11 Ways to Sleep Smarter to Improve Your Ride

Want to fall asleep faster, sleep easier, and get the most health benefits from your slumber? Here's how.

BYSHAWN STEVENSON

 

This information is excerpted from the new book Sleep Smarter: 21 Essential Strategies to Sleep Your Way to a Better Body, Better Health, and Bigger Success. In it, you'll find a fun and entertaining look at how sleep impacts your body, brain, and performance, plus the real world tools to help you recharge your life by revolutionizing your sleep.

Cycling and sleep go together like peanut butter and jelly. This may come as a surprise, but you actually don’t get in shape while you’re exercising. You’re literally tearing down your body while working out, creating thousands of tiny micro-tears in your muscle fibers. Then once you’re asleep, the transformation starts. Your body releases large amounts of beneficial hormones and elicits repair programs to build you up better than before. You expose yourself to a significant healthy stressor with a workout, but you only get the full reward if you properly rest and recover

That’s why it’s important that you get quality sleep so that you get the most gains from exercise. Here are 10 ways to sleep your way to a better ride:

Know the value of sleep
Many people are negligent about getting enough sleep because they don’t truly understand the benefits they’re getting from it. High quality sleep fortifies your immune system, balances your hormones, boosts your metabolism, increases physical energy, and improves the function of your brain.

Get more sunlight during the day
Light signals to your hypothalamus and corresponding organs and glands to be alert and “wake up.” That triggers your body to produce optimal levels of daytime hormones and neurotransmitters to regulate your biological clock. The body clock is most responsive to sunlight in the early morning, between 6 am and 8:30 am. 

Avoid screens before bedtime
Computers, iPads, televisions, and smartphones kick out a sleep-sucking blue spectrum of light that can give you major rest problems. The artificial blue light emitted by electronic screens triggers your body to produce more daytime hormones (like cortisol) and disorients your body’s natural preparation for sleep. Instead of using your devices before bedtime, try reading a book or writing in a journal.

Have a caffeine curfew
Caffeine is a powerful nervous system stimulant. If your nervous system is lit up like a Christmas tree, you can forget about getting high-quality sleep. Try setting an unbreakable caffeine curfew to make sure your body has time to remove the majority of it from your system. For most people, it’s generally going to be before 2 pm—but you can make it earlier, if you’re sensitive.

Be cool
Something called “thermoregulation” heavily influences your body’s sleep cycles. Studies have found that the optimal room temperature for sleep is really quite cool, around 60 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything too far above or below this range will likely cause some difficulty sleeping. If you have trouble falling asleep, try taking a warm bath an hour and a half to two hours before hitting the sack. This may seem counterintuitive, but the minor increase in core temperature from the bath will fall accordingly and level out a little cooler around the time you turn in for the night.

Get to bed at the right time
You can get amplified benefits of shut-eye by sleeping at the right hours.  It’s been shown that human beings get the most beneficial hormonal secretions and recovery by sleeping during the hours of 10 pm and 2 am. If you’re not feeling well rested when you wake up despite eight hours of sleep, try sleeping during those critical hours.

Consume more good sleep nutrients
The foods that you eat can dramatically impact the quality of rest that you get; so if you want to change your sleep, mix up your diet. Some of the things clinically proven to damage or disorient your gut microbiome include: agricultural chemicals, processed foods, too many antibiotics, chemical food additives, and chlorinated water. Some of the nutrients that can improve your sleep include:  selenium, vitamin C, tryptophan, potassium, calcium, vitamin D, omega 3s, melatonin, vitamin B6, probiotics, and prebiotics.

Create a sleep sanctuary

If getting rejuvenating sleep is a high priority for you, then you need to take some essential actions to treat it as such. The bedroom should be for two things, primarily. (One of them is sleep.) Humans are creatures of habit and habitat. Our brains are always looking for patterns so that they can automate behavior based on our environment. If you sleep in your bedroom—and don’t work or watch television there—your brain will be expecting sleep when you enter.

Have a big “o”
This is the other primary thing that the bedroom should be used for (as if you didn’t know). Having an orgasm can be like a full-on sedative for most people because your body releases a cocktail of chemicals, including oxytocin, serotonin, norepinephrine, vasopressin, and the pituitary hormone prolactin. It can also boost your immune system, fight depression, and help you live longer. So be responsible, have fun, and enjoy the benefits that the big “o” can have in your life.

Get it blacked out
It’s a well-established fact that we sleep better in a dark environment, yet so many people aren’t taking full advantage of this. Having light sources of any type in your bedroom can disrupt your sleep pattern. In fact, your skin actually has receptors that can pick up light. Block light from the outside and blue light from electronics inside your bedroom as well. Use blackout curtains if necessary—this way you can prevent triggering a suppression of melatonin from indoor or outdoor light.

Train hard (but smart)
It’s not just when you ride, but how you recover when the exercise is done. There are a few principles to optimize your sleep (and your results from exercise). First, time it right: Morning workouts are ideal if you want to get the best sleep at night. This may be counterintuitive for people who believe you can fall asleep faster after going through a tough workout, but riding in the evening significantly raises your core body temperature, and it can take four to six hours for it to come down again. This can prevent you from getting the best sleep possible. But there's no need to be worried if you choose to work out later in the day. It’s been found that when your core temperature comes down after exercise, it actually goes a little bit lower than it normally would. If you had to pick a time, morning is the best when it comes to sleep, early evening can provide some benefits, and smack-dab in the afternoon shows little to no benefit at all as far as blatant sleep benefits are concerned.

In addition, to get the best hormonal response, you need to lift heavy weights. This will trigger your body to secrete more anabolic hormones that will enable you to feel better, look better, and sleep better. Your genes expect you to life heavy things, and when you do that your body changes accordingly—including dropping body fat, improving health biomarkers, and most importantly, getting the sleep you require. Make sure you’re lifting weights at least two days per week.