#716: Performance Coach Andy Galpin Rebooting Tims Sleep, Nutrition, Supplements, and Training for 2024

If I'm not moving well, why not? And some of my Pavel [Tsatsouline] is going to come back and say, well, in large part it's because of a lack of strength. If you're strong enough, you move well. I actually agree with him on many, many, many things, and that's one of them.

If you were to look across in the landscape of the research, what you're globally going to see is caffeine is problematic for sleep ... Literally any caffeine ingestion whatsoever just seems to take sleep the wrong direction.

There's actually recent study that came out that was quite interesting on college freshman... They found that for every increase in one breath per minute—so you went from 14 breaths per minute to 15 to 16.—there's a 25% increase in likelihood of experiencing moderate to high stress, and that was independent of a number of sleep markers.

If somebody sleeps for 8 hours a night versus 5 hours a night, and you tell them the opposite, you will see a physiological response that corresponds to what you told them rather than what actually happened.

Point is, I'm watching that respiratory rate. If that thing starts to exceed 15 breaths per minute or so overnight, I have a pretty good indication that you're over-breathing.

We typically ask them to do some breathwork post-exercise, which is a simple as turn the lights off, lay on your back, put a towel over your eyes, turn the music off, and just breathe for 5 minutes.

One thing that stands out routinely is how sleep quality drastically differs in people depending on their position. So, some people really struggle on their right side or the left side or the back side—and it's very common for us to see people will have large percentages of their sleep problems in a single place.

Respiratory rate is a phenomenal insight into everything that's happening in your body.

You can generally get a good sense if somebody's respiratory rate is high if they tend to feel very, very good during light or low-intensity exercise.

I would caution you against two major things here. One, worrying about sleep score. Do not pay attention to that.