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The 8 Hours of Sleep Myth for Longevity and Muscle Building After 40 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you've been told you have to have eight hours of sleep or your training and fat loss just won't work, or you've skipped a session after a bad night because of it, this episode is for you.
• 0:09
  Philip Pape: Today I am evaluating that claim.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: And that includes a randomized crossover trial where they actually cut people's sleep and measured what happened.
• 0:18
  Philip Pape: You'll learn what a bad night really costs you in the gym, what it costs you for the rest of your day, which is a little bit bigger actually, and one change to make tomorrow that covers both of them.
• 0:32
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:42
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and today we're gonna revisit sleep.
• 0:47
  Philip Pape: And I've often said, hey, sleep is a foundation.
• 0:49
  Philip Pape: Sometimes I've put sleep on the biggest pedestal as the root of all evil when it comes to your inability to achieve certain goals.
• 0:58
  Philip Pape: And sometimes I don't even talk about it.
• 0:59
  Philip Pape: So what we're gonna talk about today is where does this all fit in?
• 1:03
  Philip Pape: How much do you really need?
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: How much impact does it make?
• 1:05
  Philip Pape: Because at the end of the day, what I care about is practicality.
• 1:08
  Philip Pape: I don't want to tell people on this podcast, you need to optimize everything and here's the perfect way to do everything, because that's just not gonna work.
• 1:15
  Philip Pape: You're not gonna do it, I'm not gonna do it, and you know, don't always need to, right?
• 1:19
  Philip Pape: There's a point of diminishing returns.
• 1:22
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're listening, you're probably on the older side, at least into your 30s and 40s, maybe over 50 or 60, and your sleep is not what it was in your 20s.
• 1:31
  Philip Pape: I mean, I know as a teenager, I could sleep 12 hours, I could sleep till 11 or 12 during college.
• 1:36
  Philip Pape: I could sleep to, you know, all hours of the day, no problem.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: I never had to get up to go to the bathroom.
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: And as I got older and as I had kids and as stress starts to build and all of these other things, your patterns change.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: Hey, you're up at three in the morning for no reason.
• 1:50
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's to go to the bathroom, maybe not.
• 1:52
  Philip Pape: Maybe you've got some insomnia, maybe you have issues with falling asleep, maybe you have issues with snoring and things like sleep apnea.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: And maybe you got seven or eight hours of sleep and then don't feel like you slept, all of those things.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: Then we have our smartphones, we have our screens, we we get obsessed over our numbers, like on our aura ring or our watch, where it gives us this indictment, this grade, this sleep score, and you know, our recovery is X percent, 41, 89, whatever the number is.
• 2:19
  Philip Pape: And now you're kind of obsessed over that.
• 2:21
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're inconsistent with the gym, or maybe you are going to the gym, but now you don't have enough time to sleep.
• 2:25
  Philip Pape: And I'm just kind of laying it all out there that these are the problems that you, dear listener, have talked to me about and that I've experienced myself.
• 2:33
  Philip Pape: Underneath all of it is are these rules about sleep.
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: And it goes something like this Hey, if you didn't sleep, maybe you shouldn't go to the gym because you're not gonna recover as well.
• 2:42
  Philip Pape: Or hey, if you don't get at least that like solid eight hours of sleep, that is the one thing you have to fix above all else.
• 2:49
  Philip Pape: And there's different variations of that.
• 2:50
  Philip Pape: So in today's episode, we are gonna talk about what the actual sleep guidelines say.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: Secondly, we're gonna talk about what a short night of sleep does to you.
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: Like what is the cost, both with your session and in the time after that, of the 14 hours after it to be precise.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: And third, we're gonna go over three rules that I would actually use.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: And none of them has to do with the number of hours.
• 3:13
  Philip Pape: Stick around to the end because I have a specific number for what a very short night costs in the hours afterward.
• 3:20
  Philip Pape: It's even bigger cost if you're a woman past menopause, and two ways that are pretty simple to offset that and be in a much better position.
• 3:31
  Philip Pape: Okay, so let's start with where something like eight hours came from.
• 3:35
  Philip Pape: It's kind of like the 10,000 steps.
• 3:37
  Philip Pape: It's like, where did that come from?
• 3:38
  Philip Pape: Oh, okay, it came from some Japanese company years ago, right?
