after 10 o'clock, the more compromised your hormonal release becomes, and it's actually the release of hormones while you sleep that is what primes the body for that recovery while we are sleeping.

So after 10 o'clock, we start to eat into that hormonal release and it becomes more and more stunted. If we're climbing into bed regularly after 12 o'clock, then we are seriously compromising our body's ability to release growth hormone, testosterone, and therefore to enable us to recover much better.

How to improve the quality of sleep you're getting

The second part of that is then to say when we're sleeping, how can we ensure that while we're asleep, we have the best quality of sleep. That is by keeping what we call a hygienic sleeping environment. That doesn't mean you should be clean, although that does help us sleep better when you are clean, but that's more a term to say we need it to be dark.

So the darker the room, the better the quality of sleep will be. Cool is much better than hot, cold is better than hot too. But cool is really what we're aiming for. We sleep really well when it's cool.

Stay away from the tech!

We don't want flickering lights, flickering cell phones, beeping cell phones, keep the cell phone, red light that's on a TV in your room, keep that sort of thing out of your room. Then very importantly, in the run up to sleeping, try to limit the amount of time you spend on blue light. So blue light comes from things like TVs, laptops, cell phones and iPads. So in the 30 to 45 minutes before you go to bed, try to stay away from those things, read a book, but really just try and let your mind quiet down and get rid of that blue light.

If you do those three things, go to bed a bit earlier, nice hygienic sleeping environment and have a nice run up into your sleep, then you optimize the time you've got available to you. Those three things will help you improve your quality of sleep so that you can maximize your recovery after training.