Episode 203 - Why Sleep Is Your #1 Recovery Tool with Dr Michael Grandner

Why Sleep Is Your #1 Recovery Tool with Dr Michael Grandner

Think you're nailing your recovery with protein and foam rollers? Think again.

In this week’s episode, I chat with world-renowned sleep expert Dr Michael Grandner about why sleep is the most powerful (and most overlooked) recovery tool for triathletes. We unpack what happens in your body when sleep is cut short, how much you really need, and what to do if your sleep isn’t great — even when life is busy and training is full tilt. Plus, Dr Grandner shares his top strategies to improve sleep quality tonight, no supplements required.

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It’s for you if you’re a triathlete and you feel like you’ve got your training under control and you’re ready to layer in your nutrition. It's your warmup on the path to becoming a SUPERCHARGED triathlete – woohoo!

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Episode Transcription

Episode 203: Are You a Burnt-Out Triathlete? Answer These 3 Questions

Welcome to the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast. The show designed to serve you up evidence-based sports nutrition advice from the experts. Hi, I'm your host Taryn, Accredited Practicing Dietitian, Advanced Sports Dietitian and founder of Dietitian Approved. Listen as I break down the latest evidence to give you practical, easy-to-digest strategies to train hard, recover faster and perform at your best. You have so much potential, and I want to help you unlock that with the power of nutrition. Let's get into it.

Taryn Richardson (00:00)

Today we're diving into one of maybe the most underrated tools in endurance sport and that is sleep.

A lot about training, fueling, nutrition and recovery here on the podcast. But if you're not getting your sleep right, then you are absolutely leaving performance on the table.

To help me unpack this, I'm joined by Dr. Michael Grandner. Michael is the director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at the University of Arizona, where his work looks at how sleep impacts health, performance and behaviour. He's published so extensively in this space and has worked with athletes across all levels to help them better understand the role of sleep in recovery and performance.

So in this episode, we're gonna talk a little bit about disrupted sleep and how that can affect us as endurance athletes. Maybe clear up some of the myths around sleep trackers and how to use them to your advantage and talk through some practical strategies so that you can improve your sleep quality once and for all, especially under heavy training loads that we have when we're training for three sports.

We'll also touch on what the research says about sleep banking and napping and getting yourself race ready on race day, despite maybe having the worst sleep of your life.

So Michael, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited to dive into this topic with you.

Michael Grandner (01:22)

Thanks for having me. This is a fun topic to talk about.

Taryn Richardson (01:25)

Yeah, let's get nerdy. Before we get too nerdy though, can you just start by sharing how you became interested in sleep science and the role it does play in performance for athletes?

Michael Grandner (01:37)

So my interest in sleep, I was interested in sleep for a long time because it's cool and fun to study. And I used to be just really interested in learning all about it. I didn't realise it was sort of a career path. It was just something fun to learn about until I was in college. I learned that we had a sleep lab on campus and that they were, you know, the person running the lab was teaching an undergraduate course in sleep and dreams and I wanted to take it.

And I took it and I'm like, wow, this is where I need to be. This is like a thing that could be. Well, it's like learning, just, he taught the story of the field, like from a scientific perspective, from a very human perspective about, know, there's this thing that's universal, like sleep is universal. It connects everybody. But it's this thing that,

Taryn Richardson (02:12)

Sleeping.

Michael Grandner (02:32)

we all have a relationship with, but sometimes that relationship can be kind of one-sided. But there is so much to learn about it. I just found it inherently interesting. so, volunteered to work in the lab, then, got a PhD in psychology, working at a place that had a sleep at circadian lab and just sort of went from there. The athlete thing came later.  So my research became very much about translating sleep to real world health and wellbeing.

And I sort of stumbled. So like the athletics piece is a small part of the bigger picture of what I do, but I sort of stumbled into it because if you're interested in translating the science of sleep and circadian rhythms into a real world situation with problems, constraints, where the rules can't always apply, where you have to get creative in terms of problem solving, work with athletes.

And I found that working with athletics groups, not only was it someplace that I could do a lot of good, because a lot of athletes are struggling with sleep issues, but I found that it could be very helpful because sleep plays roles in all of the things that athletes actually care about. And so I felt like it someplace that I could do some good. So I've been working in athletic spaces ever since with a bunch of different organizations and individuals and groups.

Taryn Richardson (03:29)

Mm.

There you go, natural progression. I feel like that was my career path into triathlon as well. It just kind of happened, but it's the right, I'm in the right place at the right time, I feel.

Michael Grandner (04:06)

Yeah, right.

Exactly. That's how you know it's that's how it's that's the way it's supposed to be where, the opportunity is in front of you and it feels right. And and it's sort of, you know, that's it was meant to be.

Taryn Richardson (04:21)

So let's get a little bit nerdy. Can you set us up with what actually happens in the body when you don't get enough sleep? Particularly think about endurance athletes. What are some of the consequences that they face when sleep is disrupted, the quality is poor and the effect of that on training and racing?