• 3:42
  Philip Pape: But from the sleep perspective, it comes from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.
• 3:48
  Philip Pape: Back in 2015, they got together a panel of 15 experts.
• 3:52
  Philip Pape: They ran this formal consensus process, and they published that adults should sleep seven or more hours a night on a regular basis to promote optimal health, and that six or fewer is just not adequate to sustain health and safety.
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: So that's the guideline.
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: That's where we get these seven or more hours.
• 4:11
  Philip Pape: So if you're getting seven and change, and you know, you feel like it's not enough because you should be getting eight or something like that.
• 4:17
  Philip Pape: No, you're actually doing pretty good according to those guidelines.
• 4:20
  Philip Pape: And I personally, this is a struggle of mine, even when I work really hard on my routine and moving things around and talk to my wife and like trying to make the schedule work.
• 4:29
  Philip Pape: You know, you get into parts of your life, times in your life where sleep is just hard to come by.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: Now, notice that there's no upper limit on that one when they say at least seven hours.
• 4:39
  Philip Pape: And of course, they're not going to talk about other activities like exercise, lifting, building muscle, because these groups tend to focus on one thing, right?
• 4:47
  Philip Pape: The sleep groups here were evaluating population health outcomes, things like cardiovascular disease, mortality, even driving accidents, accidents while people driving their cars.
• 4:56
  Philip Pape: They weren't evaluating how it affects lean mass, body composition, things like that, right?
• 5:00
  Philip Pape: They they almost never do that.
• 5:02
  Philip Pape: So let's start digging into the research, shall we?
• 5:04
  Philip Pape: There's a study by Nedelcheva and colleagues, 2010 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, where there were there were just 10 people in the design.
• 5:13
  Philip Pape: Okay, just 10, three women and seven men, average age 41.
• 5:17
  Philip Pape: They were overweight, sedentary, they were not lifters.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: And it was a crossover study, which are pretty cool.
• 5:22
  Philip Pape: I find that crossover studies work well when you have the smaller sample size because everybody does both conditions.
• 5:28
  Philip Pape: And in this case, it was for 14 days on each condition, one on a moderate calorie deficit with either eight and a half hours of sleep or five and a half hours of sleep.
• 5:39
  Philip Pape: So interesting.
• 5:40
  Philip Pape: They they isolated it to the length of sleep.
• 5:43
  Philip Pape: And they found that total weight loss came out the same, about three kilograms either way.
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: But what the group that, not the group, but because everybody did both, but when they got adequate sleep, they lost 1.4 kilograms of fat.
• 5:56
  Philip Pape: And when they were sleep deprived, they lost only 0.6 kilograms of fat.
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: And then the other way, they lost 1.5 kilograms of fat-free mass.
• 6:04
  Philip Pape: So that's lean mass, what we don't want to lose, on adequate sleep, but then they lost even more on restricted sleep.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: So the share of the weight that came off as fat dropped by more than half.
• 6:17
  Philip Pape: And the fat-free mass loss went up in the sleep-deprived group.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: So the body composition movement was not good when you didn't get that much sleep.
• 6:27
  Philip Pape: Now, that's just one study, again, just 10 people, and you have to take it with a grain of salt, as always.
• 6:33
  Philip Pape: So when we throw around specific numbers, it's because that's what's been studied at various thresholds.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: But I think many can agree that, hey, getting seven and a half or eight hours of sleep versus five and five hours of sleep, there's a meaningful difference there for most human beings.
• 6:46
  Philip Pape: Now, what happens to people who lift weights when they sleep less?
• 6:49
  Philip Pape: Well, I don't think there's a study on that.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: There's no trial of resistance-trained adults on chronic sleep restriction where muscle growth is the outcome.
• 6:58
  Philip Pape: Not even a small trial, not even a badly designed trial.
• 7:00
  Philip Pape: I couldn't find it.
• 7:01
  Philip Pape: If you know different, let me know.
• 7:03
  Philip Pape: It's always difficult to find things, or when you find them, you think it's on this and it's really on something else.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: So when anybody says that like short sleep kills your gains, it's not based on research.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: Okay, but it probably is based on a lot of anecdote and coaching and you know, years and years of experience, plus personal experience when people understand that, hey, when I don't get enough sleep, it's gonna affect everything in my life.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: What we do have is though, is mechanistic work.
