Hey Coach Thibs ,
Hope your doing great coach I am a Type 2B confident always have trouble sleeping and neurologicaly it’s hard for me to recover from my workouts my body responds great but my mind not always
Yesterday I did a push workout at 4PM and it was a great session and had padel Tennis at 8-10 couldn’t sleep for shit should I do each of them on different days not on the same day since without sleep I feel like a zombie and loose my motive and focus on everything
Any help would be great some Nutrition & Supplemts guidance
Bro just keep it to yourself my Question was to coach Thibs if you want to say something that will matter then by all means if not just keep your sense of humour to yourself
I never was Rude to anyone here Coach never and hope you did read what they said to me first I won’t be childish about that we are grown ups here and if I did anything wrong to anybody sorry for that I will delete this post entirely
My suggestion would be to pay attention to trends when it comes to timing your workouts/padel sessions and also combining both of them in the same day.
If your sleep is disrupted everytime in this scenario then you are either:
Working out too late in the day → referring to the padel session from 8-10. If your scheduled bedtime is at 11PM, then the elevated dopamine, adrenaline & cortisol levels alongside an increase in core body temperature could prevent you from falling asleep within reasonable time and banking enough deep sleep (which requires a drop in core body temperature ranging anywhere from 1 to 2 degrees celsius).
Doing too much volume (from both the push session and the padel session) in one day and exceeding your body’s capacity to maintain neurotransmitter balance.
Sleep issues are are often related to trouble with one or more neurotransmitter systems, caused by a chronic elevation of cortisol and an incapacity of the body to maintain or regain balance of these neurotransmitter systems overnight (which is logical because quality sleep is responsible for that balance).
Type 2B’s usually have tanked serotonin levels first, GABA follows quickly after because it needs to compensate for the lowered serotonin levels.
Nutrition for serotonin: carbs → to lower cortisol but also to increase tryptophan uptake and serotonin production in the brain. This works best when carbs are eaten separately, not with protein or fats. 2-3 pieces of fruit as a snack for example.
Supplements for serotonin: vit B6, vit D3, glycine, 5-htp, tryptophan.
Nutrition for GABA: apples, brown rice, fermented foods, prebiotics from veggies and fruits (serve as food for good bacteria that produce GABA), leafy green vegetables, (sweet) potatoes
Supplements for GABA: taurine, inositol, probiotics (especially lactobacillus rhamnosus), l-theanine and camomille. If you want to use a very effective supplement to replenish GABA levels fast, phenibut works great. But it’s also very addictive and should not be used for more than 2 weeks.
Supplements to dislocate adrenaline from the beta-adrenergic receptors which helps to decrease neurological acitivity: magnesium taurate or magnesium bisglycinate.
Always remember: temperature, light and stress have the biggest impact on your sleep quality.
When your core body temperature is too high (either due to a high room temperature or due to physical or mental stress which heats up your core body temperature), light exposure is too high/bright or your brain wave activity is too high (which is downregulated by adenosine and inhibiting neurotransmitters like serotonin and GABA), it will be difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep throughout the night.
Well thank you but in truth a lot of the advice I’m giving here is actually not from CT.
Yes, the nutritional and supplementational guidelines I’m presenting here are in part from CT’s courses but stress management and sleep science have nothing do with these courses. At least not directly.
I have mentors in all 4 big categories of health which are:
Stress management: i’ve learned a lot from Andrew Huberman’s science-based podcast, my own 10 + year long experience and insights from battling with anxiety/depression and endless hours of research to figure out what strategies really work in the short, mid and long term to effectively deal with stress. I actually wrote an E-book on stress management.
Sleep: my biggest mentors are Dr. Michael Breus PhD. and Matthew Walker PhD. Again alongside reading tons of peer reviewed studies on sleep, the different stages and how to optimize them through movement, nutrition, changes in sleeping environment, temperature etc. I also wrote two E-books on sleep but this is not a marketing platform so I never mentioned them before.
Nutrition: Andrew Huberman and Frank den Blanken. I followed a practical nutrition course from Frank which really helped me understand how to apply the science of nutrition in daily life, depending on your health and fitness goals. As I stated earlier, the neurotyping courses from CT have also contributed a great deal to manipulating food intake and macro’s to better suit one’s physiological and psychological needs.
Movement: Poliquin, Wolfgang Unsoeld and Stéphane Cazeault gave me everything I needed to know on how to design, structure and periodize effective training programs in the short and long term depending on the goal, training age and strength ratio’s of a trainee. CT’s courses also discuss program design and periodization but he went way deeper into the physiology and psychology of training. Which proves very useful when your goal as a coach is to really individualize and optimize training (and by extension their quality of life) for the individuals you’re working with.
So yeah, a lot of the advice I’m giving here is not directly related to CT’s work but his knowledge/experience in the field has definitely improved my game as a coach because he helped me connect the dots between these 4 pillars of health and make all the necessary associations between training, hormones, neurotransmitters and why they need to be balanced at all cost to improve your training and quality of life.