Michael Grandner (04:31)

Yeah.

That's a great question and I'm first going to answer it by not answering it by talking about what is it that sleep is doing and why is it that it's important for training so that because really the answer is you you're not getting that right ⁓ and so what is sleep doing so you know evolution figured out a long time ago.

Taryn Richardson (04:47)

Excellent.

Michael Grandner (05:08)

That it's much easier to perform maintenance on your car while you're not still driving it. And because of that, there's very little that's physically impossible to occur during the day that could occur during sleep. It's just not efficient that way. I mean, we have all of these systems that have been built a long evolutionary history to promote sleep.

A lot of people don't realise most of the advances in human genetics of sleep and circadian rhythms starts in fruit flies actually, that they're actually the genetic model for a lot of the sleep and circadian patterns. And because their sleep is shockingly similar to ours. Like they get tired when they stay up too late, you know, can sleep deprive them or you can get them well rested. When they're having trouble sleeping, you can manipulate their environment to get sleeping better. There's all kinds of like the machinery underlying this. Obviously it's much simpler in those much smaller organisms but shockingly similar. So are things that go way way back and so it's a fundamental part of our physiology and it touches all these different systems because of it. for and these systems all work together. So for example when you're not engaging with the environment your breathing can slow down.

And your breathing can slow down and your heart can slow down because you're not feeding your muscles while you're sleeping to move because they demand a lot of oxygen. So maybe you don't need as much oxygen. Part of it is rest, part of it is an opportunity for recovery. Blood pressure goes down because of that. But since blood pressure is going down, if you're going to do road work, you want to do the work on the roads when there's less traffic. So we systematically reduce the traffic on the road and all the blood vessels at night, which then all the maintenance vehicles get to come out and do the sort of work that is just less efficient to do when the roads are full. And so this is where you have a lot of recovery and repair functions aggregating all over sleep because it's just much more efficient to do it that way. And it's not just muscles, it's not just circulatory system, it's metabolism, it's immune system, it's brain, it's all of these systems have just, know, sleep has been a constant. It's been a reliable thing in our history and we're just built around it. But we're also flexible in that it's not about that sleep has to be perfect all the time. doesn't. Evolution also figured out that if you're, you know, running for your survival and it happens to be your bedtime, you might not want to just lay down and go to sleep. You might want to like seek safety first. And so we have all of these systems in place to protect us where we need sleep, but we can hold off on it for a little bit safely. And if we sleep terribly for a night or two, that's fine. If you're sleeping generally well, it's sort of like if your appetite is dysregulated for a day or two, nothing bad really happens. just, you the system corrects itself. The problem is when it's more continuous. So, losing a night of sleep can do stuff in the body acutely, but nothing really permanent doesn't really cause any permanent damage. It's more of the just like with diet like if you if you have a poor diet for a day, you know You're not gonna develop diabetes. You'll just you know, it's just you'll have that diet for a day and you go back to normal and everything's fine. But it's this continuous strain where you're preventing those functions from happening.

And at first it's like, okay, it's a little inefficient, but over time, all of those little functions through the body are just slightly less efficient. So for athletes, especially endurance athletes who are not getting the sleep that they need, you know, they're not able to recover in the way. So when you're engaging in that sort of training, or in sport where you're going a lot, you're pushing your body to the limits or past the limits of what most people are able to do. The way you're able to train and grow is that you put your body under that strain and that stress so it can learn how to adapt to that and then build back better, right? That's what it's supposed to do.

Taryn Richardson (09:33)

Mm.

Michael Grandner (09:33)

But if you're training and you're working and you're doing all of that activity and breaking yourself down, but not sleeping, you're not building yourself back better. Where do you think that recovery is happening? I mean, training without recovery is just injuring yourself on purpose. And you don't want to be doing that, especially long-term. So what are all the things it does? It impairs your ability of your immune system to not only deal with the exposures, but also the healing that's going on in the recovery process, in terms of muscles being able to rebuild and repair, in terms of your heart being able to reduce, to dip in blood pressure and to regenerate, in terms of the brain, to manage experiences in the day, whether it's emotional regulation, cognitive dysregulation, the ability to take our experiences from the day, turn it into memory.

Process that memory through the filters of emotion and integration with our larger self and who we are and what we know and then turn that into muscle memory turn that into experience that sleep is a major part of that process and so like I said a little bit of sleep loss here and there probably never killed anybody. It's just it's that chronic it sleep loss. It's that continually preventing yourself from doing the maintenance that you were built to want to do. And that's why you have these negative effects.

Taryn Richardson (11:08)

So as a sleep expert, how many hours of sleep a night do we need to do all those things?

