Category: Health & Fitness | Page 6

The Best Books and Resources for Learning Exercise Physiology

Last updated: March 13, 2026Leave a Comment

As I continue to immerse myself in padel and strive to improve every year, I’ve taken it upon myself to really learn how the human body works, especially in relation to exercise and sport.

Understanding exercise physiology has changed the way I train. Instead of blindly following workout programs, I can now evaluate whether an exercise makes sense for my goals, understand why certain recovery protocols work, and make informed decisions about my training. Whether you’re an athlete trying to optimize performance or just someone who wants to train smarter, these resources will give you a solid foundation.

Exercise Physiology Textbooks

These are the go-to academic texts in the field. They’re dense, but incredibly comprehensive if you want to truly understand how the body responds to exercise.

Exercise Physiology: Theory and Application to Fitness and Performance — by Powers and Howley. This is the textbook used in many university exercise science programs. It covers everything from cellular metabolism to cardiovascular responses to training adaptations. Excellent diagrams and chapter summaries make the complex material digestible. I’d recommend this as your first textbook if you want a thorough but readable introduction.
Exercise Physiology: Nutrition, Energy, and Human Performance — by McArdle, Katch, and Katch. Another heavyweight textbook that puts more emphasis on nutrition and energy systems than the Powers book. Particularly strong on body composition and the metabolic aspects of exercise. A good complement to Powers if you want the full picture.
Physiology of Sport and Exercise — by Kenney, Wilmore, and Costill. This one takes a more practical, sport-focused approach. Great chapters on training for different sports, environmental considerations (heat, altitude, cold), and age-related changes in exercise capacity. If you’re primarily interested in sports performance rather than clinical exercise physiology, start here.

Sport-Specific Training

Advanced Strength and Conditioning for Tennis — While specifically about tennis, much of the content applies directly to padel and other racquet sports. Covers movement patterns, injury prevention, periodization, and sport-specific strength exercises. One of the few books that bridges the gap between academic exercise science and real-world racquet sport training.
Strength Training Anatomy — by Frederic Delavier. Not a textbook in the traditional sense — it’s essentially an atlas of exercises with detailed anatomical illustrations showing exactly which muscles are working during each movement. Invaluable for understanding your own training and for identifying which exercises target specific muscle groups. I reference this one constantly.

Online Courses

If you learn better through video and structured lessons than through reading, these Coursera courses are excellent starting points:

Science of Exercise — A well-structured course that covers the fundamentals of how exercise affects the body. More accessible than the textbooks and a great entry point if you’re new to the subject.
Introductory Human Physiology — Broader than just exercise, this covers how the major body systems work. Understanding the cardiovascular, respiratory, and musculoskeletal systems at a fundamental level makes everything else click into place.

Practical Fitness Books

These are less academic but still grounded in solid science. If the textbooks above feel like too much, these are a more approachable way to improve your training knowledge:

Starting Strength — by Mark Rippetoe. The definitive guide to barbell training. Even if you don’t follow Rippetoe’s specific program, the detailed breakdowns of squat, deadlift, bench press, and overhead press form are essential knowledge for anyone who lifts weights.
Becoming a Supple Leopard — by Kelly Starrett. Focuses on mobility, movement quality, and fixing common dysfunction patterns. If you sit at a desk all day (like most of us) and then try to perform athletically, this book will help you identify and address your mobility limitations.
Calisthenics for Beginners — A practical guide to bodyweight training with progressive exercises. Good if you want to build strength without a gym.
The Practice of Natural Movement — by Erwan Le Corre. A different approach to fitness that focuses on natural, functional movement patterns rather than isolated gym exercises. Thought-provoking and a good counterbalance to traditional training methods.
How to Build Strong & Lean Bodyweight Muscle — Another solid bodyweight training resource with clear progressions for different skill levels.

Where to Start

If you’re coming to this with no background in exercise science, I’d suggest starting with the Coursera Science of Exercise course and Strength Training Anatomy. The course gives you the foundational knowledge, and the anatomy book makes it tangible.

