Guy Windsor

Consulting Swordsman. Writer.

How to sleep

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With the right preparation and diet, people can function just fine without eating for a week. But absolutely nobody functions just fine without sleep for even a couple of days.

Rest is part of training. Poor or insufficient sleep will wreck your whole life, not just your sword practice. It's worth spending some time and effort getting it right.

Let's start with this section from my book The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts, pages 245-247. One of the people who reviewed it on Amazon (and gave it five shiny gold stars, yay!) expressed surprise that I'd put a section on sleep in the book. To me, it's such a fundamental part of training it never occurred to me to leave it out!

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We live in an absurdly sleep-deprived culture. When someone tells you they pulled an all-nighter, you should not be impressed by their dedication: you should be appalled at their lack of organisation and understanding of basic health principles. It is simply childish to think of staying up late as some kind of cool thing to do. Read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep: the New Science of Sleep and Dreams (affiliate link) if you don’t believe me.

There are three kinds of sleep: REM (dream sleep, in which your brain is very active), light sleep, and deep sleep. Your body and brain cycle through these in a rhythm that takes usually about 90 minutes, with deep sleep usually coming towards the end of that. You will need about four full cycles per night, minimum. How do you know if you’re getting enough sleep? If you wake up naturally without your alarm clock, and if you are not tired during the day, then you are sleeping enough. Otherwise, you’re not. Almost everyone (according to Walker at least, and he should know) needs about eight hours. If you suffer from any kind of insomnia, go to the doctor. Avoid sleeping pills, obviously, but there are many kinds of sleep problems, and many of them are easily treated. If you snore, get yourself checked for sleep apnea. I had it for a long time, and eventually went to the doctor and had it treated with a minor surgery. I suffered the worst sore throat ever for about three weeks, but within a couple of months the difference in my energy levels was incredible thanks to improved quality of sleep. Friends of mine with apnea caused by being fat (when the muscles of the neck relax in sleep, the weight of the fat in their neck literally crushes their airway, so they choke and wake up) have found that a CPAP machine (continuous positive pressure; literally pushing air into the lungs, keeping the trachea open) has made a gigantic difference. Help is available.

The basic principles of getting enough sleep are:

  • Go to bed and get up at the same time every day. Earlier to bed is better: my Grandma used to say that “one before eleven is worth two after seven,” and as usual, she was right.
  • Avoid caffeine for at least six hours before bedtime, or ideally twelve. Using a sleep tracker I was able to confirm my suspicion that simply not having tea or coffee after 2 p.m. made an enormous difference – not to the total amount of sleep I was getting, but to the amount of deep sleep.
  • Avoid alcohol for at least four hours before bedtime. Again with the sleep tracker, I found that a couple of glasses of wine made no difference to sleep quality, so long as the alcohol was out of my system before going to bed.
  • Avoid eating a heavy meal for at least three hours before bedtime. This makes a huge difference, I find. If my body is working on digesting a big meal, my heart rate remains much higher all night than if I go to bed long after the last calorie went in.
  • Avoid screens for at least an hour before bedtime. If you absolutely must be using a screen, on an iOS device enable Night Shift, or use F.lux or something similar to adjust the wavelengths of light your screen emits. 
  • Avoid social media for at least an hour before bedtime. There is nothing more likely to keep you awake than some foolish thing said on the internet. Remember that social media companies hire really clever people whose only job is to get and keep your attention; and nothing says you’re not paying attention like falling asleep.
  • Keep your bedroom as dark as possible: use black-out curtains, and cover or switch off any sources of light pollution such as luminous clocks or devices with LED lights on them. This to me is one of the hardest things to get right when travelling. One hotel room I stayed in had an illuminated light switch in the middle of the headboard of the bed. I had to get my old boarding pass out and stick it over the damn thing with chewing gum to get any sleep. Eyemasks are ok, but I find they come off in the night.
  • Create a wind-down ritual that persuades your body that it will be going to sleep soon. Keep it gentle. I find reading a good novel is hopeless, because I stay up late to get to the next bit, but reading a fairly dull but useful non-fiction book is great.
  • Get a decent mattress. It’s worth it. You literally cannot put a price on sleep.