Michael Grandner (11:14)

It's a great question. I would say that if you look at the data, the easy answer for adults is seven to eight hours. For athletes, it might end a little bit on the higher end than the regular population only because those recovery functions of sleep are gonna be extra critical. You might need a little bit more. I mean, just like when you're sick, need to sleep a little bit more because of those recovery functions. So like if you're training really hard, maybe you do need to sleep a little bit more. The data on that are super clear. But what is shown is that when you take, and most elite athletes are on the younger side anyway, the younger you are, the more sleep you need. Where, you know, if you're 19, 20, seven hours is probably the target, but eight hours might be a better target. If you're 18, if you're an late adolescent, you know, you're thinking more nine, 10 hours. 

Taryn Richardson (11:42)

Mm. 

Michael Grandner (12:07)

probably optimal. I mean, there's all kinds of data that shows when you take not even sleep deprived younger athletes in college, for example, and you extend their sleep even beyond the recommendations, you know, maybe they already were getting seven hours, you push them to eight or nine, maybe even beyond that, often, they will perform better. They'll be faster, they'll be stronger, they will win more. They'll be cognitively and emotionally a little more able to handle everything that's going on. I don't know what the minimum is. It's probably not any lower than seven. Might be closer to eight. And for optimal, might even be a little bit higher, especially for people of younger size. 

Taryn Richardson (12:51)

I've definitely seen that in practice working with the elite Australian triathlon team, the developing athletes in particular, they regularly slept for 10 to 12 hours a night and they just need it. Like when you're training four or five times a day, you need it. It means going to bed early and getting up early, but your body just needs it. 

Michael Grandner (13:00)

Yeah, yeah, they do. Yeah, it does. so in our society, we tend to see sleep as an unproductive use of time, but we need to stop thinking about it that way. Sleep is an extremely productive use of time. You don't want to oversleep, but it's not unproductive. It's actually critically important. There's the Canadians have done really well with this where

Taryn Richardson (13:17)

Yes. 

Michael Grandner (13:33)

They have, ⁓ in Canada, have, their recommendations are about 24 hour activity cycle. In terms of, where sleep isn't sedentary activity, sleep is part of healthy activity within a certain range. It has a time, it has a place. And it's not lack of activity, it's actually part of healthy activity is getting good sleep.

Taryn Richardson (13:57)

So how come we haven't evolved to need less sleep over time? Because we're getting busier, work requires more, we seem to fit more into our 24 hours. sleep is kind of sexy at the moment and getting as much sleep as you can and good quality sleep is definitely, you know, trendy. But why haven't we evolved to need less and less? 

Michael Grandner (14:20)

Well, the short answer is we're still remember humans have been around for probably a couple hundred thousand years. We're still running the same code like this is the same code like, we are all humans in the wild the same we are we are genetically essentially the same as the humans in the wild. 

Agriculture is 10,000 years old. Civilization is much younger than that. Humans, that is half of a percent of human history. We even had this. So humans, our code goes back, and that's just the code that we inherited from evolution that goes back even further. know, when life is a sprint, I mean, I guess this is a good metaphor for endurance athletes. When life is a sprint, it's short.

Taryn Richardson (15:05)

you

Michael Grandner (15:07)

And when life is a marathon, it's a little bit longer. And if life is going to be a marathon, you can't race through it. There's ebbs and flows. There is no such thing as, we're not machines that just run all the time on full power until we burn out. 

If you look at nature, if you look at the world, cycles are part of how things function. There's day and there's night. There's up and there's down cycles. The tides go in cycles. There's lots of cycles to life. 

As much as it's human nature to try and break free of any boundaries we have, see whatever is beyond, you know, try and take one and more step in this direction, as much as it's human nature to strive for that, we still can't fly, you know, we still need our feet on the ground. We're still part of this cycle. Why don't we need sleep? 

Because sleep is still useful. As much as we may or may not want it to be, it still makes sense and it is still extremely, it's a much more efficient way to enhance survival than just being awake all the time apparently. 

Taryn Richardson (16:20)

So play hard, train hard, and then sleep hard. 

Michael Grandner (16:23)

Yeah, yeah, all for it. 

Taryn Richardson (16:27)

So with this, like I just feel like it's trendy at the moment to sleep and get good quality sleep. And with that has come the emergence of sleep tracking devices. So things like the Whoop band, Aura rings, like I wear ultra human ring at the moment, Garmin. Any of those devices good and do you recommend one in particular? Like there is data on, I know Whoop and Aura, but is there anything that you would suggest athletes do to track sleep to get 

Michael Grandner (16:37)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so the thing about these tracking devices is the first wrist-based tracking device for measuring sleep that data was published in 1972. They had a metal ball in a tube and as it wiggled it changed the voltage. It was a completely analog device. Within 10 years it was

Taryn Richardson (16:57)

make sure that they're getting the right amount and quality.

Cool.

