Your Secret Tool for Optimal Fitness and Health
By Roger Haeske
There's something that everyone does (at least I think 99.9% of people do this) that you could do more of and start achieving peak performance in all areas of your life. This easy and extremely enjoyable, peak performance factor makes you stronger, faster and smarter. You'll start achieving new personal bests in fitness, business and every other area of your life.
Doesn't seem believable right? Nevertheless, it is and you'd be surprised how this simple change in your life can reward you tremendously. You'll even get more done because you'll be mentally sharper and have explosive energy levels. There's even scientific evidence that people who do more of this are thinner. Certainly if you want to feel and look your best and be youthful, then you must do enough of this every day. Yet everyone these days is trying to get by with less of this. By now you probably guessed what I am talking about. I'm talking about sleep and in general getting more rest.
Whenever I'm trying to break my own fitness records, I can never do so unless I've had at least two days in a row of lots of sleep. You may not know this but the best long-distance runners in the world, the Kenyans are on their backs for 16 to 20 hours a day during peak competition season. They may sleep up to 14 hours per day. Top professional athletes in general sleep 10 to 12 hours a day. They sleep a lot and they also rest as much as possible by lying on their backs and closing their eyes. Sleep is the only way to recharge your vital nerve energy. Everything in your body will work at its best when you've slept as much as your body needed to fully recover and regenerate from the previous day's activities.
I don't believe you can sleep too much, only too little. Even if you did sleep more than you needed to that particular day, it simply means the next day you will naturally sleep less. Most people who drink coffee and take other stimulants are sleep deprived and need the coffee to falsely stimulate them into a sense of wakefulness. I urge you to stop drinking coffee and get enough rest. Coffee is not a substitute for sleep and people who drink coffee don't sleep as deeply and restfully as those who refrain from drinking coffee. Coffee is a shortcut to old age and disease.
Let me tell you a quick story about how sleep has helped me to break my pushup records. I've always had a very hard time improving the number of pushups I could do in a row. Even after years of doing pushups with all different kinds and variations, it was really difficult to improve the number of how many I could do in a row. Doing lots of pushups in a row was something I considered myself naturally weak in. I remember when my goal was to do 50 in a row. That seemed so hard and so far off. My progress was really gradual. If I improved it would usually be by one more repetition and at most 2 more. Improvement was also slow, but one day I finally reached 50 in a row. But I still had higher ambitions and I was always asking myself if there was a better way to train myself to reach this goal. I believe I have found that way after years of experimentation. I've been smashing through my pushup records at least once a week now for the last month or so. I'd say getting enough sleep results in 40% of the extra benefit. Therefore, sleep is one of the most important elements of my program.
There are three specific ways of doing pushups that I do that have helped me reach higher and higher numbers in a row. However, the fourth key ingredient is not an exercise but making sure I sleep an extra hour or two on the days when I want to set the record. Actually, I should sleep as much as possible every day because then my workout days would be more productive as well. But I don't always manage to get as much sleep as I should.
However, after two days of sleeping an extra hour or two, I feel miraculously stronger and breaking the record is easy, because I have a new level of strength due to my workout and the extra sleep. On days where I didn't sleep enough I never broke my pushup record. I never feel as strong as when I sleep a long time. Heck, if we were living in the tropics our natural habitat, we'd have 12 hour nights all year round. I'm sure our primitive ancestors slept longer than humans do these days. There have even been studies showing that 100 years or so ago people slept on average an hour more compared to how much people sleep these days.
Sleep is something you can accumulate and something in which you can have a deficit in. Not only is getting extra sleep great for peak performance but it's one of the vital health creation factors. Even if you eat the best and purest raw food diet, you exercise, drink pure water, breath pure air, get plenty of sunshine and have emotional poise, if you don't get enough sleep, you will have horrible health.
I know a raw foodist who ignores getting enough sleep and you can see the dark bags under his eyes when he does this. Some people think this is because of his diet, but I know he's up very late at night and regularly doesn't get enough sleep. He actually prides himself on how little he sleeps. I know another raw foodist who often doesn't get enough sleep. And when she doesn't sleep enough her health starts to fall apart. She starts getting so many health problems.
You can get by like this but each day you're subtly destroying your health. It's like smoking cigarettes. You don't get lung cancer by smoking them just once, but if you continually smoke, for many years you are likely to get lung cancer, other cancers or health problems related to smoking.
Sleep is of utmost importance. What you may not realize is that you're probably not sleeping enough to experience peak performance and ideal health. Your health is only as good as your weakest link. The key is to keep on sleeping until you feel like waking up. Don't get up because the alarm says so, get up because you no longer feel tired. For many with a day job, that means going to bed an hour or two earlier every night.
If there's any way possible for you to get more sleep, you should find a way to do so. I now realize that for most of my life, I have been sleeping much less than I needed. The other afternoon (really most of the week) while going food shopping I just felt so incredibly strong. I only get this feeling on days where I've slept as much as I wanted to. I'd bet that at least 95% of people living in so-called civilization, don't get enough sleep.
Sleeping more is much easier than switching to a raw food diet. Sleep is extremely enjoyable, so why not sleep more. If you aren't already eating raw, at least you can start sleeping more and you should soon feel your health and almost every aspect of your life improve.
How do you know if you've gotten enough sleep? When you wake up, you don't feel like sleeping anymore!
Printed with the permission of Roger Haeske.
Find out more about Roger Haeske, Raw food peak performance training to unleash the Superbeing within, the raw food diet, fitness, self-improvement books and coaching.