Rest And Sleep*
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Some respected recent texts on sports nutrition don't even mention rest and sleep. It may seem unwarranted to include a chapter here on the subject. It's not only warranted, it's vital. Bodily growth and repair occur only during rest or sleep, never during training. Successful development of an athlete is always a delicate balancing act between three variables: a training program of progressive overload, the correct raw materials (nutrients) to maintain and repair tissue and build new tissue, and sufficient rest and sleep to permit the repair and new growth to take place.

Numerous texts discuss only the nutrition you need before, during, and after athletic performance. But tbat's only half the picture. The main business of nutrition is to build a better body. That work takes place only during rest. Even if your training and nutrition program came straight from the mouth of God Almighty, without adequate rest your body will fail to adapt.

Some athletes tell me they need only six hours of sleep a night. My reply is, "Maybe you can get by, but you will never reach full potential." After 18 years in the business, I have seen it many times. The short sleep athletes are the first to succumb to that big killer of sports careers - overtraining. Many recent studies document that the overtraining syndrome occurs primarily because of insufficient rest.

The great coaches have always known. Swimming great Jim Councilman of Indiana University, for example, makes his athletes sleep nine hours a night, plus a nap in the afternoons. With a tip of my hat to Jim, the Colgan Institute gives similar advice. You have to allow your nutrition the space it needs to work.

There's no way you can gut it out by will power. Just the opposite. Athletes who are falling into the overtraining syndrome often start to train harder to "break the plateau." Instead of improving they get worse faster. You can't beat overtrainingwith more work because, by the time it becomes noticeable, your body is already shot.

Studies show that the neuroendocrine system becomes exhausted, altering hormone levels so that optimal performance is impossible. Some severely overtrained athletes have developed Addison's Disease, characterized by the permanently reduced function of the adrenal glands, so that they no longer maintain proper hormone levels. That's the finish of any elite sports career.

The other big problem is suppression of immune function. Overtrained athletes become progressively more susceptible to infection. They also get more injuries, especially muscle and tendon injuries, the type that can cut training for months. My friend, Olympian Jeff Galloway, who has taught thousands of athletes how to run, put it best. "The single greatest cause of improvement is remaining injury-free to train."

Compelling evidence of depressed immunity also comes from athletes with poor training advice, who increase their training intensity without increasing their rest. They almost all get sick or injured, which promptly cancels any benefit of the extra worker In contrasts carefully balanced training and rest can enhance immunity. So if you went optimum performance, you better get it right.

The general rule for rest is to get 7 1/2 - 9 1/2 hours sleep a night. For athletes who train twice a day, and you should if you want the maximum training effect, a 30-60 minute nap after your first training session, is invaluable. It may be a hard habit to get into, but persevere. You'll thank me.

How to Recognize Overtraining

The basic conundrum an athlete faces is, how intense should training be? There is a wide range of biochemical individuality in responses to exercise stress. And this genetic component is further modified by past training and by nutrient intake as well as rest. The trick is to have an individual monitoring system for signs of overtraining that tells you to back off and increase your rest. The system we use is very simple yet very effective.

Waking Heart Rate: The first sign is waking heart rate. After monitoring the heart rates of athletes for more than a decade, the Colgan Institute has developed this simple rule of thumb. Get into the habit of taking your pulse immediately on waking and recording it. Do it before you get out of bed. It is less accurate at other times because emotions, activity, having just eaten, type of food, caffeine, and alcohol, all affect heart rate. The rule is, if your waking pulse on any day is elevated by more than eight beats per minute above its average level for the preceding week, you are falling into overtraining.

Waking Bodyweight: The second sign is waking bodyweight. Your weekly average weight should not vary by more than 2 lbs, even if you are frantically working to gain muscle. Most athletes working hard at the weights gain less than 10 Ibs of muscle per year. The rule is, if your weight drops by more than 3 lbs on any day from a previously stable bodyweight, you are falling into overtraining.

Insomnia: The third sign is insomnia. Running guru Dr George Sheehan first turned me onto this ones One complication is training late at night. The Colgan Institute advises against training at night because the adrenocorticotrophic hormones (e.g. adrenalin and noradrenalin) generated by the exercise, interfere with normal sleep. The rule is, if you don't train at night yet start to suffer from restlessness, inability to fall asleep, or too early awakening, you are falling into overtraining. You may also experience abnormal mood swings during the day, and a loss of motivation. Cut back!

Immunity: An optional measure, but invaluable if you have access to it, is immune function as measured by the complete blood count (CBC) part of a usual SMAC blood screen. Our rule is, if you show elevated counts of segmented neutrophils (segs), lymphocytes (Iymphs) monocytes, (monos) or eosinophils (ens), or a combination of elevated counts of these immune cells, and no infection or illness can be found, then you are falling into overtraining. More detailed explantions of immunity are given in Chapter 22.

Curing The Overtraining Syndrome

You cannot resolve overtraining by simply increasing your sleep. From long experience our one-week-cure rules of thumb for all athletes are:

1. Stop training entirely for one week. Running athletes can jog lightly for a mile or two each day. Strength athletes can stretch for 30 minutes each day.

2. Reduce protein intake to 15% of total calories..

3. Increase carbohydrate intake to 70% of total calories. Use predominantly complex carbohydrates of low glycemic index.

4. Increase antioxidants to 20% of usual intake. How to determine you individual antioxidant intake is detailed in Chapter 20.

5. Increase sleep to 9 hours solid per night.

Better still, avoid overtraining. Monitor the signs and back off training and increase your sleep at the first inkling. Even if you follow every detail of this book to design a brilliant individual nutrition program, it will not help unless you also have sufficient rest and sleep to enable the nutrition to do its work.

*from Micheal Colgan's "Optimum Sports Nutrition", ISBN 0-9624840-5-9, Advanced Research Press, New York, 1993