[This is a guest blog by Richard (Lee) Bowie. Lee is an coach participating in our Coaches Mentorship program at Athletic Lab.] As an elite athlete, weekend warrior or just someone who wants to be the best version of themselves, we all want to perform at our highest level. Whether it is a championship game, an obstacle race with friends or just the daily workout at the gym - we want all aspects of our training, to culminate for that performance. There are many facets that make up our training including our training regimen / periodization, nutrition, mental readiness and sleep/recovery to name a few. Many of these facets have been well known and studied for years, but sleep has been the neglected aspect of training until recently. Sleep is one of the essential elements of life as a human. Why should that be any different for your "athletic life" We now know that sleep is an active physiological state, during which critical metabolic, immunologic, and cognitive/memory processes occur (Samuels). Unless you have been living under a rock, you know that sleep is imperative for proper recovery but it also affects physical performance. Physical performance, in this case, is how one performs in training, in a game or match and even in day to day life. These performance factors can range from reaction time, learning, memory tasks and sport specific elements to cognitive function, mood, and daytime sleepiness. The National Institute of Health recommends 7-8 hours of sleep per night for adults while the National Sleep Foundation recommends 7-9 hours per night. A Gallup Poll conducted in 2013 found that the average adult slept for 6.8 hours per night. Sleep, just like everything in life, [...]

[Houston Deck is a recent graduate of Florida Atlantic University and an Athletic Development Intern at Athletic Lab]. I feel like you were in a coma last night and not asleep. Anytime you can wake up and say, I feel like I had a mini death. This is the best anabolic sleep we could ask for. (Parsley, 2014). Let's take a look at the #1 overlooked supplement in the world; sleep. But eight hours isn't enough. The quality and how deep of a sleep we are in is what really matters. This week I will very briefly discuss the importance of sleep and its effects on our body's hormones. I highly recommend listening to the podcast cited below for an in depth look on sleep and your bodies function. Dr. Kirk Parsley, a health optimization physician simply puts, insufficient deep sleep means insufficient testosterone production. But why is testosterone so important? Simply put, testosterone diffuses straight to the cell wall binding to protein, goes straight into the nucleus and changes DNA expression. As a result, mRNA comes out producing more protein, receptors, energy, or whatever that specific hormone does that testosterone traveled too. So when there isn't any deep sleep or lack of, we are committing anabolic suicide and throwing away everything we worked for that day. And if this continues, so does the vicious cycle. But that's not all that happens because one hormone can't be affected without affecting them all. Growth hormone and cortisol depend on your sleep to get what it is they need to get done. A lack of sleep can affect testosterone by 30% and in turn affects growth hormone and cortisol. What does cortisol do? Very briefly, cortisol regulates [...]