Once you’re comfortable with the basics, pick one of the three textbooks based on your interest — sport performance (Kenney), general fitness (Powers), or nutrition-focused (McArdle).

Do you have any other resources to recommend? Let me know in the comments section.

Sleep – The Power of Sleep Cycles and Napping

Last updated: August 22, 2023Leave a Comment

Sleep is one of the most important things we need to take care of in order to live a healthy life and have enough energy to do all the activities we want to do on a daily basis.

When discussing sleep, the first thing we need to learn is that the idea that sleep is just one long state that we enter every night is a false one. Our sleep time is actually broken down into what are called sleep cycles.

Each sleep cycle is around 90 minutes long. There is some variation here between 70 and 110 minutes, but 90 minutes is a good figure to keep in mind as a start.

During the night, sleeping follows a predictable pattern, moving back and forth between two different types of sleep.

These two main types of sleep are referred to as non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. On an electroencephalogram (EEG), REM sleep, often called “active sleep,” is identifiable by its characteristic low-amplitude (small), high-frequency (fast) waves and alpha rhythm, as well as the eye movements for which it is named.

Many sleep experts think that these eye movements are in some way related to dreams. REM sleep comprises about 20 to 25 percent of total sleep in typical healthy adults. The average length of the first NREM-REM sleep cycle is between 70 and 100 minutes; the average length of the second and later cycles is about 90 to 120 minutes.

Together, non-REM and REM sleep stages form a complete sleep cycle.

Each sleep stage in any particular sleep cycle fulfills a distinct physiological and neurological function, each of which appears to be necessary for the health of the body and mind, to the extent that, if sleep is interrupted or if certain stages are missing for any reason, their physiological functions are not fully executed, and the person may feel tired or groggy even after an apparently sufficient sleep period, a phenomenon known as “sleep inertia”.

The reason for such a specific cycling pattern of NREM and REM sleep across the night is unknown. Some scientists speculate that specific sequences of NREM and REM sleep optimize both physical and mental recuperation as well as some aspects of memory consolidation that occurs during sleep, but this has not been confirmed.

Taking a closer look at NREM and REM, we find that there are four stages in all, three belonging to NREM and one stage of REM.

Stage 1

Stage 1 is the stage you enter when you start to nod off and your eyes close. This stage lasts between one and ten minutes. It is also known as “transitional sleep”, and during this stage, you can quickly return to being fully awake. Your eyes move slowly under the eyelids and muscle activity slows down.

Stage 2

Next comes Stage 2 which is known as “light sleep”. It lasts about twenty minutes. This is where we spend most of our nights (about 45% of total sleep). During this second stage, your heart rate slows, your muscles contract and relax, and your body temperature decreases as you prepare to go into deep sleep.

Stage 3

The 3rd stage is also known as “deep sleep” – in this stage it’s difficult to awaken, and if you forcibly wake up, you do not adjust immediately and often feel groggy and disoriented for several minutes. In this deepest stage of sleep, your brain waves are extremely slow. Blood flow is directed away from your brain and towards your muscles, restoring physical energy.

REM sleep

REM sleep is where dreams occur and the time to get there is approximately 70 to 90 minutes after falling asleep. Your eyes move rapidly, your breathing shallows, and your heart rate and blood pressure increase. During this stage, your arm and leg muscles are paralyzed.

Optimizing Your Sleep

Age Group	Recommended Sleep Hours
newborn to 2 months old	12 - 18 hours
3 months to 1 year old	14 - 15 hours
1 to 3 years old	12 - 14 hours
3 to 5 years old	11 - 13 hours
5 to 12 years old	10 - 11 hours
12 to 18 years old	8.5 - 10 hours
Adults (18+)	7.5 - 9 hours

You should calculate your sleep time based on what time you need to wake up using this calculator. You can also find out your ideal wake-up time based on the time you usually go to sleep.

It is essential to note that everything is calculated in cycles, rather than hours and minutes. So we need to get accustomed to think of sleep in cycles.

