Seven and a half hours, the same wake time seven days a week, a cold dark room and a last coffee at noon. Sleep is the training session most men skip.
Professional athletes have sleep coaches, and not because they are delicate. Every adaptation a body makes, to a barbell, to a long run, to a hard week at work, is made during sleep. A man who trains hard and sleeps six hours is spending his effort and throwing away the return. The good news is that sleep responds to habit faster than any other part of fitness, and the habits are simple.
The wake time is the anchor
Fix the time you get up, seven days a week, and keep it within thirty minutes on weekends. Bedtime follows; within two weeks your body will make you tired at the right hour. Sleeping in on Sunday feels like recovery and is actually a small dose of jet lag that costs you Monday and Tuesday. If you need more sleep, go to bed earlier; do not move the morning.
Light
Twenty minutes of daylight within an hour of waking, outdoors, no sunglasses: it sets the clock for the whole day and is the single most effective sleep intervention that costs nothing. In the evening, the reverse: lamps rather than ceiling lights after nine, screens dimmed or away by ten, a bedroom that is genuinely dark. Blackout curtains or a good mask. If you can see your hand, it is not dark enough.
Everything you do in the gym, the kitchen and the office is either consolidated or wasted between eleven and seven. Sleep is not rest from training. It is where training happens.
Caffeine and alcohol
Caffeine has a half-life of five to six hours; a coffee at four in the afternoon is a quarter of a coffee still in your system at midnight. Last coffee at noon, or two at the latest. Alcohol makes you fall asleep faster and sleep worse: it suppresses the deep sleep of the first half of the night and fragments the second. Two drinks with dinner cost a measurable amount of recovery; a bottle of wine costs the night. This is not moral; it is a trade you should make knowingly.
The room
Cool, around 18 °C. Dark. Quiet, or with a fan or white noise if it is not. A good mattress, replaced every ten years, and linen you like. The phone charging in another room, with an alarm clock on the bedside table instead. The bed for sleep and one other thing; not for work, not for television. Athletes treat the bedroom as equipment. So should you.
When you cannot sleep
If you are awake for more than twenty minutes, get up, go to a dim room, read something dull, and return when sleepy. Lying in bed awake teaches the brain that bed is where worrying happens. Slow breathing, four seconds in and eight out for a few minutes, lowers the heart rate enough to drift off. If it happens three nights a week for a month, see a doctor and ask about cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, which works better than any pill and lasts.
Try the tool
Training WeekA week of training that fits around a lifeGrooming RoutineMorning and evening, in the minutes you haveQuestions we get asked
How much sleep do I actually need?
Between seven and nine hours; seven and a half is the median. If you need an alarm to wake and coffee to function, you are not getting enough, whatever you tell yourself.
Do sleep trackers help?
For spotting patterns, a little. For the numbers themselves, not much; consumer devices guess sleep stages. Track how you feel at eleven in the morning instead.
What about naps?
Twenty minutes before three in the afternoon, if you can. Longer or later and you borrow from the night.
