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Understanding the Importance of your Evening Routine

Mobilizing and taking care of our soft tissue improves our position. It can be a little bit overwhelming and one of the things we want to try to do is simplify some of our behaviors so you can see how they fit into the context of your busy life.

 

Now this conversation is about how do we prepare ourselves in the evening for a better sleep experience or more importantly if we’re feeling stressed how do we calm down,  how do we relax, and how can we sort of get off of this this freight train of optimization and Red Bull and 5-hour energy and coffee and go-go-go and answering emails late into the night.

 

One of the things we know is that our athletes have gotten really good at getting spun up and we are less practiced at spinning down so why don't we think about this sometimes is that sleep is a really great barometer about the behaviors that led up to sleep so sometimes we kind of think of these things as sort of a disparate experiences.  There's oh I get home there's all the things that happen and then boom sleep and then those are kind of magical things I get track all my sleep I understand but I don't somehow sometimes relate those relationships between what I did before I went to sleep and what actually happened in terms of the latency.  How quickly I went to sleep and how well I stayed asleep is one of the things that we have come to find in our clinical experience is that if we back-ended some of the soft tissue work we've back-loaded some a little bit of mobility work a little bit of soft tissue work and integrated that with some breathing down regulation techniques which actually enhance the soft tissue work not only did our athletes find that they could fit this into their busy lives in schedules so it wasn't one more thing they had to do but also it helped them fall asleep it helped them relax and

help them sleep deeper.

 

We found is that our experience indicated that we saw a lot better behavior sort of stickiness and so that the behaviors ended up becoming sort of more ingrained.

 

Really you can be as simple as you want when I travel on the road I usually take a ball with me but and next to the TV or in our living room ton of rollers. What I try to do is just a little bit of stuff to should work before we go to bed or before we move at the bedroom where it works in the evening so we've kind of done the dishes and downregulated. One of the things that happens is we know that if you can put some of this soft tissue mobilization input into the body it's one of the ways that you can tell your nervous system to relax and if you ever had a massage you definitely did not get up off the massage table ready to fight someone. That’s not how the system works. The system works on “hey I get a little massage” and sometimes I feel sleepy which is one of the great things about just blindly doing any soft tissue work for about 10 to 12 minutes.

 

Even just putting a ball down and laying on it or laying on a roller somehow just putting in some more input into the trunk area we think are experiences that it maybe has an even larger impact on having our brain start to turn off and that may be because of the vagal stimulation working on that vagus nerve. Maybe just more soft tissue work I really have to focus on my breathing. It really doesn't matter but this is a really great place for it overlap sort of what's tight for the day sort of take inventory and then the real issue here is work on some big muscle groups and that can be calves that can be quads that could be hips it could be little but it doesn't really matter but think big muscle group will have a large impact so I'm trying to chill if not.

 

It doesn't matter working whatever you need to work on if I really have to hit the off switch boom to a little bit of gut smash you just roll around in your belly you know lay on the roller and here's the key: we can do lots of things just the soft tissue work by itself is going to have a miracle impact but also one of the things we know is that if you can integrate your breathing to change your breathing patterns to match a more sympathetic down regulation sort of pattern we're gonna get double bang for the buck

 

 I know what comes next, it's the sleep and it starts to fall into the batter and it starts to fall into the routine and so we're signaling that it's time to come it's time to relax and we do that by doing consistently the same thing so not only will you be able to roll because you've actually got time in the day but you'll also find that it helps you to sleep better and will help to reinforce the behavior of coming down off of that bulletproof coffee off of that that coconut MCT oil burst thing that you've been doing all day long hope this helps. happy sleeping.

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