The average sleep cycle is 90 minutes long
A typical night of sleep includes 5 full sleep cycles
90 x 5 = 450 minutes, or 7.5 hours

For example: You need to wake at 6 a.m. to get ready for work. Counting back 7.5 hours, your ideal bedtime is 10:30 p.m. That means lights out, in bed, and ready for sleep at that time.

In a week there are therefore 35 full sleep cycles that we should ideally be getting. Life can and will interfere with our sleep cycles, so we need to learn how to deal with it.

For example, say you went to a friend’s birthday party and arrived back home at 2 am, what do you do? First, you think about what time you need to wake up the next day, say 7 am for work. That leaves us with 5 hours in between. Given that every sleep cycle is 90 minutes, we can fit 3 sleep cycles.

Therefore you should go to sleep at 2.30 am. This is where many people make a mistake. Typically you will just get home, have a shower and slump into bed, only looking at the clock to make sure the alarm is set for 7 am. The problem is that if you go to sleep before 2.30 am in this case, at 7 am you will already be in your 4th sleep cycle.

You will, of course, interrupt that cycle because your alarm will ring, and you’ll wake up feeling very groggy. This is the counterintuitive part, by actually sleeping a bit less you will wake up feeling better. We must not forget that we missed two missed cycles, however. Ideally, we would recover them in the following days to make sure that we keep our total of 35 sleep cycles per week.

The goal is to wake naturally about 5-10 minutes ahead of your alarm. If you absolutely need to wake up at a specific time, I still recommend using an alarm clock, but you should find that you wake up at around that time naturally, or at least feel very refreshed and ready to go when the alarm sounds. For a more natural wake up I suggest using the Philips HF3520 clock.

Sleep Efficiency

Implementing the sleep cycles doesn’t work if our quality of sleep is bad. This could be due to a bad mattress for example, or even sleeping in bad positions.

That’s why we need to be looking at sleep efficiency.

There’s an easy, low-tech way to measure sleep efficiency that requires no sleep tracking devices or equipment. You need only a few basic pieces of information about your night of sleep:

The total amount of time you spend in bed sleeping—or trying to sleep—between bedtime and waking
How long it takes you to fall asleep
The amount of time you spent awake during the night

Let’s say you spent a total of 7 hours, or 420 minutes, in bed last night.
It took you 25 minutes to fall asleep.
You spent another 25 minutes awake throughout the night, a result of three separate periods of wakefulness.

Here’s how to calculate your sleep efficiency for this night:

Total sleep time: 420 minutes
Minus time to fall asleep: 25 minutes
Minus total time spent awake: 25 minutes
Actual time spent sleeping: 370 minutes (6 hours, 10 minutes)

Divide 370 minutes by 420 minutes = 88%. This number represents your sleep efficiency for that night.

In sleep science, we consider 85% or higher a healthy sleep efficiency and a reasonable goal. Ninety percent is considered a very good sleep efficiency. If your number isn’t quite there yet, don’t be discouraged. With attention to your sleep—and a new bedtime—you’ll see this important number start to rise.

You can find iPhone and Android apps that measure your sleep and calculate your sleep efficiency. I use my Fitbit to take these measurements.

Napping

There are many studies that prove the effectiveness of a mid-day nap. Of course, we all know that many cultures (for example Spain) have the afternoon siesta deeply ingrained in them, and it looks like they are right in maintaining this old tradition. These cultures tend to have a split-day sleeping pattern of five to six hours and night and sixty to ninety minutes in the afternoon.

Napping also typically happens during the warmest period of the day and generally follows a large mid-day meal, which explains why afternoon sleepiness is so often associated with warm afternoon sun and heavy lunches.

Following a nap, having dissipated some of the accumulated sleep drive, many people report feeling better able to stay awake and alert in the late afternoon and evening. This increased alertness typically causes people to go to bed later and generally to sleep less at night than people who do not take naps.

Research at NASA demonstrated that pilots who had a 26-minute nap in the cockpit were more alert — by 54 percent — and had improved performance by 34 percent. Studies using advanced tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) also have found performance benefits for nappers. Studies have even suggested that napping may produce the same memory gains as a full night’s slumber, as shown on tasks that tested declarative memory, motor memory and spatial memory.