Michael Grandner (17:22)

wiggly thing on a wire and they use the first piece of electric crystals. This stuff has been around for a long time The the idea of using movement to estimate sleep wake with over 90 % accuracy minute to minute relative to brainwave activity This is old technology. We've been using this in sleep research since long before I was in sleep research and So when I saw around, you know in around 2010 ish where Fitbit was the first to do this, to basically say, these devices that you guys have been using and research for decades, we can make them smaller and cheaper and give them to everyone because they're cool. And we can put an app on it and give people feedback. And I thought it's a cool idea. Like, well, anyone actually care? Will anyone actually want this? People do. The other thing, the fact that these things exist, they're not new.

Taryn Richardson (18:10)

Translates of Gadgets.

Michael Grandner (18:18)

They're not actually new. The idea that people are getting them in stores and stuff, that's kind of new. But this technology is much, we've been using this in research for ages. It's actually quite good and useful. The other thing that happened around the same time is this concept of sleep health, where there was a group of us who were all coming up around the same time, who looked, like as researchers, we were really interested in this intersection of sleep and public health. What might be hard to understand for people who sort of take this for granted is when I was writing my first grants to try and get funding to study this concept that how much a real world person is sleeping can impact their health and function that isn't part of sleep disorders, but just part of a domain of health. 

That was unfundable. Nobody would support that idea. The sleep disorders people were saying it's not a disorder. The public health people were saying this isn't diet and exercise. People were saying what do we need sleep for anyway? I sleep, you know, every time I would write a grant there would be one reviewer that says, what about people who sleep like five, five and a half hours and they feel just fine. Therefore sleep can't be that important. Like, it's like, I'm not talking about you, but, right. 

Taryn Richardson (19:33)

There's always one. There's always one. 

Michael Grandner (19:35)

And for years, it was to the point where my chair at the time, as I was sort of up and coming trying to build a career studying sleep, this is what I wanted to do. And he's like, don't even forget this as a field. This might not even be a fundable idea of sleep health. But there was a group of us who believed in it, who said, no, truth is on our side. The data is on our side. We just need to publish the crap out of all the data we could find. And 

Taryn Richardson (19:51)

Well. 

Michael Grandner (20:02)

get people talking about this and they'll realise that there's something legit here. And so this is also why there's still a lot of unanswered questions because 10 years ago, we weren't even allowed to ask these questions. Now we're just starting to get to the point where we have enough data to start knowing which are even the right questions to even ask. So in that context, I think it's awesome that these devices are out. 

Most of them are probably fine in terms of what they measure. And I give you this context because what the devices do, I recommend them for all the time. But I don't recommend them for all the things that they don't do. So what do they do? They measure movement. And now a lot of them also have heart rate. And the heart rate data are also good. What these devices generally do best is if you look at a night, minute by minute, were you probably awake or asleep in any given time during that period of time? Some of them aren't great at knowing what window to look at, which is why time to fall asleep in a lot of these devices is sometimes not good because it didn't know to start looking when you started trying. In the lab, we actually manually score it. 

And a lot of the apps, you might be able to find that they've usually worked in a way where you can set the window manually on purpose, mostly because researchers demanded it because otherwise we can't trust the data because we need to know when to start looking. But they can tell you whether or not you were asleep with about, my guess is about 90-ish percent accuracy relative to brainwave activity. And I keep saying that because sleep, we don't have a direct measure of it. There is no gold standard perfect measure of sleep. There's a gold standard which is looking at in the brain are you awake or asleep, but we're only looking at brain wave activity which is an imperfect measure of sleep. Sleep is very deep in the brain. We don't measure that in humans. Most humans don't like you slicing up their brains to get some measurements. So we take the best we can get. And if I asked you how much sleep you got and you said seven hours. 

You would meet the guidelines because all the guidelines are based on self-reported sleep and how much sleep you feel like you get because that was what it's in the large surveys and that's what predicts the outcomes like blood pressure, diabetes, obesity is how much sleep do you get if I ask you a question? But if I hooked you up to an EEG and measured it that way, if you said seven, the EEG will probably say something more like six, maybe even a little less than six because it's going to pick up lots of little awakenings during the night that you don't even remember. 

That aren't really relevant to lot of the outcomes we're talking about most of the time. But the number will be different. Which is correct? They're both correct. One, it might be more biologically correct, but the other one is actually what's predicting the outcomes that we care about anyway. That's the experience of it. So it's sort of like MRI versus pain ratings. Like if someone's in pain, you have to ask them. 

Taryn Richardson (22:56)

Mm. 

Michael Grandner (23:05)

You can do an MRI, you may or may not see anything. It might help your understanding, but it also might not. It's a different question. The wearables are somewhere in the middle. It'll pick up a lot of awakenings that you don't remember. And if you have a wearable device and you see on the app that you have lots of these little awakenings, it means it's probably telling you the truth. If you have a wearable device and you look at the app and it doesn't show you lots of these little awakenings across the night, it's either hiding the truth from you because it doesn't think you can handle it and thinks you're going to freak out if you see it, or it's a crappy device and it's missing them. That's actually the weak point in most of these devices is they tend to miss some of those awakenings. Now, how much do they matter? It's an open question. We're trying to understand this. But from an accuracy standpoint, that's usually the biggest difference. 

