Welcome to Effortless Swimming, the podcast for swimmers, triathletes and coaches. Join Australian swim coach Brenton Ford as he reveals the latest techniques and information to improve your swimming. Let’s dive right in. Hi Brenton Ford here. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. Today’s guest is Andre Abratovic and Andre is a mindset, health and well-being coach. And going a little further into that, he’s also a triathlete, previously a runner. And one thing that Andre specializes in is sleep. And the reason I wanted to get Andre on today was because for the last couple of months I’ve wanted to find someone to talk about the importance of sleep, how it can affect your performance in the pool or in your triathlons, and how it can affect your decisions and your effectiveness when it comes to work, family and sport. And Andre emailed me. He’s come into one of our freestyle clinics here in Melbourne.

And Andre emailed me and told me that he was a specialist in sleep and he’s been doing that for the last couple of years. And he works with a lot of executives and sports people in helping them get more control over their sleeping habits and helping them improve that. So I wanted to get Andre on the podcast to talk about that, some changes you can make to your sleeping habits so that you do perform better, you train better and you’re more effective in your day-to-day life. And he also showed me some very cool software that he uses when it comes to analyzing your sleep data and how you can use that to change what you’re currently doing. And this is something that I’m going to start doing for a couple of weeks to identify where I can improve my sleeping and how that’s going to improve my performance in sport and in my working life. So here is Andre Abradovic talking about how he got started in this area which is sleep.

Well I had a career in the military and then in the corporate world and it was very, very stressful and I would often get like five hours sleep a night and think I was a hero for doing that. We used to pat each other on the back in the corporate world for not actually getting enough sleep and people that would have to stop work at 10pm. We used to call wimps. So that was sort of my background and then when I actually put on weight and I wasn’t very well, I left the corporate world and started my journey in terms of really focusing on my running. I’m a runner, right? And I met a guy who, a senior executive who I was coaching because I started been coaching and he had sleep issues and I had sort of fixed my sleep a bit. But I ended up being referred to a guy that runs a company in Australia who do sleep analytics for big corporates. And I did some work with those guys in terms of coaching and they asked me if I was interested in being trained and being certified as a fatigue management coach.

So I could use the analytics software and the different sleep devices myself for my clients. And at the same time I used it for myself, learnt how the technology worked and put a focus on the importance of sleep myself. And I saw a dramatic change in my weight, my health, my mental clarity, my training performance. And then I decided that this is something really important. I learnt a lot and I started working with real people, myself on the sleep improvement side. Do you think there’s a big shift in the importance of sleep in today’s society compared to 10, 20 years ago where there’s that attitude of the harder you work, the less sleep you get, the better off you’ll do. Where you really sacrifice and you’re grinding and you’re just really working yourself as hard as you can. Do you feel like that shifted somewhat? I think there’s a lot of talk about it but honestly I’m not seeing people are taking notice of it because I believe people have a belief that it’s easier just to stay with the habits you have.

And it’s even, I think it could be getting worse with the horrible addiction we have with electronics. And then also the culture of alcohol in our country that people don’t understand that drinking doesn’t actually help improve your sleep but causes more problems. So I think there’s a lot of talk about it but I don’t think people are really taking action on it. I think there’s too many distractions and other things people have to do that are more important to them. And what, I mean you mentioned some of the changes that you saw when you started to get more sleep and I mean how long since you’ve made those changes to getting more sleep, how long has it been since you sort of started that and what results have you seen in your work life, your sporting life and family life? It’s probably been two years now and I think it took me 12 months to recover from 30 years of chronic sleep deprivation, probably took me 12 months and so that was sort of the recovery.

But the next 12 months which was really the optimisation stage, the things I’ve noticed combined with different other things I do, but as holistically I would say I wake up in the morning more energetic. I don’t actually need a alarm clock, I actually can wake up at 5.30, 6 o’clock most mornings without an alarm clock. I’m more stable during the day, my mental state is less fluctuating so I don’t go up and down and have a foggy brain during the day. I don’t crave sugary foods or foods that a lot of people crave like carbs when they wake up because I’m actually getting a good sleep. And I didn’t know that was an impact or an effect until I learnt about the science and neuroscience about sleep but I don’t get up and crave those types of foods. But I’m also a lot, I think the biggest thing is I’m a lot clearer in the head and I’m a lot less, I don’t get stressed anymore so I think a combination of exercise, sleep and nutrition are fundamental to less stress.