• 7:29
  Philip Pape: There's one that I really like from Seyner and colleagues in 2020 in the Journal of Physiology.
• 7:34
  Philip Pape: They took 24 healthy young men with five nights of four hours in bed, which is awful.
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: I would not want to be one of those guys.
• 7:44
  Philip Pape: Just four hours of bed five nights in a row, and they measured myofibular protein synthesis.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: That's the muscle-specific protein synthesis, and it decreased under sleep restriction.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: But there was a third arm in the study where people did high-intensity interval exercise during those nights.
• 8:03
  Philip Pape: And in that group, their protein synthesis was maintained at control levels.
• 8:10
  Philip Pape: So the thing that protected the muscle for the sleep-deprived group was the training.
• 8:16
  Philip Pape: And when I say training, in this case, again, it's cycling intervals.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: So we're not talking about lifting weights, but I think the general idea that you are moving your body and using it, there's something to that.
• 8:27
  Philip Pape: Now, the best chronic evidence we have actually came out this year from Zureikot and colleagues in the annals of internal medicine.
• 8:34
  Philip Pape: They pulled together two randomized crossover trials of 95 adults.
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: All of them have habitual seven plus hour routines for their sleep.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: And were these people were at elevated cardiometabolic risk.
• 8:48
  Philip Pape: The phases in the trial were six weeks long.
• 8:51
  Philip Pape: And in the restriction phase, they cut time in bed by an hour and a half.
• 8:56
  Philip Pape: So in re but so in reality, it worked out to sleeping about 78 minutes less.
• 9:01
  Philip Pape: In reality.
• 9:02
  Philip Pape: So, in other words, the manipulation of their sleep time worked, which sometimes doesn't happen in research.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: Research on calories are like, yeah, we decreased our calories by 500, but in reality, they were only down by 100.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: Or in reality, they stayed at maintenance, right?
• 9:16
  Philip Pape: So in this case, they in reality slept on average 78 minutes less.
• 9:20
  Philip Pape: What happened?
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: Their body weight went up by about half a kilogram, so call it a pound over six weeks.
• 9:26
  Philip Pape: Waste circumference went up by about a half a centimeter.
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: Now, they're small, but they're consistent, and they go in the direction that you would expect when you are sleep deprived, you know, relative to your baseline, because again, it's compared to what they were doing before.
• 9:42
  Philip Pape: However, energy intake did not go up measurably, and total daily energy expenditure didn't change either.
• 9:49
  Philip Pape: And I say that because there are studies that show big differences in an ad limitum consumption of food.
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: Like you tend to eat more when you're sleep deprived.
• 9:57
  Philip Pape: And again, that's usually comparing something like five and a half to eight hours, so big, big difference.
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: And in this case, again, they dropped by 78 minutes.
• 10:05
  Philip Pape: But what did go up was their sedentary time.
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: These people just sat around more.
• 10:11
  Philip Pape: And that's probably why they gained a little weight, right?
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: Even though it seems like their daily energy expenditure was unchanged.
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: Um, and we're gonna actually come back to this at the end of the episode because I have some practical tips around this that you're gonna find interesting.
• 10:23
  Philip Pape: Now, this seems to somewhat disagree with the research from 2017 that I've brought up multiple times about sleep deprivation raising energy intake, like you eat three or four hundred more calories a day without a rise in expenditure.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: But some of these studies are measured over days rather than weeks.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: Though that one was in a lab.
• 10:43
  Philip Pape: Also, the variability between individuals is much larger.
• 10:46
  Philip Pape: Some people were eating like 800 calories less to 1400 calories more.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: So there's a lot of variation.
• 10:51
  Philip Pape: So I'm not going to compare them.
• 10:54
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna say that no matter what, it seems like, you know, over the short term, being sleep deprived can definitely cause you to eat more.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: And over the medium term, we think that maybe it causes you to move less as well.
• 11:05
  Philip Pape: So it just tends to cause all sorts of bad things that we don't like.
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: Now, I want to quickly mention my app Fitness Lab because it's highly relevant here.
• 11:15
  Philip Pape: Because Fitness Lab has an evening debrief every day where it asks about your sleep and your energy, your hunger, your stress, your soreness on a one to 10 scale.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: And it measures things like your movement and your sitting time, which is really the whole thing this episode is about.