Is that the question, so what are you gonna do with that information? So what about all the other stuff it does? The heart rate data is also probably good because that's a totally different measurement approach. The sleep staging data, they're ballpark. Sleep stages are brainwave activity patterns. So the fact that you can estimate them with 60 to 75%, maybe a little higher accuracy depending on the person and the night, based off of wrist-based data is a miracle. 

But it's still limited. It's sort of like you're playing one game of telephone and you have a second game of telephone going in an opposite direction. One's going to the brain, one's going to the periphery. And you're using the result of one game of telephone, not to guess what the message is, but to guess what the other game of telephone came up with. That's using the wrist to look at sleep stages. You can get pretty good with it as a ballpark, 

Taryn Richardson (24:29)

Hmm. 

Michael Grandner (24:54)

and if you looked at an actual tracing with the tracing from one of the good wearables, if you looked at them side by side, you can tell it's the same person on the same night. But minute to minute, it's not going to agree 100%. It might agree 70 % or 75 % or 80%. But the pattern is generally the same. So don't over-scribe. And also, there are algorithms. So when people say I'm not getting enough deep sleep or whatever, no, it just means the algorithm isn't picking it up. Maybe you are getting it. Maybe you're not. I don't know.

The question is, does it matter? For most people, actually, the answer is no. But that's a different conversation. So the sleep staging data is not nothing, but it's also not super reliable. And it probably never will be. I could be wrong. They could make the technology better. But my guess is there's a ceiling effect in terms of how good that game of telephone is going to be. 

Taryn Richardson (25:45)

How much of the deep sleep and the REM cycle sleep do we need in a night to do good job of recovery?

Michael Grandner (25:52)

So the real answer is nobody knows. And the reason why nobody knows is because studying sleep stages outside of a laboratory is extremely new things that technology didn't exist until fairly recently. So 99 % of everything we know about sleep stages mostly comes from mostly young, healthy people studied in a sleep lab on a campus somewhere in a medical center.

Taryn Richardson (25:55)

Good answer.

Michael Grandner (26:20)

Or sleep apnea patients or sleep disorders patients getting screened in the sleep center looking for sleep disorders. That's not the question. And that's where almost all the data comes from. So now that we're starting to get data on sleep stages out in the real world, my guess is over the next bunch of years, we're gonna start having more insights of what to actually do with that information. To be totally honest, if someone comes in and says, here's my sleep stages data, even if it was captured from an EEG device in my home. I don't know that the home-based recordings of an EEG are even generalizable to a lab recording. Because when people go into the lab, they sleep differently. They're in a different environment. They're on an unfamiliar bed. All these sorts of things change your sleep stages. So everything we know about sleep stages is kind of biased and fundamentally problematic at best. And so...

Taryn Richardson (27:02)

Mm-hmm. Mm. 

Mm. 

Michael Grandner (27:16)

It's not wrong or bad, it's just, you know, we're limited. You we're limited by our technology. And as the technology gets better, we'll learn more. So if someone says, is this deep sleep enough for me to recover? I would say, I don't know how much deep sleep you need to recover. But the question I will ask instead is, is there anything preventing your body from getting the deep sleep at once? Is there anything standing in its way? Well, yes. So that's the thing.

Taryn Richardson (27:42)

children. 

Michael Grandner (27:46)

Where my take on this is your body will take what it wants if you let it have it. And when people aren't getting enough, say deep sleep or REM sleep, REM sleep's a little different. There's two main causes of people not getting REM sleep. One is medications, and there's some medications that dramatically cut out REM sleep, and it's actually not clear whether it actually causes any problems because of it. Like most antidepressants will knock out at least half of your REM sleep. 

And it doesn't seem to cause any problems, which is kind of weird and it's a different question. But if you want to look, if you want to extend your natural REM sleep, the only way to do that is sleep a little longer because only really after about six hours do you get most of your REM sleep. Most of your REM sleep is after that time. So if you're waking up at five and a half, six hours, you're cutting off most of your REM sleep. The deep sleep happens in the first few hours mostly. If your tracker is showing deep sleep, after five hours, it's wrong. It's probably wrong. It's almost definitely wrong. But again, the algorithms are imperfect. But your body will take it early in the night. So even people who are quite sleep deprived, they don't have any deprivation of their deep sleep. It takes a lot to cut it. You have to be sleeping like four hours to be able to really be cutting into that too much, it seems like. So the question isn't, am I not getting enough? The question is, if I'm not getting enough, is there any reason why that might be? So then I would look to see, is there anything in the way? So do you have any medical conditions? Because untreated sleep apnea, probably the most common reason why people are getting deep sleep, because it's their breathing issues are keeping them out of it. Chronic pain. Athletes are like veterans. I used to do a lot of work at the VA. Then I started working with athletes, and they're very similar. There's a lot of injuries. There's a lot of chronic pain. There's a lot of inflammation and that can make your sleep shallow. Or maybe it's something environmental like you're next to a snoring spouse or kids or whatever. You have other things going on in your environment that's keeping your sleep artificially shallow. It's not a problem with your sleep. Your sleep is just fine. Your sleep is functioning just fine. You're just standing in the way. Something's just in the way and the goal is to 

Taryn Richardson (30:04)

So just check into a hotel for the night and stay there. 

