Shrinking Our Favorite Unit of Measure with Ultradian Rhythms

What if the importance of any particular day could be shrunk even further? You’ve heard of circadian rhythms. But, have you heard of ultradian rhythms? We’ll, whether you’ve heard of them or not, you’ve got one and it matters!

Circadian rhythms, as you know, make one full cycle each day and have a profound effect on sleep. 

Ultradian rhythms, however, are 90 to 120 minute cycles that take place over and over again within a day. More specifically speaking, these ultradian rhythms affect bodily functions like blood circulation, growth hormone, appetite, arousal, and many more functions. 

There’s not much tactical use beyond maybe Trivial Pursuit for the information above, so why are we talking about this? It’s simple. 

If we can acknowledge the fact that we have cycles every 90-120 minutes throughout the day, then we can depart from evaluating the day as the smallest unit of which to evaluate our energy output.

Personally, I figured any given day is the smallest cycle for me to observe energy levels and in the morning I’d generally have a lot of it and at the end of the day I’d be mostly out of it.

From the perspective of ultradian rhythms, we can explain why we feel lethargic at times only for that feeling to subside, for example. From a training context, if you don’t feel great now. You might just be 90-120 minutes away from a different possibility rather than throwing the whole day away. 

Hang in there. Things are always changing (every 90-120 minutes, at least).