But I think the mental clarity and the ability to focus on a task and be very creative and have deep insights and that’s what I put back into my when I’m running on the bike or training. I can be totally focused on that thing I’m doing and being mindful and being in the moment because I have lots of energy and I’m not tired. My brain’s had time during the night to consolidate all those things and we can talk more about that later to be very prepared for the next day. Yeah and that’s something that I’ve noticed when I do get more sleep and me being a swimmer and a swimming coach I’m chronically sleep deprived just because of the early mornings and the late nights with coaching. So I’d say I’m probably a prime example of someone who doesn’t get enough sleep but when I do get enough sleep there’s none of that mental fogginess that I have during the week and especially when it comes down to sitting down and getting work done.

I find that I can get two hours work done of what would normally take me five or six hours and that’s all as a result of getting better sleep and you’re showing me some pretty cool software that we’ll talk about later. Before this call this software was just showing you effectiveness as a result of the sleep that you get and having a look at your data because I mean you’ve really dialed this in to be pretty much at the top of your game when it comes to getting the right amount of sleep and making the right choices with it. I think I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where you’re currently at with your sleeping and I mean when I first started chatting with you earlier last week I noticed that you seem to be really on top of your game and do you feel like sleep is a big part of that? It’s fundamental I mean you know I have a mantra that I’m a runner right because if I have that mantra that’s what I’ll be but if it wasn’t being a runner it would be I love my sleep.

So when I walk into my bedroom we’ve got a really nice bedroom I look at our big bed and I look at the bed and I actually it’s like with my bike my shift I kiss my bike before I ride and when I get off it because it’s beautiful. But it’s almost the same emotion thing this attachment to I’m in the bedroom now’s my time to sleep I have these mantras and feelings and beliefs about the importance of sleep. And it’s so powerful and you can draw a parallel to a swimmer right you know someone who has this desire to achieve to do the swim at a certain time they have these mantras and beliefs about swimming and their performance capability like you do as a superb swimmer I’m sure. You need to do these things with sleep so that’s what I do with sleep and I love my sleep and I have that belief that sleep is important to me and that’s a fundamental thing so you know more people die from lack of sleep and a lack of food yet how much time do we spend.

Obsessing about food and how much time do we not spend even thinking about sleep we throw it away like it’s a complete waste of time because you know you don’t eat while you sleep you don’t drink and you don’t have sex well most people don’t while you sleep so why would we do it. So to me yes sleep is one of those three things nutrition exercise and sleep sleep is one of those three most important things and I would say sleep is actually number one because if you can’t sleep properly you can’t perform. In exercise or in your career and it screws your whole nutrition up as we’ll talk later it drives ghrel and the hunger hormone and in women it drives leptin which is the which is the other hormone that affects women about when you stop eating. So it’s a profound effect and we can talk more about that so to me it’s absolutely critical and and you know there’s a couple of things you can do to help improve your sleep very easily and that’s one of those is taking 20 minute power naps during the day.

So when that’s something that I do to try and make up for that the tiredness of getting up early how many power naps a day when should you take them what are your general guidelines for that. Whenever you need them whenever you’re feeling if you’re feeling tired and if you’re feeling tired you take a power nap but no more than 20 minutes. Gotcha and that’s yeah that’s something I’ve been doing for quite a while and if I go for 45 60 minutes then I start to go back into that deep sleep phase and it’s yeah it takes longer to wake up and I don’t feel as refreshed as if I get those 20 minute naps. So that’s a good tip. One of the other things you mentioned and that we spoke about the other day was when you go to sleep it helps consolidate all of your thoughts and helps reorganize things in your brain. I haven’t explained it very well but can you tell me more about that and explain to the listeners what the purpose of sleep is.