Michael Grandner (30:07)

You know, you know, I sometimes sometimes I can help.

Taryn Richardson (30:16)

So what are some of the ways that we can improve our sleep quality then? Setting up our environment, sleeping in a different room to a snoring husband, getting rid of the kids, what other things can we do? 

Michael Grandner (30:24)

Yep. Getting the snoring husband to sleep study to get their sleep apnea treated potentially so they don't need to be sleeping in a different room. You know, one way to think about that this is there's actually really cool data, especially on otherwise young, healthy people. If you bubble wrap your sleep a little bit, you insulate yourself. Some of the best sleep technology out there is eye masks and earplugs. I've had patients where.  

They would fight me on it and I say, you know what? Let me just block out some extra light and noise for you and see if that does the trick. People underestimate how big of a deal that can be. If you can't tolerate that, things like white noise machines, blackout curtains, other things that can just protect you from environmental stimulation. That is one thing to think about. Another thing to think about is talking a little bit about the wearables, like looking at the clock, looking at your devices. Sometimes that's helpful because the information is useful, but sometimes it can actually get in the way. Like sometimes I have to have people like, just don't wear it for a couple of weeks because you're looking at it and it's making you more stressed or turn the clock around. Sometimes that information is not a net positive. It actually gets in the way. Another thing is stuff that you're ingesting. So  

Taryn Richardson (31:32)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Michael Grandner (31:43)

bunch of food late at night can cause reflux. Even if you don't know that it's reflux, you just might notice your sleep is more shallow, especially once you go horizontal. Drinking a whole bunch of water at night, unless you really want to go to the bathroom and pee more at night, you might want to limit your water intake at night. I mean, or if you're 20 and you're fine, that doesn't happen. know, drink water until you get older, and then you can't drink as much water at night. 

Taryn Richardson (32:06)

That's a good point because athletes do often wake up at least once overnight to go to the toilet. Is that something they need to work to just avoid altogether or is one wake up to go to the toilet okay?

Michael Grandner (32:12)

Yeah. So that's a great question because most people don't realise, like I mentioned, I sort of hinted at this earlier, the average adult will wake up 10 times a night or more. That you woke up is not the problem. You're not supposed to remember. And you can remember a couple of awakenings and actually don't worry about it. If you can fall right back asleep, it's not a problem. If you wake up to go to the bathroom and if it doesn't interfere with anything, then I'm not too worried about it. 

But if it becomes stressful or you would rather not, just experiment with cutting liquids off and go to the bathroom before you go to bed and just don't drink anything for a little bit and see if that's it. And so like excessive food or liquids, alcohol, you kind of want to avoid close to bedtime. I mean, one glass of wine probably isn't going to give most people a problem, but it might because as the alcohol leaves your system, it can cause an awakening response.

It might help you fall asleep faster, but it makes your sleep more shallow. And anyone with a sleep tracker who is looking at their heart rate data across the night can see their body is processing that toxin and keeping your sleep shallow. Nicotine, no one should be smoking anyway, especially endurance athletes. Can't imagine many endurance athletes smoke, but if you do, hopefully not. But nicotine's a stimulant and it will interfere with sleep. Caffeine.

Taryn Richardson (33:30)

they not.

Michael Grandner (33:38)

Caffeine generally rule of thumb is about six hours before bedtime is sort of a safe place to use caffeine. But for some people they're more sensitive and they need 10 to 12 hours beforehand Some people say I can caffeinate right before going to bed But then you actually look at their sleep and their sleep is actually shallow and fragmented where they were so exhausted Yeah, sure you fell asleep, but you still had caffeine on board that was keeping things activated for example.

Taryn Richardson (33:58)

Yeah. Yeah, big vicious circle that one.

Michael Grandner (34:06)

I mean THC is another one where THC and CBD is super murky for sleep. For some people it seems to help. Some people it might make sleep worse. THC might help with sleep in the short term, but the sleep effects kind of wear off after a few weeks usually, and it can cause a rebound and nightmares and stuff. So there's stuff that can interfere. So there's environmental stuff. There's behavioral stuff. Regularity is good for sleep. The human brain loves predictability and patterns. 

Feed it a pattern you want it to learn. you can't go to bed and wake up at the same time every day because life gets in the way, yeah. And some people wake up early to run or to do whatever or train, but they don't do it every day of the week. So if you can't have time be the regular thing, at least build other regularity. Have routines, have a pre-bed routine, 

Taryn Richardson (34:44)

Shift workers. 