• 11:30
  Philip Pape: It's not just about sleep, it's about how sleep interacts with all the other things you're doing to help or hurt your goals.
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're using an iPhone, Fitness Lab can pull up to 85 Apple Health metrics.
• 11:40
  Philip Pape: So it's actually pulling in a lot of your sleep and recovery data there.
• 11:44
  Philip Pape: If you use an Android, we're working on it, we're working on Google Health.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: It takes a long time for Google to approve it.
• 11:48
  Philip Pape: So just stay tuned.
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: But you can still use the app and the evening check-in and answer it manually.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: And it's still highly, highly powerful to do that.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: Now, why am I bringing this up in an episode that is arguing against being obsessed with your sleep?
• 12:01
  Philip Pape: Because I don't want you to be obsessed with it.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: I simply want you to track things and be able to make simple behavior choices based on it, as opposed to getting overly consumed by things like sleep scores and HRV and stuff like that.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: So Fitness Lab, which by the way, go to winsonwaits.com/slash app to check it out.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: Before you buy anything, you can get a free custom fat loss muscle building plan.
• 12:23
  Philip Pape: The app doesn't, you know, judge you for any of this stuff.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: It helps you use that data so that you can train better.
• 12:30
  Philip Pape: So, like when you log a training session and asks whether movement felt easier or harder, and it said it sees that you slept badly and you were stressed or you sat around all day, it's going to correlate that data and over time understand your patterns and what you should work on that will move the needle the most.
• 12:48
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 12:48
  Philip Pape: And as much as I love the aura ring and the Apple Watch and all the data you get from that, the problem with all this data flowing in and like a fire hose is like, what do you do with it?
• 12:57
  Philip Pape: What do you actually do with it?
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: So go to witsawaits.com slash app if you want to take a look at how that works, wits and weights.com slash app.
• 13:05
  Philip Pape: And it's a great tool to put your sleep next to your training and have them work together.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 13:11
  Philip Pape: So what would I actually do when it comes to sleep?
• 13:15
  Philip Pape: Three things.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: Okay, three things, make sure to take notes because this is where you're gonna have some actions.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: First, and this is the big one, never let a bad night be an excuse not to train the next day.
• 13:26
  Philip Pape: There's actually a systematic review and meta-analysis from Grandau and colleagues in 2022.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: It's in sports medicine, if you want to look it up.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: And what it shows is that acute partial sleep loss produces small strength decrements or decreases on the order of a few percent.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: And those decrements get bigger as the bad nights stack on top of each other.
• 13:48
  Philip Pape: Now, a few percent isn't nothing, but it's also strikes me as a big excuse you can use that I don't want you to.
• 13:56
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 13:57
  Philip Pape: The day after you have a bad night of sleep, keep your training session scheduled, keep the load where it is, don't try to change everything, don't make an excuse to slack off or not train with effort or to reduce the reps or sets or whatever.
• 14:09
  Philip Pape: You may be surprised when you go in that you just feel great.
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: You feel strong.
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: I mean, I've gone into a gym and felt kind of weak and tired when I had a great night of sleep, and vice versa.
• 14:18
  Philip Pape: Just showing up and getting that stimulus moves the needle tremendously.
• 14:22
  Philip Pape: And guess what?
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: Here's the cool thing training itself is doing something specific even when you are underslept.
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: And wouldn't you rather have that than not having that and being underslept?
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's the first thing.
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: The second thing to do is I want you to focus on regularity, right, or consistency instead of sleep duration.
• 14:42
  Philip Pape: For many, that's often the place where they can get that aha moment and really fix some of these issues for them.
• 14:48
  Philip Pape: There's a study from Windred and colleagues in 2024 in the journal Sleep, great name for a journal about sleep.
• 14:55
  Philip Pape: And it was a big one, almost 61,000 people in the UK biobank, and they used accelerometer data.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: They built something called a sleep regularity index, which essentially is how similar your sleep and wake timing is from one day to the next.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: So are you going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time?
• 15:15
  Philip Pape: How much variation is there?
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: And the people in the more regular groups had around 20 to 48% lower all cause mortality than the least regular group.
• 15:27
  Philip Pape: And then in their model comparison, that this regularity, this consistency predicted mortality better than hours in bed did duration.