You don’t need to nap for hours, 25 minutes is actually the ideal time.

If you try it and feel groggy when waking up, try this variation. Take a cup of coffee before hitting the bed. The caffeine will kick into action in 25 minutes, just when you are waking up, and give you a boost.

In general, experts recommend sleeping between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. or between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m

You can use the table below (based on the Nap Wheel) to find out the best time to take a nap, based on your wake-up time.

Wake up time	Perfect nap time
6:00 am	1:30 pm
6:30 am	1:45 pm
7:00 am	2:00 pm
7:30 am	2:15 pm
8:00 am	2:30 pm
8:30 am	2:45 pm
9:00 am	3:00 pm

Why Do We Sleep Anyway?

While the brain sleeps, it clears out harmful toxins, a process that may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s, researchers say.

During sleep, the flow of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain increases dramatically, washing away harmful waste proteins that build up between brain cells during waking hours, a study of mice found.

“It’s like a dishwasher,” says Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Rochester and an author of the study in Science.

The results appear to offer the best explanation yet of why animals and people need sleep. If this proves to be true in humans as well, it could help explain a mysterious association between sleep disorders and brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s.

Setting Up The Right Sleep Environment

You can read my article about designing your bedroom as a recovery room for more details, but here are some quick tips:

Buy the right mattress for your weight.
Keep the mattress and all linen and pillows clean.
Keep the room at a cool temperature with a good supply of air.
Take advantage of the morning sunlight, but make sure it’s dark when you go to sleep. You can buy the Philips clock and sunrise simulator if you don’t have the ideal conditions.
Remove all electronic devices from your bedroom, especially phones and tablets.
For blocking out light you can use an eye mask. Cheap and does the job.
As an alternative to Mack ear buds (my favorite for blocking noises) is to use a white noise track off Spotify. It helps your brain go to sleep, in the same way that airplane or car noise does.

Tips for a great start to the day

Drink two glasses of water as soon as you wake up. It’s best to have it with a few drops of lemon and Himalayan salt.
Establish a morning routine. I have found that going outside, meditation, stretching, and preparing a cup of matcha or coffee works best for me, together with having a hearty breakfast.
Prepare your work schedule the previous evening, and start with the most important task of the day (eating the frog).

I’d also add a bit of a longer note on exercise. Many people swear by morning exercise, while others absolutely can’t do it, and prefer an afternoon or evening session. I’ve experimented with this for a long time and have come to the conclusion that we all have our own best times for exercise.

People can be assigned to two broad groups: larks (people who go to bed early and rise early) and owls (people who go to bed late and rise late).

This time preference affects all biological rhythms, including the ability to exercise and perform. In general, it seems the best athletic performance is achieved late afternoon/early evening when several exercise-related rhythms reach their circadian peak. This means exercising at this time has the best results for increasing fitness, increasing lean muscle, and reducing fat tissue.

That’s pretty much what current science tells us, and there still is a lot of debate around this topic. My take is that you should train whenever it feels best for you. Personally, first thing in the morning is absolutely the best time for me. I love going out in the morning and really taking in the day, so a morning swim or cycle feels really awesome.

It wouldn’t be the same later in the day. Moreover, I have more control over my training duration than I have on my work sessions. I might start something really interesting in my office and feel absolutely no desire to leave my desk and go to train, and that led to many missed training sessions and lots of guilt in the past.

The only exception to training in the morning is if I have a scheduled match or group exercise activity. Having that extra responsibility of being part of a group and having paid for an activity magically gives me the willpower to train at any time of the day including late evenings or afternoons. Therefore, I combine morning sessions of padel training, gym work, swimming or cycling with afternoon and evening padel, indoor cycling, yoga/pilates.