Michael Grandner (35:02)

and have that pre-bed routine involve dimming lights, maybe using blue blockers or something, putting screens down, but maybe not put all your screens down an hour before bed. I mean, that's what everyone says, but that is the best worst advice ever only because no one actually does it. I mean, it's true, but nobody does it. So what are you gonna do? So instead, what I would say is if it's... 

Find the zone, whether it's 20 or 30 minutes or an hour, whatever it is before bedtime, that you need to shift gears. If whatever you're doing on the screen, dim it as much as you can. Have it be something that's easy to put down. If it's something that's not easy to put down, you're doing the wrong thing. For some people, or say, or like if you're watching a show or something, some people switch to the news for last half an hour. 

Some people switch off the news for the last half an hour. It depends on the person. I don't know what the right thing for you is. For some people, it's switching to reading because you have to do it itself at your own pace. And if you start losing muscle tone, you know it as opposed to if you're just reading something. Find the thing that's easy to detach from. I'm not saying you have to put all your screens down, but try and be smart about it. 

And then the one other thing I wanted to mention is, it's not really sleep hygiene, but it's a great sleep tip and it's especially good for athletes, is this idea called stimulus control. Bang for your buck, this is the best sleep tip there is. On its own, we'll often outperform prescription sleep medication in the long term in terms of getting people to sleep a little bit better. And what it is, it's easy to explain in nutshell, but there's an art to it. The idea of stimulus control, is when you're in a place where there's a very limited number of things that you will predict can occur there, when only one thing can happen there, you walk into that place, that thing starts happening. You put yourself in the zone for it. It's like when you go to the gym and when you go to the training room, you don't do anything else there. So even if you're tired or whatever, you can start, you can finish. Like because you can get in a zone. As opposed to a place like you know, one thing I saw a lot with the dining room table, people used to eat at the dining room table. Now, since a lot of people are working from home and stuff, they also work at the dining room table. They also are on their phones at the dining room table. They're doing everything else there. So now the ability of that place to create that hunger response is diluted. So when lots of things are a possibility, nothing becomes trained. What you want the bed to be, you want the bed to be the place that sleep is predictably going to so that even if you are stressed, even if you do have to wake up extra early, even if you do wake up in the middle of the night for some reason, being in bed is so predictably tied with being asleep, you can get in that zone easily as opposed to being in bed not predicting it. So like if I say bed equals sleep, bed, sleep, bed, sleep, bed, sleep, if I say bed, you say, correct, good answer. If I say, 

Taryn Richardson (38:08)

Sleep. 

Michael Grandner (38:11)

Bed sleep, bed think, bed read, bed sleep, bed toss and turn, bed worry, bed sleep, bed think, bed what comes next in the pattern. You have no idea. Right, you have no idea what's coming next. And so then work, things like work, start becoming self-reinforcing. Then bed work, bed think, bed think, that sort of, that connect, the bed becomes the thinking. 

Taryn Richardson (38:21)

Bed work.

Michael Grandner (38:38)

So whenever anyone says, I'm really tired, and then I get into bed, and my mind just keeps going, and I can't turn it off, usually it's because you programmed that response. You made that the predictable thing that happened there. You made the bed your thinking place. And it's usually because you didn't give yourself enough time to wind down before getting into bed. So you were still going. You weren't ready yet. But you were still going, and you took that energy into bed with you. 

And your brain is like, good. Now I have your attention. You're not distracted anymore. Now we're going to go through all the things. Instead of doing that before, if it's going to happen anyway, do it. You've got to give yourself that wind down time and space before so that when you get into bed, you're ready. But if you do it often enough where it becomes predictable that you're going to think, instead of bed-sleep, it's bed-think, bed-think, bed-think. 

And so now even if you're tired, you can't fall asleep. And then you wake up in the middle of the night because you have to go to the bathroom and then you get back to bed and you start thinking again. So you want to program that bed-sleep response. And if you can't control the sleep side of that equation quite yet, control the bedside. Whereas if you're not tired, don't go to bed. If you're in bed and you're not falling asleep, get up. If you're in bed and you're exerting a bunch of effort to sleep or you're frustrated that you're not sleeping, you've just added energy in instead of taking the energy out, you're out. 

Taryn Richardson (39:38)

Mm-hmm. 

Michael Grandner (40:01)

Try again. Wait. Wait till it comes back down. Try again. What if I don't sleep that much tonight? Well then you'll be a little more tired tomorrow. Guess what? You'll sleep better tomorrow night, won't you? Because you'll be a little more tired. Let the system correct itself. What if I freak out about not sleeping? It's like, well, if you're not hungry for one day you don't have an appetite, do you freak out that you're going to starve to death? No. You're just going to be hungry tomorrow. Think about it that. 

Taryn Richardson (40:15)

Hmm. 

Michael Grandner (40:30)

Like just because, you know, let the system correct itself and eventually train it on the pattern you want. 