• 15:36
  Philip Pape: Now, this is observational.
• 15:37
  Philip Pape: It's an association, right?
• 15:39
  Philip Pape: It's a correlation, it's not necessarily cause and effect.
• 15:42
  Philip Pape: And it's from the UK Biobank, Biobank with all the problems that come with that.
• 15:46
  Philip Pape: Okay, I'll get those in a minute because I do think they matter.
• 15:49
  Philip Pape: But I always care about things you can control.
• 15:51
  Philip Pape: And duration, even though you can technically control it, it's often hard, harder to control it.
• 15:58
  Philip Pape: And some parts of it you can't at all.
• 16:00
  Philip Pape: Like even if you intend to sleep eight hours and you have you're in bed long enough, sometimes you just don't, or you can't, if that makes sense.
• 16:08
  Philip Pape: But you can decide what time to go to bed and wake up.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: And that seems to benefit people when they do that regularly, even on the weekends, all seven days, including Saturday, right?
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: Instead of, yeah, I don't like I don't want you sleeping 10 hours on Saturday, but then five hours Monday through Friday, that's gonna really wreak havoc.
• 16:24
  Philip Pape: So that's the second one is that regularity.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: The third one is to stop grading yourself based on your sleep scores from wearables, like from your ring.
• 16:33
  Philip Pape: Hey, I have an aura ring, I have an Apple Watch, I love data too, but we have to be balanced with how we use this stuff.
• 16:41
  Philip Pape: There was a clinical sleep lab comparison where the aura ring came in around 50% accurate across all four sleep stages.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: Now, I'm sure they're getting better.
• 16:52
  Philip Pape: I know they are.
• 16:52
  Philip Pape: Again, I have one, so it's not a knock on them.
• 16:54
  Philip Pape: I'm just trying to be honest with like what the data shows.
• 16:57
  Philip Pape: I think it's great at telling you whether you were asleep or awake and measuring like objective things, of course, like HRV, oxygen, um, temperature, things like that.
• 17:08
  Philip Pape: And and the differences between those can tell you about whether your sleep is better or not.
• 17:12
  Philip Pape: I'm not sure it's very good at the sleep stages, though, which is uh what a lot of us rely on it for.
• 17:17
  Philip Pape: And therefore, if you see that the deep sleep is like nowhere near it supposed to be, and you get freaked out by that and stressed out, maybe you shouldn't be.
• 17:25
  Philip Pape: If it's 53% accurate, that's like a coin flip.
• 17:28
  Philip Pape: So be careful.
• 17:28
  Philip Pape: That's all I'm gonna say.
• 17:30
  Philip Pape: You know, they're gonna push it hard.
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: They're talking about all their improvements and new upgrades and everything and the shiny new versions and all that.
• 17:35
  Philip Pape: I get it, I get it.
• 17:36
  Philip Pape: I'm beholden to that, just like the next person.
• 17:39
  Philip Pape: There's mattresses, there's magnesium blends, there's, you know, all the things that say that they're gonna help you with sleep.
• 17:46
  Philip Pape: Just be careful and make sure it moves the needle, as much as the easy things you can control, like when you go to sleep and wake up.
• 17:52
  Philip Pape: Now, there were quite a few other studies that I looked at for this episode, and I honestly don't want to bore you to death.
• 17:58
  Philip Pape: I think one thing we're seeing from research over and over again is that activity is the biggest single lever when it comes to the interaction here with sleep.
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: And that the optimal sleep is probably somewhere around seven or seven and a half hours.
• 18:14
  Philip Pape: It's not necessarily eight hours, right?
• 18:16
  Philip Pape: For many, many years, me growing up in the 80s, the eight seem to be the magic, like at least eight, but now it's probably at least seven or seven and a half, and that all of these things are bidirectional.
• 18:25
  Philip Pape: Like sleep affects your training and your movement.
• 18:28
  Philip Pape: Your training and your movement also affect your sleep.
• 18:30
  Philip Pape: We really, we do have some really good fit data that I did want to share though on steps.
• 18:36
  Philip Pape: So regarding steps, Pollock and colleagues in 2022, they took 15 separate studies with more than 47,000 adults, and they saw that the mortality benefit of steps plateaued around 6 to 8,000 steps a day for adults 60 and older, and 8 to 10,000 a day for those under 60.