I also use naps extensively. If your schedule allows it, cutting your night time sleep by an hour or so is okay if you get a full sleep cycle (so a solid 90 minutes of sleep) in the afternoon. Shorter naps can be helpful, but nothing replaces deep sleep. As this book is also concerned with history, I should mention that throughout most of human history artificial lighting was incredibly expensive. It is only in the last century or so that ordinary people can afford brightly lit rooms after nightfall. Thanks to Roger Ekirch’s book At Day’s Close, Night in Times Past (affiliate link), we know that at least some Europeans used to sleep in two blocks, with an hour or two of wakefulness in between. In the 1990s, Thomas Wehr (a psychologist) found that people who live in darkness for fourteen hours per day spontaneously develop a similar pattern, so it may be very natural. It’s worth experimenting with, I think. 

For a layman’s overview, see the article entitled “The myth of the eight-hour sleep” by Stephanie Hegarty, published by the BBC on February 22nd 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

The key with this – as with every aspect of health habits – is to experiment carefully, and track what makes a difference for you. 

***

In lockdown it may be even harder than usual to get good sleep, especially if you are living in a confined space. Ideally, you would do nothing at all in bed except sleep, so that your mind associates going to bed with going to sleep. (The only exception I'd make to that is sex.) If you work in bed, watch tv in bed, use the bed like a sofa, and so on, then your mind may associate going to bed with getting work done, or playing video games. If your bed is your sofa, then you can work around this by having a day set-up (such as covering the bed with a blanket and some cushions), so ‘bed' becomes ‘sofa', and then as part of your going to sleep preparation, you re-set the “sofa” into a bed. So long as you perceive it as a separate space set aside for sleep, it should work just fine.

There's a lovely video on how to create separate spaces for different activities in lockdown here:

(With thanks to Stefan Geritz for pointing me to it)

If there is one thing to take away from this blog post, it's this: take your sleep seriously, and guard it as well as you possibly can. It's absolutely fundamental to your health. If you are having problems sleeping (as many do, including me), then make it your top priority to get more and/or better sleep. You deserve it!

Scaling new heights

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I’ve taken up indoor climbing as a hobby. Nothing too serious, and no hanging off skyscrapers. Some friends of ours invited me along, and it was fun, physically and mentally demanding, and reasonably safe. 

I have a general rule not to take up new hobbies that don’t have a social component. I spend more time alone (usually writing) than is probably good for my mental health (I may be an introvert, but I’m not a misanthrope), so any new activity must include other people. Climbing fits that, because I usually go with the friends (Ross and Katie). I should also mention that the climbing centre (Avid, in Ipswich) is a relaxed and friendly place, staffed entirely by really good climbers, who are always happy to advise on climbing technique, and make beginners feel welcome. It passes the ‘would I want my kids to train here test’- and yes, I do take my kids every now and then.

As you can imagine, being an experienced martial artist I picked up a lot of the basics quite quickly, and I’ve come up with an informal training approach that you might find useful to think about as it can be applied to any discipline.

As I see it, climbing has three aspects:

  • Skill
  • Strength
  • Bravery

Or, if you prefer, mental, physical, and spiritual dimensions. 

Mental training: Skill

Being able to see the route is a skill, and I’ll sometimes have to work out how to approach a particular route. Often, I can’t do it in my head, and have to get someone who knows what they’re doing to show me. But with experience comes the ability to see the way up. It’s very rewarding.

Physical training: Strength

My agility is perfectly up to the task- so far I haven’t failed on a route because of lack of flexibility. But strength? Oh my. Compared to climbers, martial artists like me are weak as underfed kittens. No, that’s not fair. Compared to climbers, my hands are weak as kittens. But my hands are actually pretty good… 

Sometimes a route requires the ability to generate force in odd directions, and I find that even though I’m strong enough in most dimensions, I just have never needed to generate force that way before. It’s awesome.

