Took me three times to parse what you wrote, I thought you were saying Not strength training improves mental clarity and sleep lol

Just one missing comma before `and`

Also, a colon after `sleep` in place of the period

I enjoy strength training and drinking alcohol.

I think if I had issues with either mental clarity or sleep I'd cut back more, I do practice dry January and have been surprised and how I don't really feel all that different. Maybe 30 days isn't long enough

I too enjoy drinking alcohol and a few years back went dry for 90 days. I was disappointed. If anything, I felt worse. A clean diet and exercise has much more of an impact on how I feel/sleep than abstaining from alcohol.

Eat less, move more, drink in moderation.

Several studies have shown that exercising improves cognition better than brain training games and activities. Alcohol does impact cognition if it is binge drinking, or you exceed 2+ drinks/day. Though it does take years of drinking for it to be visible.

And good sleep will increase mental clarity and strength training

And not drinking alcohol will improve good sleep and strength training

They all impact each other!

It's a small town shop.

I agree with this, however, the best sleep of my life was when I was doing Ashtanga yoga regular. It's very physical, but I think it also takes care of a lot of muscle tension - notably in the shoulders, hips, and hamstrings - that are an often unnoticed cause of sleep issues.

Not only did I sleep better while doing Ashtanga, I felt better with less sleep. It was amazing. It's something I've struggled incorporating into my current lifestyle for a few reasons.

Ashtanga means lot of things apart from Asana and Pranayama. How strict was your lifestyle?

Not strict at all.

Agreed. When I was practicing 5-6 times per week my sleep was a lot better. Unfortunately my yoga school closed during the pandemic and I started training Muay Thai in my neighborhood. Sometimes I'm so tired from training it's actually difficult to sleep. With only doing asana practice I can sleep 7 hours and be fine, with Muay Thai I need 8-9 hours to recover.

I've had a lot of fights about this with my girlfriend. We both work in academia and regularly go to the gym, but she insists to have a drink every now and then, which she says helps her take an edge off work stress. She also scolds me some times when I want to go to bed before 10pm, saying this is too restrictive and less fun. We ended up breaking up last week - not exclusively because of this, but these incompatibilities definitely contributed to the decision.

Her approach might not be the literal peak healthiest, but that doesn't mean its wrong. If she's only having a drink every once in a while and is getting 7+ hours of sleep most nights then the negative effects are probably negligible anyway.

To a certain extent, most people need to sacrifice some amount of health and performance to live the fullest life they can. If you don't feel that you benefit from that, though, and its important for either of you that you share your lifestyle, then perhaps you just weren't that compatible.

> To a certain extent, most people need to sacrifice some amount of health and performance to live the fullest life they can.

I agree 100%. I did not post to complain about her, but more to note about incompatibilities in things like sleep schedule. I do believe though she should drink a bit less, but as long as it makes her enjoy life, why not.

In this scenario, I am your girlfriend, and you are my boyfriend (or from my perspective you are my wife ).

For what it’s worth, I’ve found that if I try to go to bed too early — as my wife often insists — I wake up in the middle of the night. This happens constantly enough that I really try to avoid being in bed before 11pm.

Everybody is different. The reason I need to go to bed early is that I wake up before 7am every day, regardless of when I go to bed. So the only way for me to get 8-9 hours of sleep is to go to bed early.

Your body is different from mine so you need a different routine. My point was that it's important for me to maintain a certain schedule which was incompatible with my partner - which is fair enough.

Sorry to hear about your break up, hope you're doing ok.

Thanks, we are both doing fine! I've had really good sleep since then actually.

sounds like she likes a drink every now and then, and you insist that it, like fun after 10pm, is against your principles

Glad for your ex gf, tbh :)

I'm assuming y'all voted differently

I haven't had a drink, or smoked for two months and my sleeping has improved so much it is crazy, absolutely crazy... I do need to get back to the gym, it is just so hard to muscle the strength to go when I'm not feeling particularly good about myself, which is dumb, since that is the reason I want to get back into it...

Maybe get yourself a couple kettlebells and do some kb swings at home? You can build a lot of baseline strength with a kb or two. Even just doing 100 single arm swings per day is enough at the beginning, and it takes no more than 15 minutes or so. Set yourself a goal of doing it consistently for a while and I'm sure you'll feel pretty confident walking into a gym again after 45 or 100 days.

Rogue is actually doing a 5-items ship for $5 promo for the month, kettlebells included.

Kettlebells are half that price at Walmart. They work just as well.

Oh for sure, I just am very happy with my Rogue equipment and am wiling to spend a little more for it. It's easy to get damaged equipment in the mail with something so heavy, and Rogue is good about reshipping things. I've never purchased anything from Walmart (I live in NYC, we don't really have them), so I'm not sure what they're like.

But yeah, get whatever works for you to start training!

I never associated alcohol with poor sleep (it makes me fall asleep!) until I got a garmin watch and could see whenever I went to bed after drinking, my rest was absolutely awful.

Note this study provides no evidence in support of this statement; strength training caused motor neurons to grow -- the neurons between your spinal chord and the muscles -- not neurons in your brain. Your statement is likely true, but just not because of this study.

Just going to leave this here as a counterpoint, since sibling comments feel one-sided on the question: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6957093/#:~:text=In...

That doesn't really say anything about alcohol's effect on (non-dementia related) mental clarity and sleep.

Also if you continue to read that meta-analysis beyond the sentence you linked to it seems that much larger studies did not find a correlation between reduced dementia risk and moderate alcohol consumption. In fact they found that high alcohol consumption was associated with significantly higher risk of dementia. The overall conclusion of the analysis was "Available epidemiological studies are not sufficient to verify a protective effect of alcohol on dementia development."

Dementia seems highly related, if not inversely synonymous, with mental clarity? I think your comment is a bit misleading - while it does seem clearer that _high_ alcohol consumption and alcohol "use-disorders" are correlated with elevated risk of dementia, results pertaining to light-to-moderate consumption are "heterogeneous" - I read 4 studies or meta-studies with results showing _decreased_ risk of dementia (Rotterdam, Whitehall-II, Anstey, Xhu), 2 showing no correlation (California, HUNT), and zero showing increased risk when it comes to light-to-moderate consumption. Anyone interested should of course read the linked text in full and draw their own conclusions.

Thanks for reminding me of :~:text=.