Improve your sleep and you improve your life. It’s one of the simplest, most bang for buck things you can do to improve your health. At least 50% of the time when I sit down with new clients this is where we start. In this article I outline my favourite supplement protocols for getting sleep faster and getting deeper, more quality sleep. Before I get into that - let’s make sure we’ve got the basics covered - no caffeine at least 8 hours before bed time, stay away from screens for the last hour before sleep and make sure your room is nice and dark. Magnesium - this is the mineral of relaxation and most of us are deficient in it. Modern food is lacking in it and modern society demands more of it (we have more stress every day than our ancestors which depletes our stores). Not all magnesium is created equal - we must have quality. If you look at the label of your magnesium at home and it says “magnesium oxide” throw it in the bin. That’s very poorly absorbed and a garbage product. Any decent magnesium product will have the magnesium bound to an amino acid for better absorption - this is called a chelate. Therefore any decent product will end in “ate” eg: Magnesium malate or threonate or citrate. We can increase our magnesium stores very effectively by consuming multiple different forms (if you have too much of one form you will be sitting on the toilet for a long time - not good). That’s why I like products like “multi mag.” It’s 6 different chelated magnesiums in one. Simply taking this will improve sleep and almost everything because better sleep positively impacts almost everything (mood, recovery, food cravings, appetite, mental health, relationships, fat loss etc etc). Protocol 1 (basic) - Simply take multi mag 1 hour before bed. Protocol 2 (high stress) - Add 1 serve of magnesium threonate to the multi mag 1 hour before bed. Protocol 3 (Gut Health) - Add 10g glutamine to your multi mag 1 hour before bed. Glutamine is the favourite food of our gut lining and helps to keep the junctions tight and the bad stuff out of our blood. Protocol 4 (Reduced Inflammation) - Add 10g glutamine and 3-4g quality fish oil to your multi mag 1 hour before bed. Protocol 5 (Struggle falling to sleep) - Add 2-3g of glycine to your multi mag 1 hour before bed. Protocol 6 (you want the best of everything like me) - Do all of it. It will knock your socks off. 1 serve Multi Mag 1 serve Magnesium Threonate 10g Glutamine 3-4g Quality Fish Oil 2-3g Glycine Feel free to ask questions in the comments and let me know how you go with it. Coach Jake PS: If you’re taking medications please check with your doctor to make sure there is nothing that might interact. The key obvious ones: any psychiatric medication - check with magnesium threonate (as it acts on the brain) and if you take any blood thinning medication check with fish oil (it also has a slight blood thinning effect). PPS: We do have another sleep product which has some magnesium in it but it’s more focused on adaptogen herbs. This product is great in 2 cases. 1- the 10% of people who don’t respond well to the multi mag (this generally means they’re the rare people who are not magnesium deficient in the first place).
2- As a change up. Sometimes after long term use your body can become less receptive to things (like if you did the exact same training every day). In this case use the sleep product for a month and then go back to what was working previously.
