Sleep: Change the way you sleep with this 90 minute read

by Nick Littlehales

Once it’s dark, however, these are all undesirable qualities. If you’re using devices or have the lights blazing late into the night, then it’s going to cause problems. It’s going to lead to what Professor Chris Idzikowski calls ‘junk sleep’ – disrupted and diminished sleep as our lifestyles and gadgets inhibit the production of melatonin and push our body clocks later.

Use caffeine as a performance enhancer, instead of simply to get yourself to a position from which you can perform.

In fact, setting a constant wake time is one of the

most powerful tools at our disposal when looking to improve the quality of our recovery.

Using your wake time, you can now count backwards in ninety-minute cycles to establish when you should aim to be asleep. If you’re the average person, aiming to get around eight hours in at night, that would be the equivalent of five cycles per night (which equates to seven and a half hours). If you’ve chosen 7.30 a.m. as your wake time, then you should be aiming to be asleep by midnight, which means curling up and letting go fifteen minutes before – or however long it takes you to get off to sleep.

We try to avoid three consecutive nights of fewer than five cycles. Instead, we’d look to follow a night or two of this with the ideal routine. If we can get at

least four nights in a week of an ideal routine in our schedules then we’re doing OK.

What you do immediately before you go to bed has a direct consequence on the quality and duration of your sleep, while what you do after waking has significant consequences for the rest of your day (and the coming night).

Doing some simple, non-stimulating tasks around the home to better prepare you for the next day will take care of this and give your mind the space it needs. This might involve ironing and hanging up your clothes and tidying your environment, taking out the recycling and putting everything in its right place for the morning.

you are sleeping in hypoallergenic bedding – mattress, mattress cover, sheets, duvet, duvet cover, pillow and pillow case – it’s another marginal gain.

The bedding in your sleep kit also needs to be breathable so that you don’t experience any unwelcome changes in temperature. We need to be cool under the covers, and if it gets too stuffy and warm under there it will interfere with our sleep.

This empty room is no longer a bedroom, nor is it an extension of your living space. Starting here, it is your mental and physical recovery room.

you could tape the curtains closed or use Velcro fasteners to attach easily removable blackout material to the window at night. On the Tour de France we would tape black bin bags to the windows, which could easily be taken down in the morning.

warm to cool is the mantra.

This technology doesn’t have to be expensive – a basic model will do, provided it’s from a reputable brand such as Philips or Lumie.

Montmorency tart cherries. These aren’t the kind of cherries you’ll find

You should aim to eat your final meal of the day two cycles (three hours) before your targeted sleep time, and any last light snack ninety minutes before, at the beginning of your pre-sleep routine.

most world records in athletics and cycling are broken in the afternoon

and evening.

Montmorency tart cherries