Archive

This 20 minute Ted talk is definitely worth listening to and sharing with anyone worrying about summer exams, work deadlines or health in ageing. I have written about sleep before in my posts ‘sleep for performance’ and ‘sleep nutrition’ and believe research categorically shows that good sleep is really important for performance and beneficial for […]

Can food and drink affect your exam results? Research shows that eating the right foods can benefit mood and motivation, improve focus, lower anxiety and strengthen memory formation. The wrong choices can make you feel sluggish or jittery making learning and recall more difficult. Powering Performance EATING ADVICE FOR EXAM PERFORMANCE 1. EAT –   Your brain […]

What can we learn from Sports Science ? Mark McClusky’s new book, Faster, Higher, Stronger, which was published at the end of last year, is the best book I have come across at answering the question “what we can learn from sports science?”. A really good review of the latest research and technology, written in […]

Chris Hoy winning a life time achievement award at last nights BBC Sports Personality Awards, reminded me how much I had enjoyed Richard Moore’s book – Heroes, Villains and Velodromes. First published in 2008 and primarily focusing on Chris Hoy, it gives an unprecedented insight in to the secret worlds of track cycling at a time when everything was […]

In my post Sleep and Performance, I talked about different pattens of sleep and how important sleep is to performance and in last weeks post Sleep Nutrition, I linked a nights good sleep to good nutrition. This granola bar recipe was originally adapted as a sports energy bar but contains many ingredients that have been […]

Poor sleep has been shown to lower athletic (1) and cognitive performance (2), to effect mood (3), change glucose metabolism (4), suppress appetite regulation (5), and immune function (6)  increase blood pressure (7) and raise perception of stress (8). Poor sleep is common in athletes, particularly footballers and can be a problem for anyone from working professionals to teenagers, particularly […]

We spend about a third of our lives asleep but until recently we have known virtually nothing about why we do. For decades sleep disturbance has been known to effect academic and athletic performance as well as health but how has not been clear. Jeff Iliff’s concise 12minute Ted talk describes how his groups research is coming closer […]

We spend about a third of our lives asleep. Why?….. We used to believe that we slept to save energy during the night, as it was too dark to hunt. In fact the amount of energy saved by sleeping is tiny and recent research shows that far from being in active, sleep actually plays a […]