Sure OK so one of the purposes of sleep the science tells us is processing and memory consolidation and what we know is as an example is that when you’ve tried to learn a task and if you’re sleep deprived it becomes very very difficult to try and learn a task and remember something. So this whole consolidation process is very critical so let’s you know what the science shows is that when you’re trying to solve complex problems and come up with really novel solutions it’s really the ability to do that’s really enhanced by good night sleep and they believe that there’s like a three fold advantage so you know imagine if you could by sleeping properly and putting a focus on sleep you could enhance your performance by three times in in one particular way. Now how that actually happens is that at night time we increase our creativity when we’re sleeping and what happens is the neural connections in our brain and the sympathetic connections are really important

and what they do is they lengthen themselves they strengthen and they work in an area in our brain called the hippocampus. So if I want to go a bit further into that maybe we can use a swimming example would that be useful do you think. Perfect. OK so let’s say you’re trying to correct your stroke and I do this all the time because I’m not a bad swimmer because if I say that I will be. I’m an improving swimmer but I’m a runner. I’m a runner so running is my best leg right so I do a lot of this so if we’re trying to correct our stroke so improving our catch or whatever. During the day when you’re doing that physically you’re actually activating the hippocampus which is a structure in your brain that’s around memory function. Now during the night when you’re actually sleeping the next night what happens is is is reactivation or what we call replay of that hippocampal activation and that happens as the brain’s

reprocessing these recently learned activities. So when you’re trying to learn to do something new that’s a new thing like putting your fingers in a certain way or keeping your elbow up or pointing your wrist down on this angle. But my coach has taught me that your brain says I’m trying to learn something new right I’m trying to learn something then at night your brain starts reprocessing that. And what we find is there’s a real relationship between the increase in that hippocampal activation during sleep and the amount of improvement the next day the next week. But what’s even more powerful and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this is because I love doing this is if we actually purposely dream about that stroke correction. That we’ve learnt that day before we go to bed not by watching it on a video because that’s not good for your sleep but we visualize and we think about it and we pretend we’re doing it.

The improvements can be outstanding and what this suggests is that this re-expression of this hippocampal activation during sleep reflects the offline processing of memory. And this leads to strengthening of those neural pathways in our brain improving our memory performance and this is what really drives our physical performance. So this has been known for years and years but people don’t put the two things together between sleep and what your brain actually knows. Yeah and that’s one of my favourite strategies for getting prepared for a race is before bed. It’s visualising how the race is going to play out or in an ideal situation how I’d like it to play out. And that’s something I used to do a lot when I was a teenager and training with a very heavy load and working towards an event that was 12 months out. And when it came time to racing things just happened automatically because I’d seen it happen so many times and that was because in bed every night I would visualize myself swimming that race how I’d like it to play out.

And that’s exactly what you’re talking about. So what do you visualize before you go to bed? Okay so as an example if we take a running, actually triathlon because I’ve made the switch to triathlon last year and moving from marathoning. And one of the things I practice and visualize is the transition. So when I coach athletes one of the things I work with them on is when you’re doing the swim there’s no use thinking or putting your mindset, and this is a bit different to sleep but it’s a very important thing, is there’s no use putting your mindset while you’re doing the swim about what’s going to happen when you get off the bike in the run. Because a lot of people stress about my hamstrings or quads are going to kill me. So if you put your intention to exactly what you’re doing at that time with your stroke in the swim is important but what I get people to focus on visually is the transition. So one of the things I focus on myself is the transition.

So what am I going to do as I’m getting out of the water with my wetsuit so I can get out of my wetsuit, not lose my goggles, not lose my swim cap and be on the bike in a minute and a half. So I visualize the first thing I do is I actually physically practice the transition. So I set my bike up at home on the driveway with my shoes with exactly the same things I’m going to wear on the race. So same shorts, same goggles, glasses, helmet, same towel, I lay it all out, I put my wetsuit on, I even jump in the shower so the wetsuit’s wet. I come out of the house, pull a zip down, do all that gump. So I practice it physically and then that night is when I do the mental visualization of exactly that except I picture it at the race venue if that makes sense. And that’s the sort of way I do it. So you’ve got to do the physical learning, the new activity first. You get the hippocampus working and the other parts of your brain, your visual cortex and other parts.