• 18:56
  Philip Pape: We also see that muscle strengthening activity, fancy word for lifting weights, is associated with a 10 to 17% lower all cause mortality, independent of exercise, and the dose response starts to peak around 60 minutes a week.
• 19:14
  Philip Pape: So 60 minutes a week is not very much to hit.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: This is why I tell people going from nothing to a couple training sessions a week is gonna be massively beneficial.
• 19:23
  Philip Pape: And sleep has nothing to do with whether you can get into those sessions in the gym, but sleep has other effects, and then whether you go to the gym and whether you move enough also affect your sleep.
• 19:33
  Philip Pape: So sleep and movement and food all work together as like one combined dose, I'm gonna say it's like one big dose of your fitness lifestyle, right?
• 19:43
  Philip Pape: If one of them is down for the count, okay, if your sleep was terrible last night, hey, the other two are still available to you.
• 19:50
  Philip Pape: Don't make the excuse.
• 19:52
  Philip Pape: Go after those, still eat well, still train, all right?
• 19:56
  Philip Pape: And you're gonna be far better off in the long term from a consistency basis, which is the piece I want I kind of started this episode with is like not trying to be perfect, but doing your best to kind of keep these things fairly regular.
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: Now, before we wrap up, I have that number related to sitting that I promised you earlier, and two specific ways to offset how bad sitting too much can be for your health.
• 20:20
  Philip Pape: Okay, we'll talk about that in a second.
• 20:22
  Philip Pape: But if this episode hits you in terms of maybe making you feel a little bit better about what actually moves the needle with sleep and the fact that you don't have to be perfect with this, that you can make it work.
• 20:34
  Philip Pape: And I'm not even getting into all the little sleep hacks that people focus so much on, because there are really some simple things to start with, one of those being the regularity, and the other one being to have your other things in order, like training and movement.
• 20:45
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• 20:47
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• 20:49
  Philip Pape: That is a great way to support the show.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: Not only that, if you give me a review, five-star review, that can help as well, but just text this to a friend if you think they'll find it interesting.
• 20:59
  Philip Pape: Okay, so here's here's a really cool number that comes from the research related to sleep.
• 21:03
  Philip Pape: When people researchers cut people's sleep by about 78 minutes a night, which we talked about in the study earlier, they did not eat more, but they sat more.
• 21:11
  Philip Pape: So I mentioned that earlier.
• 21:12
  Philip Pape: The details are that they sat 17 extra minutes a day and close to 30 extra minutes a day for men and post-menopausal women.
• 21:20
  Philip Pape: So to offset this, all we need to do are some very simple things.
• 21:24
  Philip Pape: One is take two 10-minute walks after meals.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: Walking after meal is one of the best things you can do for your health, for your digestion, for your blood sugar, and for your steps.
• 21:34
  Philip Pape: It's really one of the best times to actually do your walks.
• 21:37
  Philip Pape: So a 10-minute walk after breakfast or lunch, a 10-minute walk after dinner.
• 21:41
  Philip Pape: And then in other trials, when they looked at sedentary breaks, like taking a break while you're sitting a long time, five minutes of light walking every 30 minutes.
• 21:49
  Philip Pape: And I've talked about as little as two, like even just getting up and walking around for a couple minutes can make a massive difference on your postmeal glucose, your blood pressure, your blood flow, your inflammation, your muscle protein synthesis.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: Like there's a lot of benefits to that that we're finding out.
• 22:05
  Philip Pape: Kind of like anti-inflammatory, if you will, whereas sitting is inflammatory.
• 22:09
  Philip Pape: And the older you are, it seems to have an even better impact.
• 22:12
  Philip Pape: And that could simply be because older people are even more sedentary.
• 22:15
  Philip Pape: So it's and it's not just standing up either.
• 22:17
  Philip Pape: If you have a stand-up desk, that's great, but you have to be moving around and walking.
• 22:19
  Philip Pape: So I would say 10-minute walk after meals, get up every 30 minutes for two to five minutes walk.
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 22:25
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 22:25
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: And remember that sleep and movement and food are one combined dose.
• 22:32
  Philip Pape: So when one of them is off, the other two can somewhat make up for it.
• 22:36
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.