Sleep Hygiene – The Secret to Improving Performance

Without a doubt, recent research is showing us that sleep hygiene is the secret to improving performance and health, inside and outside of the gym. The great news is, you don’t need a drug or medication to improve your sleep, you need sleep hygiene!

Let’s start out by understanding that there likely isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to improving your sleep. If this is an area of struggle for you, understand that developing good sleep hygiene over time will without a doubt improve your performance, but it may not be an immediate solution. 

So what is sleep hygiene? To put it simply, sleep hygiene is the practice of developing healthy habits around sleeping to help you improve the quality of your sleep. Before we cover some habits you can use to improve your sleep hygiene, a book recommendation (and where the source most of this information comes from): Why We Sleep. For the short version, check out Dr. Matthew Walker’s Ted Talk!

We’ve posted about this before, let’s unpack some of the most important sleep hygiene habits to improve your performance!

1. Keep your bedroom cold.
2. Get rid of screens for 30 minutes prior to bedtime.
3. Try and set a regular bedtime and wake time.
4. Blackout your room or purchase eye shades. 
5. Take a warm bath 30-60 minutes before bedtime.
6. Aim for 7-9 hours of sleep per night!

We believe that if you couple these positive habits with a healthy diet and well-rounded exercise program, you will experience performance boosts that supplements and medications can’t come close to competing with.

At Onward Tennessee, we focus on much more than pain, we focus on you as a human being. This means at every evaluation, you can expect to speak to your provider about sleep, stress, exercise, and nutrition. Our goal is to help you optimize your health, recover from injury, and improve your movement capacity

If you think you’re in need of some focused help with sleep hygiene, or a lifestyle evaluation book an evaluation with one of our providers!