And then I go to bed and I think about that. Even when I’m swimming or when I’m running, sometimes I’ll visualize these different aspects and not even think about my running while I’m running. I just do it and get in the flow. So that’s one of the things I practice visually. And for the listeners who are athletes, which most of them are, some are coaches, some are parents. But for athletes in particular, what are some strategies or tactics that you use with your clients to help them get a better night’s sleep so that they can perform at a better level in their work and in their sporting life? Okay, great. All right, so the first thing is acknowledging the importance on your life of having good sleep. And I’d like to come back to the impact medically as well once we’ve gone through the tips if we have time. So acknowledging the importance is important because if you don’t acknowledge it, you’re not going to put emphasis on it.

Understanding the current sleep you have, your current level of performance of sleep and is it what is enough? And we should be getting seven and a half to eight hours sleep every single night and we shouldn’t be waking up tired in the morning, okay? The second thing or the third thing is around building mantras like I talked about wanting to go to sleep, not throwing it away. So sleep’s important to me. I’m going to perform better tomorrow in my training because I’m going to sleep well and having a positive statements around that. So building mantras around sleep. Now they’re sort of free around the mind and how you think, which is very powerful. Let’s now look at some practical things. So firstly, the bedrooms for two things and they both start with S. Sorry if that’s being a bit rude and one of them isn’t social networking. So in our house, we have a no electronics policy in our bedroom because a lot of people I’ve coached have bad sleep because they go to bed with their phone.

Well, they use their phone as an alarm clock and what ends up happening is they might go to bed at 10 o’clock but they won’t put their phone down until 1am and then they can’t understand why they’re not sleeping well. So buy an old-fashioned alarm clock and put your phone in the kitchen because it’s sleep time. That is the biggest thing I find with people that I’ve done sleep studies with. They take their phone to the bedroom and they get on the phone. Do you want to talk about what you do? You use a Garmin instead to wake yourself up? Oh yeah, okay, great. Well, I’ve got three Garmin watches. I’ve got my Swim watch, my Rum watch and my Race watch and before I go to bed, I lay my gear out on the chair, whatever I’m using the next day or I have my backpack there with my towel and stuff and I select my watch. So if I’m going swimming, I’ll put my 910 on and I set the alarm on it because a watch has an alarm.

Other people may not realise that. So before I even go to bed, I’m getting in the state of being an athlete tomorrow morning which gives me an intention of why I’m setting my alarm to wake up. Even though I’ll probably already be awake because I actually wake up automatically. But I’m setting my alarm for a purpose and that purpose isn’t to hit the snooze button six times. It’s actually to get out and train because I’m an athlete and I’ve got a race coming on. So I put the watch on, I set the alarm, therefore I don’t need a phone. I don’t need an alarm clock and I’m going to bed associating myself, wearing the watch that I’m going to get up and train with and it has a very powerful mental effect of intention if you do it enough. So that’s what I do myself. I was doing it a little bit in the past where I was leaving my phone in the kitchen using my watch to get me up and then I got back into the habit of taking my phone to bed and using that as the alarm.

But since we spoke last week, I’ve gone back to that habit and my sleep has been so much better and I’m getting to bed that little bit sooner because I’m not wasting time on the phone. That’s fantastic. That’s great. It’s such a simple thing to do but it just makes such a difference and I spend too much time in front of the computer and on the phone just with what I do and then those days where if I turn the phone off for half the day or the whole day, I just find myself thinking so much clearer and not getting distracted by stuff that isn’t important. So yeah, I took away a lot from when we spoke last week and just implementing some of those small changes has already made a difference. And one of the other things you mentioned as well was just getting ready for the next day. So if I’m going out cycling, I put my bike next to the door, I’ve got my cycling gear out, my food, my cards and money and all that stuff that you take on a ride.

It’s all ready to go that so when I wake up, it’s just get some food into me and head out the door. So I’m not worried about getting ready and needing to be somewhere in time and having to think about it. It’s all just ready to go the night before and I think that’s the same thing goes with doing work the next day. If you’ve got some important things you need to get done, writing them down the night before and for whatever reason, I find that my brain sort of manages or figures out a way to get those things done better and quicker than if I hadn’t thought about them the night before. Yeah, I’m writing a blog on the whole how to plan and organise and work with your brain around specific tasks. So maybe once I’ve written that we could do another session on that because that’s really important. But what you’re saying is absolutely right is if we build these habits around being prepared the night before, it has a profound impact.

