Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Dinner & Sleep

Want to win something?


Mini-Challenge #4: BEST DINNER RECIPE!

Bison and Kale courtesy Steve Paleo

This week's challenge is simple. Give us your best dinner main-dish recipe that you've created this week. (If you want to include a side dish or other items, feel free to.) This means you actually have to make it, not just post a recipe you've found off the internet!

How to participate:
  • Create or look up a new Paleo main-dish dinner recipe. It can be original or a slight tweak of an existing recipe. These recipes must be new and not already posted.
  • Provide recipe and directions.
  • Take a photo of your masterpiece to prove you actually made it!

Recipes due this coming Monday at 2pm! Prizes will be awarded to ALL that follow the instructions and submit!

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WOD

The "SF CRIPPLER"

for time:
30 back squats, 100/60kg
1000m row

Use whichever squat style you prefer.

Post results to comments!

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Why sleep?

It seems like a simple question, but the answer is both complex and unanswered.   So lets break down what we do know.
Two basic processes make us sleep.  The first is our circadian drive that keeps the master time for our body.  In simple terms, the circadian clock is our body’s watch that tells us what time of day it is.
The second is our homeostatic drive that is our stopwatch for how long we have been awake.  When you wake up in the morning your homeostatic drive to sleep is at zero and counts up from there until you go to sleep again.
Our circadian drive to be awake fluctuates across our 24-hour day, with the least wake pressure during the night and the most wake drive during daylight hours.  In contrast, our homeostatic sleep pressure builds from the time we wake up until we sleep again.
Below is a diagram depicting how the sleep process (S; homeostatic pressure) and circadian process (C) are thought to work together under normal conditions.  Process S steadily rises from waking until you go to sleep and then falls.  Process C naturally oscillates across the 24 hour period helping us to both fall asleep at night and wake us up in the morning.  When these two independent process are coordinate they work to help us sleep.  For example, we naturally fall asleep when our circadian pressure to be awake is low and our homeostatic pressure for sleep is high.  Waking up naturally is a combination of circadian timing that it is time to wake up, as well as homeostatic pressure being relieved from the night of sleep.

Have you ever pulled an all nighter?  During an all nighter our homeostatic pressure continues to build because we don’t relieve it by sleeping.  But the next day, assuming we can’t sleep until the following evening, our circadian drive kicks in.  By 10am-12pm you probably felt relatively alert, although sleepy.  That is your circadian drive overriding the homeostatic pressure to sleep by exerting its own time of day pressure to tell your body ‘Daytime! Time to be up’.

Read more on the PaleoRx website!

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2 comments:

Chris said...

Thank you crippler, my back was screaming all night

T said...

I super-setted this by loading 7,000lbs of weapons, ammo, and commo gear into the belly of a plane. See you cats in a month or so.