Spiritual training: Bravery

As with all challenges, the key to growth is to get to the edge of failure. Because of my particular phobias, climbing can generate a kind of existential dread or terror that is really challenging to confront even though it’s a very safe space. It’s a lot like flying trapeze in that way (though actually less scary than that). 

As regular readers will know, I’m always on the lookout for things that generate irrational levels of fear. Some routes in the climbing centre are really quite easy, but scare the crap out of me. Others are much harder, but not scary at all. Overhangs, and not being able to see the footholds, are both good stimulators of fear. Being able to generate irrational fear allows me to practise remaining calm when frightened.

Structuring the session around the three elements:

I go about twice a week, until my hands give out (usually about an hour). I structure each session like so:

10-15 minutes warming up. This starts with normal warm-up stuff such as squats, quadripedal exercises (aka funny crawling), rolls and so on, and continues with relatively easy routes. I have no joint issues (thanks to decades of careful training, and no bad accidents), so I don’t have to be especially careful, but at the age of 45 it pays to have a cautious approach.

Then I look for technical challenges, especially routes I’ve failed on before. Figuring out how to get past the difficult bits. This is usually mostly mental. If the problem is near the end of the route, I’ll usually ‘cheat’ my way there, and just work on that one move until I’m happy with it. I try to avoid fatigue in this stage.

Then I do at least one scary bastard. One not-very-hard route gave me what felt like a panic attack. It was really unpleasant, but very useful for practising remaining in control when my amygdala is going haywire.

After the fear-practice, I go for physical exertion. At Avid they have a circuits wall, with numbered routes (you’re not supposed to skip a hold, and should go in order). They are really hard. My forearms feel like they’ve been mangled. It’s great.

If my feeling after the circuits is that I nailed it, I stop there. Otherwise, I’ll find a route I know I can do and climb that. Every session must end with a success, which is defined entirely subjectively.

On any given day, I’ll be feeling stupid, or weak, or fearful. I still challenge the weakest aspect, but more gently, spending more time on the areas where I feel up to the task.

One final thought: I don’t fall very often, and have yet to fall more than a metre or so. This is what limits my progress and, far more than technical skill, separates me from the expert climbers. They fall off the wall like apples off a tree in autumn. The place practically vibrates with really good climbers hitting the mats. But us beginners? We’re like limpets stuck to the wall.

The experts are that good because they are always pushing their boundaries. They are trying routes that are just out of their reach. And failing over and over again. I’ll never be that good because I’m not willing to risk those falls (even though the mats are deep and squishy). And that’s okay- my priorities are different, and I don’t mind how slowly I progress. I’m doing this for fun!

Health matters

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I've been thinking a lot about health lately, which will come as no surprise if you've read my previous blog about injuring my back.

I think of health as a three-legged stool. The legs are sleep, nutrition, and exercise. I cover the principles I use in some detail in my new book The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts, but I don't go into my personal routines all that much, because they're probably not relevant to most readers. The underlying message is ‘diligently study to find out what works for you, then do that'. So what do I do?

This morning, I got up before my wife and kids and did about 20 minutes of breathing exercises, 20 minutes of calisthenics (push-ups, stretching and so on), before making my wife a cup of tea and going back upstairs to deliver it before having my cold shower, then getting dressed and having breakfast. This is normal, and doesn't count as ‘training'.

But today, I did walk the long route to the gym (about 3 miles, fast, with nordic walking poles), and did my 7-way legs, hex bar deadlifts (I'm back up to 60kg, but won't go higher for a long while as my back recovers), arm exercises (such as the ones on my free arm maintenance course), and the rest of my routines. The walk and gym time totalled about two hours 20 minutes, which means that by the time I got to my office, I've done about three hours of health-dedicated exercise. I don't do that much that often because I'm not a fan of ‘more is better'. I prefer to find the minimum effective dose and do that.