And in fact, so you don’t have to think when you get up, that’s important because when we wake up we have a circadian dip, which means your mental effectiveness for about five minutes is a lot lower. So having that time where you’re on automatic pilot that you just don’t even think, you just put your gear on, everything’s there organised can make it a lot less stress, less stress as well. There’s a couple of other, I’ve got about another four hints if you want me to go through. So consistency in bedtime and wake time as much as possible. And I know that when people have kids that can be very hard, but trying to get into a rhythm of when you go to bed, when you wake up in the morning and not necessarily having huge sleepings on the weekend because that can upset your body rhythms. But if you are sleep deprived, the good thing is you can make up time, you can make up some of that sleep deprivation on the weekend, right?

The other, the last three is reading books in bed like real books, not kindles or iPads because that blue light just really screws up your body and it won’t let you go to sleep. Last two are around and these are the other most common. So there’s three things that I find the biggest things, electronics in the bedroom and then these last two, alcohol and food choices. So if you’re finding you’re waking up at three o’clock in the evening, think about, and that happens regularly, think about if you drink alcohol that night. So I don’t drink alcohol, but if people want to drink alcohol, that’s totally up to them. Judging them, I’m just saying, what happens is the alcohol starts your liver processing. That’s why you wake up at three o’clock in the morning because it’s toxic and we’re not actually supposed to drink it, it’s not good for your body as an athlete. So that’s the thing and also food, thinking about what you eat.

So if you’re not sleeping well, keep a diary of what you actually do with your food and alcohol and without any analytics or if you want to do the sleep program you can track yourself, how you’re sleeping and what you’re drinking and eating and make some changes. Usually high carbohydrate sugary meals don’t really help your sleep at night. The last one is the active mind and stress. As I said, there’s three things, electronics, alcohol, food as one and then stress. A lot of people have very stressful lives. I used to, they go to bed and all they think about is work. Have you ever done this where you’ve gone to bed and you’re thinking, oh, I’ve got to have the thing done for the next day, blah, blah, blah. Do you ever have that rumination going on that disrupts your sleep? Yeah, not as much anymore, but in the past it’s definitely been an issue where I just, I can’t stop thinking about work and work that I need to get done.

And it’s just, it was 24 seven and I couldn’t switch off because I was working on the computer until nine, 10 o’clock at night and I wasn’t able to switch that off and not think about it. But now I don’t really work after five o’clock. I won’t be on the computer. And another thing I do is most nights my wife and I will go for a walk. We’ll chat and just kind of debrief from the day and get rid of those, all those thoughts that you have going through your head when you’re just settling down after a day of work or a day of training. Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, that’s really good. And I used to, like you used to be, that was my life for 30 years. So here’s two helpful hints and strategies about how to reduce that. And guess what? They’re all around mindset. So having a belief that sleep is important and that you want to go to sleep and have a mantra around sleep is important at a fundamental level. And what you can do is when you’re lying in bed

and you’re having some thought come into your head that’s stressing you about work or even if it’s not stressing but you want to go to sleep, saying to yourself, I want to go to sleep. I need to sleep. I need, I want to perform tomorrow. Saying these types of things can help at one level a little bit. But the other thing I’m working with a client at the moment and what we’ve done with him is highly stressed. We’ve developed this capability where he puts his work bag at the door in the bedroom and if he starts thinking about work, he visualizes putting that thing like meeting with ex-person. He pitches writing that on a bit of paper, putting it in a little box, putting a ribbon on the box and putting that box in his bag and saying to himself, I’m prepared for the meeting. The meeting’s tomorrow. Now is my time for sleep. And I will not think about this again until tomorrow. Now, some people might think that’s a bit weird

but if you do these things for three weeks or four weeks and you practice them, they become habits and you find that you can forget about these things and you won’t ruminate over them continually. It might come into your mind but you then say, no, go away. There’s no positive intention for me thinking about this now because now is my time to sleep because I want to visualize my stroke correction or I want to lift my cadence on my run to 190 steps a minute. That’s what we replace those ruminations with. Can you talk a bit more about some of the other work that you’ve done with clients? I guess some case studies of people who have worked with you have analysed their sleep and then you’ve helped them make some changes to improve their lives as a result of their sleep. Yeah, okay, great. I had a very senior law enforcement officer who she was finding, she was very, very tired in the morning when she woke up and she’s actually written a testimonial on my website.

