The Longest Lever You Aren't Pulling

I talk a lot about levers of transformation. Clarity on your goal. Consistency with your habits. Nutrition. They all matter. But there's one lever that sits underneath all of them, and most people barely touch it.

Sleep.

I had Nick Riell on the podcast, a coach out of Las Vegas who built his whole practice around it. He calls it the longest lever we have to pull, and I agree with him. Here's why. It doesn't matter what phase you're in. Fat loss, peaking for a meet, off-season, on-season. You're going to sleep through all of it. It's the one input that never turns off. Get it wrong and every other lever gets harder to move. Get it right and everything else starts working better almost for free.

So why do so many of us suck at it?

Stop fixing the leaf and ignoring the root

Here's the thing Nick said that stuck with me. The entire sleep industry sells you the leaves of the problem and never touches the root. Buy a different pillow. Get a weighted blanket. Take a melatonin. And look, if you genuinely can't fall asleep, stay asleep, or wake up feeling human, I promise the blanket is not the issue. You're treating a symptom while the actual cause keeps running in the background.

I've lived this. I had sleep apnea I blamed on being overweight. Lost the weight, still felt like garbage. Turned out I had tonsil stones blocking my airway and a deviated septum I didn't even know about; I literally could not breathe out of one nostril and had no idea that wasn't normal. Got it handled and went from eight hours of terrible sleep to eight hours of actual restorative sleep. The light bulb that goes off is wild. You think, wait, is this how everyone else feels all the time?

Once that clicks, you don't go back. But you have to be willing to chase the root instead of slapping a band-aid on it.

Your body runs on a clock, and you keep resetting it wrong

The root, for most people, is a clock problem.

Your body has a master clock, the circadian rhythm. It tells everything when to fire up and when to power down. Digestion, hormones, energy, repair, all of it. When your lifestyle and your internal clock are pulling in opposite directions long enough, the consequences start showing up. Dysregulated blood sugar. Weight gain. Wrecked hormones. Decisions you wouldn't make if you were rested.

Here's the part worth understanding. There's a difference between your chronotype and your circadian rhythm. Your chronotype is the genetic default; what your body would do if you had no job, no kids, no alarm. Some people are wired to rise and set with the sun. Some are wired to be up at zero dark thirty. But your circadian rhythm is trainable. You can sync it to whatever you do consistently. That's the leverage. You don't have to fight your genetics. You have to stop sending your clock mixed signals.

And there are really only a handful of signals that set that clock. Nick calls them the big synchronizers. Light. Food timing. Physical activity. Get those aligned and most of the pillow-and-supplement noise becomes irrelevant.

The actual moves

So here's how you pull the lever, in plain terms.

Pick a consistent bed and wake time and protect it. Your body loves a routine and runs everything off of it. If your schedule is chaos, don't be surprised your sleep is chaos. Nick's take, which I like: in our world it's usually bedtime that drifts, so anchor one end and the other tends to follow. Go to bed when you're tired, do it consistently, and the rhythm builds itself.

Mind your caffeine. Caffeine doesn't give you energy; it blocks fatigue and keeps cortisol elevated, which delays the melatonin you need to actually fall asleep. It runs about a six-hour half life. So that 3pm double shot still has half its punch in your system at 9pm. If you're struggling to fall asleep and you're a heavy user, that's the first lever. Generally nothing within six hours of bed, and learn your own sensitivity.

Put the phone down. Late-night screens dose you with light your clock reads as artificial daytime, and it shoves your whole rhythm back. Whatever Becky's doing on Facebook will keep until tomorrow. Cutting some caffeine and some nighttime screen time is, more often than not, the exact combo that re-syncs people.

Move every day, ideally outside. Physical activity is a synchronizer, and sunlight is the big one. If you're stuck inside all day, take a 15-minute walk on your lunch. That alone does more for your sleep than most gadgets.

Get the nutrition basics right, and ignore the dumb myths. Food timing is a real signal; eating a big load late tells your clock you're still in "active" mode and delays sleep. But "no carbs after sundown" is one of the worst myths that refuses to die. Carbs later in the day can actually help; they lower cortisol, which lets melatonin rise, which is literally the chemistry of getting tired. Mashed potatoes with dinner are not the enemy if your overall intake is dialed in.

A quick honest note on all of this: these are general principles, not a prescription for your specific body, and if you've got real sleep issues (apnea, insomnia, anything clinical), get a professional in your corner. I had to. It mattered.

Let the data inform you, not boss you

One more thing, because I'm a data nerd and so is Nick. Track your sleep if you want; an Oura ring or a Whoop is a useful tool. But the number is never the boss. Your biofeedback trumps the number every time. I've had my ring tell me to take it easy and then gone out and smashed one of my best biathlon sets in months. I've also had it raise a yellow flag that made me check in and realize, yeah, I actually do feel cooked. Use the device as a guidepost. Then listen to your body, because it's telling you everything you need to know. You just have to slow down enough to hear it.

That's the whole game with sleep. Stop chasing the leaves. Go to the root. Anchor your clock, feed it the right signals, and let the longest lever do the heavy lifting.

Listen to the full interview here.

If you've been grinding away on training and nutrition but you're still dragging, your sleep might be the lever you've been ignoring. That's exactly the kind of thing we untangle together. If you want a coach in your corner, come talk to us; we've never turned anyone away over money, and we'll meet you where you're at.

Vokse eller dø. — Coach Jordan