Perhaps the hardest health practice I do is fasting. Not because fasting itself is hard- it isn't, or at least it doesn't have to be. The difficulty is I don't want to normalise not-eating for my daughters. They are heading into the age where anorexia and other eating disorders become a significant risk, and one of the things I'm doing to try to mitigate that risk is model healthy eating and a healthy enjoyment of food. (Other things include never praising them for their looks, letting them not finish their dinner if they are really not hungry, or stop eating when they're full, and above all giving them a firm sense of being in control wherever possible- this includes things like letting them choose a recipe, do the shopping, and prepare the meal (or more commonly, cake), even when– especially when– I wouldn't make the same choices.) But they were away for a couple of nights, so I managed to get some fasting in. I set it up like so:

Dinner as normal, but a bit early, on Sunday (roast lamb with all the trimmings). Then Monday morning, a small ketogenic breakfast, made up of some lightly steamed cabbage with a tin of mackarel, some nuts, olive oil, and MCT oil, with a dose of raspberry ketones and a dose of BCAAs. That put me straight into ketosis, which I prefer for fasting because a) it prevents muscle mass being digested for calories and b) it hugely reduces hunger, making compliance much easier. I don't fast for character-building or spiritual reasons; this is all about biochemistry.

Then I just ate nothing at all until breakfast on Tuesday morning. I drank only water. The only other thing I ingested was, on Monday night, I could feel I was thirstier than normal, and as I usually eat a lot of salt, and had just had a long hot bath, I figured I might be low on salt, so had a pinch (I was right, it helped immediately). Monday was a training day, so I went to the gym for a couple of hours in the afternoon. Being in ketosis means that there's no problem with ‘low blood sugar', which (except for diabetics and people with other conditions) is a bullshit reason for feeling unable to train anyway. If you can't train when hungry, then there's something wrong with your diet, or your training. If everything is working properly, there should be no energy drop from low blood sugar unless you are fasting the hard way (i.e. not triggering ketosis first), and are in day two or three. If you've eaten in the last 24 hours, you ought to be fine. If that's not the case, then you have some metabolic work to do!

Do I think you should do this? I have no opinion whatsoever, as I don't know you, your medical history, or anything else. But folk ask me about this stuff, so I'm sharing.

If I had to pick one thing I think is most useful and important, out of all the things I do for health reasons, it would be breathing exercises. I do them every day. They are the one constant over the last 25 years of training. They combine a kind of meditation, some useful movement, and provide a back door into your metabolism that is startlingly effective. That's why I created an online course covering the basics of several styles of breathing training, so you can find what works for you. I'm offering a 50% discount on the course that's valid until the end of April, just use this link.

Try it out! The course comes with a 30 day money back guarantee, so if it's not your thing, no harm done.

I look forward to seeing you on the course.

 

The knees are the keys

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Your knees are the keys to everything. For many martial artists knees are the first thing to go, and signal the end of a career.

I don't want my career to end.

I have put my basic knee maintenance program online for free here, and for some reason best known to my subconscious I didn't put one of my key knee stabilisation exercises into it. So one day last week in the gym I set up my phone on a little tripod and videoed the whole exercises for you. It's not my own: I borrowed it from legendary trainer Ryan Flaherty.

I think Vadi was onto something when he put the Keys of St Peter at the knees of his figure illustrating the roles of the parts of the body in swordsmanship, no?

Vadi's segno page: note the keys!

I hope you find this useful! You can find the whole free course here.

Sharpen the saw. Or sword.

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Time spent sharpening is never wasted.

A couple of weeks ago I helped a friend to lay a nice oak wooden floor. This entailed lots of standing up and bending over, and I'm delighted to say that I felt it in my legs the next day, but not in my back at all. Ergonomics for the win! We did have a chop saw available (a kind of power saw, very fast, very noisy, very dangerous), but I had brought along a beautiful old handsaw. I bought the saw about 20 years ago in a car boot sale for, I think, 50p. Once it was sharpened up, oh my. It might look old and black, but it cuts like a dream, and we laid two floors using only that for cutting the planks.

