The ’90s marked a revolution in the science of football and performance, at the heart of it was Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United as they explored how sleep improves the mentality and performance. Fast forward to today and every club leaves no mattress unturned.
Nick Littlehales is known as football’s first sleep coach and it all started when he contacted Sir Alex and asked what they’re doing to improve sleep, and he then went on to help the United squad with their sleep as the club focused on gaining every marginal advantage possible.
It wasn’t long until people started to hear about his name and wanted to be part of the sleep revolution in football. Real Madrid, Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool, and recently Bayer Leverkusen, are clubs that have used Nick’s services.
Nick is an Elite Sports Coach at sportsleepcoach, has written an international bestseller, and has been redefining sleep the way that professional athletes sleep since 1998.
So, we’ve asked him for his top three tips…
Nick says, “If you do these three steps you’ll wish you had done it weeks ago, months ago, years ago, because it stops you worrying about sleep and that’s the biggest disruptor.
“You will feel far more optimised and energised when starting your day.”
1. 24-hour rhythm of sleep
Just make sure that you are now aware and put it into play that you’re a human being on this planet.
You need to understand that it’s a rolling 24-hour period and not Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday.
The key factor is your exposure to light, so your awareness of circadian rhythm through your exposure to light and dark.
You can do this by getting yourself a light meter on your phone to track your light and get your more synced.
2. Take some time out
Take some time out to try and get a better relationship with your natural characteristics and your chronotype.
Once you’ve got that you can see where you can put that into play because it can be really significant to how your personal best performance will reveal itself more often than not.
Identifying your chronotype characteristic could be a game changer.”
3. Identify your sleep Anchor Reset Point (ARP)
The Anchor Reset Point is not the time you put your alarm on but it’s your most consistent everyday time that you wake up.
Pick it either on the hour or half an hour. So, if you’re a morning type like me and you’ve got a job that means you’ve got to be somewhere then maybe your most consistent time is 6.30am, because that’s the time that you need to start your day and natural start of the day.
From that anchor point you’ll chop your day up into 16, 90-minute cycles and it gives you a series of timings from cycle 1-4.
Once you start thinking in that subconscious tactic and habit, everyday you will realise that you’re cracking on into your first cycle.
In that first cycle you get lots of light, hydrate and energise the best you can.
You’ll move into cycle two and you want a little moment looking out of the window just to add it up, with this you might start to think, ‘I feel good on five 90-minute cycles and get the good stuff’.
Then you’ll start to think about cycle seven or eight when you take your 20-30 minute reset and the 16th cycle is when you wake up again.
For more tips and advice, you can listen to the full episode of our podcast with Nick Littlehales from 10am tomorrow…
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