Knowing Your Chronotype

There are four recognized chronotypes, and knowing which one you are can help you optimize your day, including sleep, exercise times and working hours. I am a Lion, so here’s my ideal sleep time calculation:

Sleep duration: Usually 5 cycles x 90 min = 450 min + 20 min to fall asleep = 470 min

Sleep time: up at 6:00am – 470 min = 10:10 pm

By tracking my sleep using a Fitbit, I have found that I feel best the next day when I sleep at least 7h45min as marked in the sleep reports.

The Alternative View

For a contrarian view on sleep science, you can read this post. I think it’s always healthy to be wary of the hype around a particular topic, and inspect the incentives that drive sleep scientists in this case. Are they promoting a book, speaking tour, podcast, consultancy etc? While that doesn’t mean they are lying about anything, you know they are incentivized to find some issue with your sleep even when there might be more important issues affecting your well-being.

I have personally experimented with sleep quite a bit, and invariably I feel at my best if I sleep 7-9 hours. If I sleep on the lesser end of a scale, then I need a nap to refresh half way through the day.

Experimenting with sleep monitoring gadgets was fun, but ultimately once you get the basics right and you’re in tune with your body, you will instinctively know when you’re doing it right and when you need to make some adjustments.

Further Resources

Sleep by Nick Littlehales and his coaching services website.
Why we Sleep by Matthew Walker
Philips clock and sunrise simulator

Enjoy your sleep! Let me know whether you find this helpful and whether you have any other tips on sleep and rest routines.

Should You Switch to a Standing Desk?

Last updated: May 22, 20217 Comments

For the last few years, I’ve been coming across articles extolling the benefits of standing desks. Due to being a digital nomad, however, I’ve found it difficult to actually get one and try it out. Finally, in our condo building in Chiang Mai (Thailand), I found the perfect place to experiment with standing desks.

This was the first experiment with working standing up. In Chiang Mai I got the opportunity to switch between a standing desk and a traditional seated desk in the same office.

Claimed Benefits of Standing Desks

Before I share my experience, let’s take a look at the claimed benefits of standing desks:

More energy
Improved posture
Reduced risk of diseases (cancer, diabetes)
Lower long-term mortality risk

Perhaps more worryingly is the fact that research has indicated that sitting is killing us, shortening our lifespans by up to 15 years. Sitting has also been referred to as the new smoking in terms of harmful effects.

Many people try to restore balance in their lives by sitting for six hours at work and then heading to the gym afterward, however, this does not seem to do the trick. Evidence suggests that the negative effects of extended sitting can’t be countered by brief bouts of strenuous exercise.

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Foam Rolling for Myofascial Release

Last updated: November 14, 2020Leave a Comment

One of the important additions to my workout and fitness routines this year was the incorporation of a foam roller. I like to foam roll first thing in the morning after drinking my espresso and doing a 10-15 minute meditation.

Here’s a quick taster of what foam rolling can do:

Release trigger points and tight muscles, tendons and ligaments
Increase blood flow through your skin, fascia and muscles, thereby improving tissue quality and cellular function
Engage core muscles and build strength
Increase range of motion in your spine
Improve posture by strengthening your core

When foam rolling you are aiming for a myofascial release. The myofascial system is made up of all the muscles and fascia in your body. A fascia is a band or sheet of connective tissue, primarily collagen, beneath the skin that attaches, stabilizes, encloses, and separates muscles and other internal organs.

For those of you who are visual learners, you can imagine your skin is like the rind of an orange. So, if your skin is the outer layer of the orange peel, the thicker, white, fibrous layer that lies almost immediately beneath the peel would be your fascia. Just as that thicker layer completely surrounds the inside of the orange, the same holds true to your fascia. We all have a layer of fascia directly beneath the skin that completely envelopes the body, giving another protective barrier between the skin and the deeper soft tissue.

For various reasons, including inactivity, repetitive motion and injuries, the fascia and underlying muscle tissue can bind together causing painful ‘knots’ or ‘trigger points’. Muscle binding will restrict movement, reduce flexibility and cause muscles to fire improperly during exercise.

Rolling out stretches muscles and tendons and releases the fascia. This increases blood flow and circulation to the soft tissues, allowing muscles to fire at peak efficiency during exercise.

