You cannot out-train bad sleep

By Geoff Scott, Founder & Senior Physiotherapist, Hauora

By Geoff Scott, Senior Physiotherapist and founder of Hauora.

I have watched gifted athletes train like machines and still go nowhere. Not because they were not working hard enough. Because they were undoing every session the moment they walked out of the gym. The missing piece is almost always sleep and recovery.

Training is the stress. It is the stimulus that tells your body to adapt. But the adapting, the actual getting fitter, stronger and faster, happens later, when you are asleep and when you are fed. Get that wrong and you are not building. You are accumulating damage and calling it dedication.

Sleep is the session you are skipping

If I could give every athlete one upgrade, it would not be a new programme or a supplement. It would be an extra ninety minutes of decent sleep. That is when tissue repairs, hormones reset and the brain locks in everything you practised. You can have the perfect plan on paper and undo most of it by going to bed at one in the morning. No amount of training out-works that. Our guide to sleep and athletic performance goes into the detail.

Fuel for the work you are asking it to do

Under-fuelling is the quiet epidemic I see in driven people. They train hard, eat like they are trying to shrink, then wonder why they are always tired, always sore, always one cold away from a week off. Food is not the reward for the work. It is the raw material for it. Get enough of the right things in at the right times and recovery stops being a battle.

Sleep and recovery: a plan, not a vibe

This is the heart of our internal pillar. Fuel from within means treating nutrition, sleep and recovery as part of the programme, not the bit you sort out if you have time left over. Led by our performance nutritionist Dr Emma Tester, who holds a PhD in nutrition and has spent 15 years in elite sport, the aim is simple: energy that lasts, recovery that actually works, and a plan you can stick to in a real life with a real job and a real family.

You do not need to live like a monk. You need a system that makes the hard work you are already doing actually count.

The training is only ever half of it. The other half is what you do when you are not training at all.

Related reading: sports nutrition basics and strength training after 40.