What a NASA pilot can teach you about your workouts
A recent NASA study on short-haul pilots found something interesting for all of us.
NASA recently came out with a study on short-haul pilots (think pilots who fly multiple legs per day) and found something interesting for all of us:
Even small amounts of irregular sleep or disruption to the circadian rhythm can lead to drops in alertness and performance.
Poor sleep combined with irregular hours (like overnight shifts) didn't just make pilots tired, it impacted how well they could do their job.
So, what does a study on pilots have to do with your workouts?
More and more fitness-related studies are showing similar results: when sleep is disrupted, everything suffers. From a workout standpoint this means:
Slower recovery - As in the body doesn’t recover as well so your next workout either doesn’t feel as great or doesn’t happen at all.
Impaired mental state - Meaning your workouts feel eeeeeexxxxttttrraaa hard and your brain just isn’t in it (probably because it doesn’t have the capacity).
There is a nuance though:
The relationship between sleep and training goes both ways. The wrong amount of sleep and working out can inhibit our progress, but the right amount can help our bodies….
Find calm before dozing off to dream land
Get more restorative sleep
Regulate our circadian rhythm
But, and again, here’s the nuance, too much of anything is never a good thing.
In your everyday workouts, we want your muscles to be challenged to the point of full fatigue sometimes. But, if every single workout pushes your body to complete fatigue, your results will be limited, or even start to plateau.
This is especially true in Pilates. The goal isn’t to leave every class fully wiped. It’s to challenge your body, while still leaving something in the tank most of the time (there’s that nuance again!).
Consistency can help you identify your point of fatigue and give you an understanding of when to push and when to pull back (hot tip: your instructor can help with that too!). This post can also be a helpful starting point in understanding how to find and build your baseline.