Taryn Richardson (40:37)

That's a really good tip. One of the things I've personally done, I love reading, but even just looking at the words, like I could stay up all night reading. So what I've done is listen to audio books instead and that like falls straight away. I have no idea what happened. have to go back. 

Michael Grandner (40:44)

Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good one. That's a good one. 

There you go. That's a good one. Yeah, I mean, so for some people reading is great because but for some I am actually like you this way where the data show on average reading is a good thing for for nighttime. But for some people it is not. I am also one of those people where like I'll just keep going. ⁓ Yeah, yeah. 

Taryn Richardson (41:09)

Yep. If it gets good, you're up to 1am when you're like, what's happening next? I'm like, this is not good for me.

Michael Grandner (41:15)

So the good tip is, whether you're watching something, listening to something, or reading something, if you're in the zone where you want to see if you're ready, do it sitting up or leaning forward. Because eventually what's going to happen is the bob. You're going to get the head bob. You're going to lose that muscle tone in your neck very briefly. As soon as that happens, that was your body telling you you're ready. Go. They're like, they're like, 

Taryn Richardson (41:40)

time quick. 

Michael Grandner (41:43)

Now, don't even need, don't panic. You don't need to rush. But like, your body's telling you like, okay, I'm done. I'm ready. Can we go now? And you know, if you say five more minutes, you can say five more minutes, but the longer you push it out, you you might build more stress rather than use that time. 

Taryn Richardson (42:02)

Such good advice. So many good tips there. If you can give triathletes just one thing to walk away with from this episode to help with their sleep and recovery, like one gold nugget, what would it be? 

Michael Grandner (42:04)

You. Yeah. Sleep should be your number one recovery protocol. Sleep is about recovery. And the more you want to build up and be stronger and better, let sleep be your ally.

Taryn Richardson (42:29)

I love it. As well as the right nutrition, right? Shameless plug.

Michael Grandner (42:32)

Yeah, same, it's very similar. But that's the thing, they work in concert with each other where eating right gives your body the raw materials it needs to leverage sleep  for that recovery process. mean, this is why, mean, if you're gonna take a supplement at night and give yourself the amino acids or whatever to rebuild at night, I would just say,

Taryn Richardson (42:37)

Yeah.

Michael Grandner (42:58)

err more on the side of ones like glycine that can promote sleep and stay away from the glutamine that can wake you up. But, a healthy diet, healthy sleep, these are foundational things that help our body work fine. And just like nutrition, it doesn't have to be perfect to be perfectly fine. So obsessing over it doesn't help. And having it be, there is no perfect. 

It also means that just like nutrition, sleep and recovery, it's like that where when people say, how much sleep do I need to get on weekends to make up for sleeping like crap during the week? That's like saying, how much healthy food do I need to eat on weekends to make up for eating just junk food all week? It's like, well, that's not how it works. Like it's all about me. It's all about striving for balance seven days a week, if you can. Yeah. 

Taryn Richardson (43:39)

Yeah. Yep. Yeah, I agree. Maybe we'll have to get you back on to talk about the nutrition interventions for sleep because you just put that little, you dangle that carrot there, I'm like, ⁓ that's a whole nother topic that we could dive into. 

Michael Grandner (43:52)

Yeah, yeah, we could talk about that another time. How about you set nutrition? That's another fun thing that I like to talk about. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, you know where to find me.

Taryn Richardson (44:03)

Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. If you're up for it. All right, Michael, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing all of your expertise on sleep. It's really nice to nerd up with you. And I think for anyone listening, it's so obvious that sleep is not just an afterthought and it's a secondary. Like it is your most powerful tool for recovery. It trumps nutrition. I'm happy to say that on my own podcast, but it is going to make a huge difference to training, racing, and just your overall general health, if you can prioritize getting

Michael Grandner (44:26)

I don't know about that. 

Taryn Richardson (44:34)

enough sleep and good quality sleep. for listeners who do want to dive deeper, I can link some of Michael's papers in the description below this too, if you do want to check out some of the science behind it. But Michael, where's the best place to find you if people want to learn more about your work? 

Michael Grandner (44:37)

Yes. I'm easily my last name is unusual and easily Googleable ⁓ and my website is just Michael Grander .com on social media LinkedIn blue skies

 Taryn Richardson (45:01)

Okay, I can link those below for you if you do want to just click. Alright, legends, thank you for tuning in and we will definitely get Michael back. I'm holding him to that. We'll talk about nutrition interventions for sleep another time. But thank you and I'll catch you next week.  

Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast. I would love to hear from you. If you have any questions or want to share with me what you've learned, email me at [email protected]. You can also spread the word by leaving me a review and taking a screenshot of you listening to the show. Don't forget to tag me on social media, @dietitian.approved, so I can give you a shout out, too. If you want to learn more about what we do, head to dietitianapproved.com. And if you want to learn more about the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program, head to dietitianapproved.com/academy. Thanks for joining me and I look forward to helping you smashed in the fourth leg - nutrition!