I’ve started waking up at 5am each morning in order to get in my GPP. I’m planning on doing 5 days of LISS on a rower for now since I have some fat loss goals (also throwing in one HIIT session per week for 5 or 6 total). I’ve been struggling to comply with the GPP prescriptions on the templates, but waking up at 5 seems to allow me to do this. Unfortunately, this means I’m only getting about 6 hours of sleep each night. I’m working on making bedtime happen earlier, but with a 4-month-old it’s been kinda rough. I read Austin’s post on placebo sleep several months ago and that immediately improved my overall life experience (no more obsessing about “recovery” and thinking I need 9 hours each night because I’m a special snowflake). I know that roughly 7 hours of sleep is “optimal” in terms of being correlated with the lowest rates of mortality, morbidity, etc.
So my questions are:
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Do you think 6 hours per night can be maintained long-term by most people without [insert nocebo language here]?
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I read Jordan’s article from 2012 titled Mommy… It’s Bedtime, Dangit. Would you guys revise any of those suggestions today?
Thanks!
If you are wondering if getting insufficient sleep while dieting/trying to lose weight is a good idea, read the book “Why we sleep” by Matthew Walker. It’s probably the best resource for sleep science and it will make you think twice about sacrificing sleep for pretty much anything (in your case, cardio).
the number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population and rounded to a whole number, is zero.
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Keep in mind that there are costs and benefits to essentially every decision we make. If I “refused to sacrifice sleep for pretty much anything”, I wouldn’t have accomplished a shred of what I have in work, training, or most other areas of life. I don’t routinely sleep < 5 hours per night, but I also don’t skip training if I’ve slept less than 7, either.
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Thanks for the replies. I tried to keep up the 6 to 6.5 hours of sleep thing and it worked for about 3 days before I just couldn’t keep it up. My goal is just to get the GPP in (in addition to the strength sessions, obviously), but this method won’t work for me. Guess that’s why they call it trial and error. Back to the drawing board…