Her issue was the alarm clock issue. Within three weeks of us doing a sleep analysis program and having a coaching discussion, she bought a real alarm clock, she left her iPhone in the kitchen and she was waking up in the morning and was hitting the gym every morning, whereas for three years she’d been a gym member and just wouldn’t turn up because she was so tired in the morning. That’s so easy, right? But often you can’t understand this yourself. Another person is someone who is an executive at a senior company. She’s written me a testimonial as well. Hers was around acknowledgement that she had some habits around alcohol that weren’t serving her well and we had some quite emotional coaching discussions and talking about the long-term health impact of bad sleep, bad alcohol, she worked that out herself, but that if she didn’t improve her sleep and this was driven by her on a Thursday and a Friday just being exhausted

and almost being in a state of adrenal failure and it was all related to her sleep. So we did the report. She looked at how bad her sleep was. She looked at the fact that her mental effect in the afternoons was atrocious because that’s what this reporting tool does and she realized that if she wants to be successful, she’s not an athlete, if she wants to be successful in her career she needed to take action. So I’m still working with that client. It’s a long journey, but she’s taken some very positive steps also around her nutrition, so lowering the carbs and sugar she has but also the alcohol and the electronics. So she had all three going. She takes the alcohol and some bad choices for her around food, which she’s made now. And there’s one more, another lady actually who runs a big company, her own business. Within two weeks, she’d changed her whole sleep. She’d put a focus on her sleep. She’d changed her nutrition habits,

her alcohol habits, and she’s now going to run a half marathon this year that I’m coaching her for. In the past, she’d run maybe 200 meters and she’s doing a 10K run in February. She wants to do 48 to 50 minutes and her whole life’s changed just because she’s improved her sleep. So it’s really, it’s so much fun working with people that either are athletes or not athletes that within three weeks, you can have them totally flip the dial on one behavior that changes their whole performance during the day. It’s just wonderful. That’s the thing about sleep is it’s something that anyone can change. It doesn’t require, you know, it’s not like swimming where there’s so much technique involved. You know, everyone knows how to sleep and it’s just, it’s such a performance enhancing thing that you can tweak to get better results in what you’re doing. And when you show me the analysis, the sleep analysis software before we jumped on this call,

one of the things it analyzes is it looks at your effectiveness during the day as a result of your sleep and it compares your effectiveness to having a blood alcohol reading of having a few drinks. So can you talk a little bit about that and how a lack of sleep is equivalent to having alcohol in your system and how that can affect your decision making and other things like that? Well, yeah, okay, that’s a good question. So, you know, the algorithm in the software looks at your mental effect in this, your sleep and it just draws an equivalence to the blood alcohol reading. I don’t know the detail around how it does it, but the science behind it and the 20 years of research and millions of dollars that was put into it by the US military and Harvard developed that capability. But it can be quite scary that if you, one client, in fact the report I was going through with you without the client’s name on it showed that this client was having

three to four drinks of alcohol a night, three or four nights in a row and her mental effectiveness plus having bad sleep because then she’d be waking up at three o’clock, four o’clock. She was essentially getting three hours, four hours, five hours sleep a night. The next morning she was at 0.05 until about 7.30 a.m. So, she was driving her child she was driving her child or doing things in a car that had a significant danger category because her blood alcohol equivalence of her mental effectiveness was 0.05. Now that doesn’t mean you’d take her blood test and it would show that. It’s just drawing on the science that she was so mentally non-effective that it’s the same danger. Yet when she has good sleep her mental effectiveness is not at that state. It’s at about, you know, 85% of mental effectiveness whereas my average is about 96 to 97%, but that’s because I work on my sleep and it’s important to me. As you say, everyone can change