When rolling or working on tight/sore muscles you will experience discomfort or pain. Think of it like the pain you get while stretching. It should be uncomfortable, but not unbearable, and when you are done it should feel better.

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On Peak Performance

Last updated: April 05, 20244 Comments

This year I’ve been really challenging myself to improve at something specific: padel. This involved lots of training, practice matches and competition. Throughout this journey, I have, perhaps inevitably, become very interested in peak performance and how to achieve it.

We usually associate peak performance with top athletes, musicians or even successful business people. The first question is whether these successful people have completely different genetic makeups than the rest of the population. In short, are they uniquely gifted? Are they so different from the rest of us that we stand no chance?

As I dug into literature and observed the best athletes in padel as well as speaking to various top coaches, the surprising discovery is that in most cases, it’s not a case of superior genetics that leads to peak performance. Hence, we can all reach a state of peak performance.

Here are some of the most important realizations I’ve made this year.

The people who do extraordinary things have figured out ways to be very progressive about improvement and structure their life around getting better. No matter what the field, the most effective approaches to improving performance all follow a single set of general principles that can be termed “deliberate practice”.

Psychology is a key element in achieving success in any discipline. I had mostly been focusing on the physical, tactical and technical aspects of improving my padel game, before I realized that the way I think was perhaps a bigger factor in determining whether I win or lose any given game. Apart from being aware of the mind’s importance and training it, you need to get the right guidance from sports psychologists who can identify your blocks and point you in the right direction.

To achieve peak performance in sport you need to achieve a state of flow. Those who practice mindfulness have an increased attention and concentration, enhanced performance in hostile contexts, respond better to stress, have better parenting skills, improved sleep, enhanced mood, decrease in fatigue, and so on. These effects are all proven through various studies. The practice of mindfulness can help in achieving the laser focus needed for peak performance. The minimum effective dose is around 8 minutes a day and an optimal dose is 20 minutes a day. I’ve dabbled in meditation at various stages of my life, but I can’t say I’ve done it that rigorously on a daily basis. I’ll definitely be adding this as one of my goals for 2018.

I’ve also learned that success in any discipline is not something you can achieve alone. You need a team behind you. That might be the support of your spouse, friends and family at amateur levels, and involve a whole team (technical, physical, tactical coaches and psychologist, physio) for the elite athletes.

It is very important to write down your guiding principles or philosophy for life. What are you doing? This is a question you need to answer alone and be very clear about. This will be your guiding principle every day and will give you the right framework to be able to make short-term objectives and be able to evaluate your progress.

You also need to set aside time (15-20 minutes a day) to visualize and experience yourself performing at the highest level. You also need to split the visualization exercise in this way: 85% kicking ass and 15% of the time being in compromised positions and figuring out how to get out of that. That will help you overcome bad situations where your competitor has an upper edge in competition and you have to dig yourself out of a hole.

In padel, I’ve seen clearly that we kind of have two inner selves. One, the “I,” seems to give instructions; the other, “myself,” seems to perform the action. Then “I” returns with an evaluation of the action. For clarity let’s call the “teller” Self 1 and the “doer” Self 2. Within each player, the kind of relationship that exists between Self 1 and Self 2 is the prime factor in determining one’s ability to translate his knowledge of technique into effective action. In other words, the key to better tennis – or better anything – lies in improving the relationship between the conscious teller, Self 1, and the unconscious, automatic doer, Self 2.

Another important element that we tend to overlook is proper recovery after training or competition. It’s very important to get your sleep patterns right, have the right nutrition and top that off with a proper psychological state of mind.

These are the best resources I’ve found and totally recommend if you’re interested in learning about peak performance:

What is clear from my experience in life so far, is that we have incredible resources inside of us and it’s just a matter of accessing those resources in order to achieve the best version of ourselves. Practicing this is a life’s work and is one of the most important reasons why I wake up enthusiastic about life every morning.

Hope that helps you achieve peak performance in whatever you want to focus on. If you have any experiences or resources to share, please leave a comment below.