In short, he helped me understand myself and others better. His work has contributed massively to the way I design and periodize programs that actually suit the lifestyle and psychological profile of my clients as well as my own. Which becomes even more important when you’re dealing with hormonal/neurological disorders in your life. I will always be grateful to him and his unwavering efforts to educate us on how to improve our lifting game.
Even though the man hates to be thanked, he deserves to hear it every now and then.
I think my initial “kudos” was poorly worded: I meant each of the three adjectives separately, but combined them in a single sentence. I think each of your answers in this forum provides a ton of context and depth; when you advise in-line with CT’s works (neurotyping, as the easiest example), it appears, to my uneducated eye, to be very true to his writings.
I do appreciate you calling out multiple mentors, and I actually think it’s a fair lesson here: we all need to diversify our sources of information. It’s also somewhat validating that I’d read from a couple of those names myself; other coaches (including our man in question here) have also referenced more than two from your list. Mutual conclusions independently arrived are strong indicators of good mumbo-jumbo!
@wika20 That’s fine but try not to put yourself into a box too much by saying I will never do that or I will always do it in the same way. This thinking pattern does not pay off in the long run because you will probably form limiting habits that could work against you when you are in a situation where changing up your routine could actually be valuable to keep stimulating new gains and progress.
Phew, that was a long and and unnecessary complex sentence. What I meant to say is that managing your training variables (frequency, volume, intensity, load) and total workload over the day/week is context dependent.
For example, if your sleep is great, your total life stress is low/okay, your nutrition is dialed in then you might benefit from doing more volume over the course of a week or a 3-week training phase/block. You can even workout twice a day (meaning one normal strength training session and one cardio session or two short bouts of strength training where your spread the total workout volume of a normal session over two shorter sessions) but take into account your own biofeedback when it comes to timing these workouts. Doing some steady-state cardio after a workout is fine or even 4-6 hours later. Just don’t do an intense padel session 2 hours before going to sleep when you know it will hurt your sleep. Or if there’s no other time to do it, try engaging in some yoga, mediation, mindfulness protocol pre-bed to calm down your nervous system activity. Also, stop eating food at least 3 hours before bedtime. You might not think much of it but it’s actually a huge game changer for your sleep quality when you stop eating right before bed. I have data from my Oura ring that supports this claim because I was hesitant too at first. It actually works because your resting heart rate will lower earlier in the night (due to the absence of a need to digest food), allowing you to get more deep sleep and recover better.
A second example would be the complete opposite: your sleep is bad, your food intake is insufficient or predominantly made up of processed products, your workouts make you feel very fatigued and less motivated, your stress is high, you’re becoming more moody, emotional or easily annoyed by trivial things, you start overanalyzing etc. In this scenario, it would be best to either take time off from the gym, do a deload** (either via a reduction in volume or intensity, which is often phase dependent) or train every other day or even two days with active recovery days planned in between.
Mind you, these active recovery days are actually meant to allow for recovery. Don’t start filling them in by doing extensive cardio sessions, meaning more than 60 minutes, even if they are steady state only.
Instead, focus on activities that activate the parasympathetic nervous system as much as possible: yoga (which is actually a great combination of meditation and mobility work that allows for better performance and a reduced risk of injury on training days), daily 10-20 minute walks at a leisurely pace, playing with your kids/dog/cat, doing house chores etc.
If you are somewhere in between these two examples, like your sleep is OK, your workouts still feel good and you’re recovering, you’re not a ball of energy but you’re no zombie either, then it is probably fine to do your workouts and cardio spread out over the same day or doing them on separate days.
The point is that your training needs to change depending on the context, not only the goal or the current phase you are in right now. If you feel rundown or tired, there’s no point in trying to accomplish what the program calls for. Unless you are a complete wreck, I would always encourage you to at least start the workout. Then, when you notice a severe drop off in performance on the first exercise (like 2 reps or more drop off on the second set), stop that exercise and proceed to the next one. If the drop off happens again, it’s time for you to go home and recover.
** It is customary to deload the training variable that is being emphasized the most in the current phase you’re at at the time of the deload. You can, however, also deload the variable that contributes most to how you’re currently feeling. Here’s a quick tip I got from Poliquin on how to decide which variable needs to be deloaded:
Is the trainee feeling lethargic, rundown, tired, doesn’t feel like doing anything? → maintain intensity (RPE and load the same), deload volume by 10% or all the way up to 50% depending on how severe the symptoms are.
Is the trainee experiencing frequent headaches, concentration and sleep issues (waking up in the middle of the night)? → maintain volume, decrease intensity either by decreasing load by 10% or decreasing RPE from 8-9 tot 6-7.
Your best bet as a type 2B will probably be to deload volume first, intensity second or even both of them when you feel really run down.