their habits to improve their sleep. You don’t need to buy anything. You don’t need to buy a drug. You don’t need to, you know, in fact one of the things people don’t understand is that sleep can help you, alcohol can help you go to sleep a little bit short term, but it’s very bad for you in the longer term because it can actually screw up your body and your biological system so it harms your neural processing and your memory consolidation when you’re actually going to sleep. So you’re not doing, while it may help you go to sleep on an occasional basis it’s not helping your brain function that night and it can actually, it works as a depressant so it’s better not to have it to help you go to sleep. I guess the other thing which we haven’t really talked about or dive into is this whole association between weight gain and bad sleep. Would that be something you want to spend a minute or two on? Yeah, definitely. And that’s something I’ve noticed in myself

is when I get lack of sleep just craving food all the time especially at 2, 3 o’clock in the afternoon getting those cravings for anything of bread or sugars and stuff. So yeah, can you explain that and the relationship between sleep and weight gain? That’d be great. And as an athlete, as people listen to this call I’m sure they would like to be lean. I’m sure they’d like not to be if there’s any on the call listening that might be a kilo or two overweight I’m not sure but if you’re an athlete you want to be lean and sleep can help you get there. So, you know, there’s actually a scientific fact that says if you’re getting less than 5 hours sleep a night there’s a 50% likelihood you’ll be obese. Now, I’m sure that’s not the athletes but that’s the context. So, the connection is that if we have less sleep it gives rise to this hormone called ghrelin and this gets released into the brain and that hormone says to the brain

something’s wrong here and the brain then says ah, I need sugar, I need carbohydrates, right? And that then leads to weight gain and you’ve just said it, you wake up or in the afternoon you’re hungry but most people feel it in the morning. So, there’s an inclination to overeat when we have bad sleep for men but in women what happens is it actually reduces their desire to eat which can be actually bad if you’re an athlete but the dangerous thing for women is this hormone called leptin and this is a hormone we need to really focus on because this is the hormone that says I need to stop eating, right? And what happens is as the cells produce leptin it changes body fat levels and the more you have the more it makes leptin, right? And it enters the bloodstream it circulates through your system and leptin binds to these proteins in your blood and then it goes up into your brain, it works in your brain and it works in your hypothalamus

which is that memory centre and leptin actually tells you when it’s time to stop eating. Now, if you have a problem with leptin which is generated by bad sleep you will continue to eat and you will put on weight because your brain is telling you to keep eating even though you’re full. So, at a deep level there’s this hormone impact of bad sleep around ghrel and the hunger hormone and leptin the hormone that tells you to stop eating and the last thing is that it also drives this desire to have fructose which is natural sugar from fruit which actually causes you to put on weight processed foods, carbs they’re the things that are driven by having bad sleep it’s just such a fundamental thing that and there’s a lot of science to back it up as well that bad sleep causes weight gain as an athlete you don’t want to have weight gain you want to be lean you want to have good weight muscle, power to weight ratio for all of your sport

and your sleep can have a massive impact on that. It’s almost like if you were to if you were to put I’ll talk about all of the benefits that you get from having a good night’s sleep if you were to package it up and put it in a pill it would be like a miracle cure or like a miracle pill but all it is is sleep something that’s so fundamental to what you do and something that anyone can improve that it’s surprising that more people don’t take advantage of it and I guess that’s part of knowing the importance of sleep as well something that we spoke about at the start but I didn’t know all of the advantages of getting a good night’s sleep can have to your day to day life well I think the take away point here for people is that if we live to the year of 90s if we live to 90 years old and we’re getting the right amount of sleep that we should have we’ll sleep for 36% of our life so 32 years so at a really deep level one would think

that there’s a reason for that sleep is the most important behavioural experience we actually have it is the most important thing we do as a behaviour in our life so there must be something important about it and the bottom line is that if we have bad sleep the function of our genes is changed and this is really important because it increases inflammation screws up our metabolism reduces our immunity but the best thing is we can change it yeah absolutely and one thing that we spoke about at the start of this call was putting something together for the listeners of the podcast so there’s a service that you offer which is this sleep analysis program and you’ve put together a bit of a discount or a special offer for people listening to the podcast so can you talk a bit about that and what people who are interested in this can do with you and this is something that I’m going to do as well because when you showed me the software and the analytics

