GoodFriday: On tuition, sleep architecture, & top tracks
Happy GoodFriday!
Here's something I heard, thought, and did this week.
Something I Heard: Top Workout Tracks of The Week
A few tracks from this week's training. Everyone's taste is different, and when I get locked in I lean aggressive. Take what you like, skip the rest.
Rooster — Alice in Chains
My ramp-up song. This is what goes on before things start getting real.
Calm Before the Storm — Light The Torch
Howard Jones, former lead singer of Killswitch Engage. His vocals are unmatched and this one fires me up every time.
Tired — Stone Sour
That opening riff puts me in a state where I'm ready for pain.
Oblivion Crusade — No Cure
The Maker — Bodysnatcher
I Long for Rest — Angelmaker
Top-set music. When I'm grinding through reps I need someone screaming at me.
Put You On The Game — The Game
Takes me back to high school. This is for the days I don't need to go as intense. I just need to move.
Menace — Rezz
For when I want something melodic. If I'm on the elliptical this goes on repeat and I zone out.
Something I Thought: Tuition
Your first attempt at anything is not a failure state, it’s tuition.
Something I'm Doing: Sleep Architecture
For about a year now I've been picking at my sleep architecture. Not the obvious stuff. The room is already cold, the phone is already charging in the other room. I mean the smaller levers, the ones you only go looking for after the big ones are already pulled.
Two of them ended up mattering more than everything else combined.
First: creatine, 5g, around 4 or 5 in the afternoon, with maybe 20 ounces of water. I'd taken it for years, always first thing in the morning, because that's the default and it's easy to attach to an existing routine. Moving it to late afternoon was the whole change. Same dose, same powder, different clock.
Second: carbs at dinner. I aim for 50g. That's the entire protocol. No specific source, no window, no ratio to hit. Just make sure they show up.
My HRV went up about 30 points on average. I'd been sitting in the 90s for a long stretch, and after the carbs and creatine it moved into the high 120s and held there. Not a spike. A new baseline. Recovery scores followed, which is what you'd expect given how heavily they're weighted toward HRV, but the HRV number is the one I actually watch.
I want to be careful here, because I am one guy with one wearable and no control group. But it held through travel, through a bad training block, and through a times when the normal sleeping patterns weren’t ideal. That's about as much confidence as an n of 1 earns.
On the why, with appropriate hedging:
The standard line on creatine is that timing is irrelevant, it's about saturation, and I don't think that's wrong. But I suspect there's still something to having some onboard closer to sleep. Creatine is an osmolyte — it pulls water into cells — and a better-hydrated brain overnight seems like a brain that does its overnight work better. There's also the plain energetics of it. Sleep is when the repair happens, on a fixed budget, and the phosphocreatine system is what funds that kind of work. Being fully stocked going in shouldn't be nothing.
Carbs land in the same place from a different direction. Glycogen stores water, so that's hydration again. They're also upstream of serotonin, which is upstream of melatonin. And a real dinner seems to let parasympathetic tone actually come up.
If you want to try it, change one at a time and give each three weeks. A single night tells you nothing. Consistency over the long run is waht you’re looking for.
Until next week!
-Cameron Harn