It gets blunt after an hour or so of slicing through solid oak, so every now and then we'd stop for a couple of minutes, and I'd sharpen it. The title of this post is NOT A METAPHOR!

Or rather, not just a metaphor. Time spent sharpening is never wasted. If I have a lot of conflicting demands on my time, and need to sort through a lot of priorities, I'm more likely to spend 20 minutes meditating first to clear the clutter. Then a job that might haven taken two hours of frustration gets done in half an hour.

If I am piling through a difficult bit of editing and it's all going really well, I'm more likely to stop every hour or so and do some pull-ups.

There are a few different ways to sharpen a handsaw, but there are hundreds of options for sharpening your virtual, metaphorical, saw. My top sharpening techniques are: 1) meditation. 2) exercise. 3) get out and do something completely different.

Any decent craftsman will keep their tools sharp with regular maintenance (touching up an edge), and the occasional intervention (completely re-shaping an edge). It's the maintenance that really makes the difference though.

More productive procrastination

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I have been meaning to sort out a standing desk solution for my workspace for oh, about 7 months now. A couple of weeks ago I started reading Kelly Starrett’s book Deskbound. (Potted review: great information, bitty presentation. Thorough, but repetitive, and way too much referring to his super-cool fighter pilot clients. Essential reading for ergonomics at work, but I wish he’d got me to edit it for him.)

The book reminded me that sitting down to work will kill me so I was galvanized into action, and designed and built a standing desk solution that fits with my existing desk. There was no space to put a standalone desk, and that would take a lot more time anyway. I was most pleased with finding an apt use for the piece of walnut left over from my sister’s wedding present, and my friend Heli’s meditation stool.

Dovetails, with a mitred front, and the cork feet that the whole thing sits on.Of course I ended up adding edge banding to the boxes (oak and maple), and cutting some not-too-gappy-dovetails in both boxes,

but that was way quicker than the heavily engineered adjustability I was originally thinking of. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good!

The walnut top with a groove for fitting my keyboard and trackpad.

As with my writing set up of DOOM, this set up I have now means there are no excuses left for not getting my writing done.

I set the desk up yesterday morning, and that very same day sent print-outs of the second edition of Veni Vadi Vici to the academic peer reviewers. We’ll see what they say! It’s good to have that off my plate for a bit; there’s nothing I can do with that book until I hear back from them, probably next month at the earliest.

There is a busy week coming up next week; on Tuesday, I’m flying to Helsinki with  the entire family; teaching class in the Helsinki salle on Thursday, and a seminar there on Sunday, before getting home on Wednesday morning, and driving up to Glasgow to see my brother in law, and then to Dumfries for my dad’s birthday at the weekend… so if I’m a little absent and slow to respond to things, that’s why.

All of this has also meant that there has been little forward motion on The Theory and Practice of Historical European Martial Arts (I’m thinking of titling it The HEMA Bible. What do you think? let me know in the comments here). There is not a great deal left to do on it, but I found a couple of gaps to fill, and I want it to hit the presses as a thoroughly comprehensive set of solutions to every type of HEMA problem.

Speaking of comprehensive; if you study medieval martial arts of any kind, you really should buy and read this book:

And if you study German medieval combat, you absolutely must buy and read it. It is HEMA geekery at its very finest, a serious in-depth academic study of the Fechtbuch of Lew the Jew, with a complete translation into English, and a concordance of the different manuscripts. The whole book is in German and English, so there’s really no excuse. It’s not even very expensive. Buy it. I had the pleasure of providing some language help with the English translations of the academic bits, so I may be biased, but damn, this is fine work.

And just in case you missed it; the first book from the ‘digitise the National Fencing Museum's library' project is ready, and yours for free.