it was really interesting to see how it can affect your performance and looking at your statistics and data you’ve really got this dialed in and you’re doing such a good job of it that your data is kind of a little bit I wouldn’t say it’s not boring but it’s right on track which is what you want but compared to most people I think where there’s dips in their effectiveness there’s a lot of changes in their sleep they wake up in the middle of the night your data is really spot on and I’m interested to see where I’m at with this and how I can use it to improve my performance in triathlon and in swimming and also just when it comes to my effectiveness with doing work so can you explain to the listeners what the sleep analysis program is? Sure and you’ve got to remind me to bring your band out on Saturday because I’m doing your swim clinic and I’ll bring it on Saturday ready to go for you so don’t let me forget that

so the program, there’s two programs and the first one is what we call Capture and Insights and that’s where you wear a sleep recording device it’s called a Ready Band it’s like a Fitbit except it’s an FDA approved so it’s a medical device you can’t actually go and buy them you wear this device for 14 days you never take it off just wear it on your wrist it has an actor graph in it and it measures your movements at the end of the 14 days when I send it to you I send two express post envelopes things with return postage you put it in that you send it back to me I then suck the data off it I then produce a report and then we do a Skype session where I show you all of the insights so we’ve captured the data it goes into the analytics engine in the cloud and then we do an insight coaching session for an hour where we look at the data the client keeps a bit of a diary which I’ll send them around their electronic usage their stress levels during the day

their nutrition at a general level I had a really bad day today because I ate takeaway food or no I ate normal healthy food or I got smashed this night really that’s why you might not have slept that day so we keep a diary so the person can see what they’re doing and their habits and behaviours and how that may or may not affect their sleep so we do a one hour session they get some takeaways from that and that program is normally 350 I had it on a Christmas special for 2.99 but what I’m doing for any of your clients is I’ll do it for 2.49 for the next 14 days that doesn’t mean they have to take it they just have to sign up by then and then that includes sending the device to them putting it on and then me doing the report and having a one hour session where they can see the data on the screen now on my website there’s a video showing how the software works there’s an example of the sleep report in PDF that they can download as well

there’s also then a four month program where it covers four one month coaching sessions for an hour each time and then doing another 14 day study at the end so they can actually see how they were and then four months later how they’re sleeping now and I’ll put together a special price for that which we’ll include in the podcast information I just haven’t worked that one out yet but the special deal for the initial one is 2.49 yeah that’s awesome and I’ll put that at effortlesswimming.com and I mean most people will listen to this either through iTunes or through an app on their Android phone or on the website so go to effortlesswimming.com for all of those details and I appreciate you putting together that offer for people because when you show me through it I like that it’s trackable and that you don’t really need to you don’t need to do anything to get all of this data and then you can just start to make those simple changes

to start to improve your effectiveness and you can actually see the results of it it’s like going to one of our freestyle clinics where you know what pace or what time you’re doing for your events and then you can come to a clinic you start to make those changes with your stroke you start to make those changes in training and then six or 12 weeks later you have another event and you can see that improvement and it’s measurable and that’s what I think is really great about this sleep data it just makes it a whole lot more measurable so I’m really looking forward to doing that over the next couple of weeks it’s going to be great. Excellent, well look thanks for your time having me on the show and I look forward to talking again and I’m happy to answer any questions anyone’s got if they want to ping me in whatever way you want to do it more than happy to provide some other advice as well and I look forward to seeing you on Saturday

for a great swimming session I’ve been so excited about it it’s going to be great. Yeah like I was looking forward to it and how can people get in touch with you or connect with you so website, social media what’s the best way? I’m on Facebook just Andre running Obradovic you know linked in I’m all over that Twitter and my website’s just AndreObradovic.com so they can go there there’s the thing they can fill me out a contact form and get in touch that way or Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook whatever they want to do. Fantastic thanks for being on the podcast Andre really appreciate it and look forward to seeing you on Saturday. Okay cheers.