Hey {{first name | reader}},
It’s Tuesday, which means your weekly fitness check-in. Welcome to Week #25. I'm not a good sleeper. Never have been.
I'm the kind of insomniac who can fall asleep but can't stay asleep. A friend of mine has the opposite problem. Recently we spent several days exchanging texts about all the sleep we weren't getting and all the ways we'd tried to fix it.
Texting about insomnia is the middle-aged person's version of bragging about an all-nighter.
Naturally, this sent me down a research rabbit hole to determine whether my long-standing strategy of "just power through it" is actually working.
The answer was not especially encouraging.
The view from Tank Hill Park, San Francisco
The science is pretty clear that most people need a minimum of seven hours of sleep a night. There are outliers who are genetically predisposed to sleeping a lot less. This is such a small percentage of the population— estimates are 1-3%— that most of us who think that we are doing fine on 4 to 6 hours of sleep are slowly killing ourselves. So while I seldom manage seven hours it’s always my goal.
I know that my lack of sleep is impeding my fitness goals.1 A lot of what helps our fitness happens while we sleep. Sleep is essential for muscle repair and growth. While we sleep, the body's pituitary gland releases human growth hormone (HGH)— a critical component of muscle repair and recovery. Sleep regulates our hormones, reducing the stress hormone cortisol, and releases hormones that help us regulate our appetites. When we don’t get enough sleep we increase our risk for cardiovascular disease, obesity and weaken our immune systems. One study found that sleeping less than six hours a night for two weeks produced cognitive impairment similar to staying awake for 48 hours straight— and they didn’t even realize it.
Sleep also helps us acquire new skills. I remember when I was a kid, and I’d be learning something difficult in school. I’d work on it, and my grandmother would tell me to review whatever the lesson was and put it under my pillow and go to sleep. Turns out there was something to that after all. When we sleep we process what we’ve learned in the day time. This is true for both cognitive tasks and our muscle memory.
That makes this edition of the newsletter more of a do what I say, kind of newsletter than a do what I do. And I've tried. Here are some of the remedies that I’ve tried to increase my sleep (that mostly didn’t work):
Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR): tense and relax each muscle group from your toes to your head.
Breathing exercises: 4-7-8 breathing, box breathing, counting breaths.
Cognitive shuffling: generating unrelated words from each letter of a chosen word.
Backward counting by sevens (preferably in Portuguese, French, or Spanish).
The Alphabet Game. Pick a category, go through the alphabet.
Building elaborate imaginary worlds, usually involving generation ships.
Melatonin, valerian, and tryptophan.
Most worked once or twice. None worked consistently.
What has worked for me are prescription drugs, and though my primary care physician tells me that they are not habit forming, I’m not convinced. What also works for me is really hard exhausting workouts or multiple work outs during the day.
📖 ASK ME ANYTHING
Question: How much sleep do I need to get each night if I’m training regularly?
Answer: Short answer: as much as you can get.
Most adults need seven to eight hours, though some need more and some need less. What the research is clear about is that consistently sleeping less than six hours undermines recovery, disrupts hormones, elevates cortisol, and makes it harder to adapt to training.
Sleep isn't a luxury. It's part of the program.
💡 MYTH BUSTING
Myth: Sleep isn't an important part of fitness — recovery happens at rest, not just during sleep.
Reality: Sleep isn't just rest — it's the primary recovery mechanism. During deep sleep, there's a surge in growth hormone, testosterone, and IGF-1 — the hormones crucial for tissue repair, protein synthesis, and muscle growth. Even a single night without adequate sleep can reduce testosterone levels by nearly one quarter. Growth hormone released during sleep is critical not only for childhood growth but for adult metabolism — helping build muscle, strengthen bone, and reduce fat. You can do everything right in the gym and still undermine it by sleeping five hours a night. The gym provides the stimulus. Sleep is where the adaptation actually happens.2
🍽️ RADISH FUEL BOX:
Most sleep advice says not to eat right before bed. I ignore this advice more often than I'd like.
On the nights I do it properly, dinner is usually baked salmon, kale, and rice. It's light, high-protein, and doesn't leave me trying to digest a cheeseburger while counting backward from 1,000 in Portuguese.3
📚 WORTH YOUR TIME
UC Berkeley researchers recently mapped the brain circuits that control growth hormone release during sleep — uncovering a feedback system where sleep fuels hormone release, and the hormone in turn regulates wakefulness. It's recent, it's well-reported, and it explains why your gym results are partly determined by what happens after you leave the gym.
For the less scientifically inclined: the short version is that your body is doing serious construction work while you sleep, and cutting the shift short has consequences.
💪 TRY THIS WEEK
Audit Your Sleep This Week Before buying a supplement, downloading a meditation app, or ordering blackout curtains, spend five nights tracking what actually happens.
What time did you get into bed?
What time did you fall asleep?
What time did you wake up?
Most of us don't have a sleep problem. We have a measurement problem.
Start there.4
Stay strong,
{{first name | reader}}
P.S. The science says seven hours. I'm working on it.
1 I’m an early riser, which helps me get into the gym by 5:30. I’m usually up around 4, well before my 4:45 AM alarm. I should be asleep by 9. And I often make it to bed by 9, but such an early bedtime kills any attempt at a truly adult social life so often it’s closer to 11. And I’m still up at 4. You might think that getting up at 4 AM, I get a lot done. I don’t. I like to loaf in the morning. Make coffee. Read the news. Scroll Instagram. The alarm is really to tell me to stop dithering and get it together to get to the gym when it opens.
2 I know this. I am telling you this while running on five hours. We contain multitudes.
3 The Portuguese is not optional. It turns out doing arithmetic in a second language is exhausting enough to be genuinely useful.
4 I have tried changing five things at once. It did not work. I don't know why. Actually I do know why.