What is Metcon Recovery?

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

It wasn’t that long ago that that was the cool thing to say.

Today we know that not enough sleep will make you dead a lot faster.

And if you’re an active person? You know how important sleep is to recovery. If you want to perform well in your sport you gotta get those Z’s in.

That’s why we created Metcon Recovery, to maximize the amount of quality sleep you get. It’s an all-natural supplement with its core ingredients inspired by the research of everyone’s favorite neuroscientist. (Hint: his last name rhymes with buberman.)

Metcon Recovery will help you fall asleep faster, stay in deep sleep longer, and wake up feeling extra fresh and recovered.

That’s the short of it.

But if you like nerding out on the science like we do, keep reading.

Let’s start with how much sleep a healthy person actually needs. Here’s a chart from the National Sleep Foundation:

According to the NSF, a healthy adult without sleep disorders needs at least 7 hours of sleep.

If you’re an adult athlete, you might need up to 10 hours of sleep. And elite athletes (people who train 4-6 hours a day) need 10-12 hours of sleep per night.

Sleeping less than 7 hours a night puts you at a far greater risk of stroke and heart disease.

Sleeping less than 6 hours a night puts you at greater risk of impaired glucose tolerance and diabetes.

Sleeping less than 4 hours a night is the equivalent of aging 8 years.

Sleep deprivation (meaning less than 7 hours a night) is also associated with memory issues, mood changes, trouble thinking and concentrating, high blood pressure, weight gain, weakened immunity, increased accidents, low sex drive, the list goes on and on.

Few things are as devastating on the body as not getting enough sleep.

Tracking sleep quantity is easy. If you’re a healthy adult, 7+ hours of sleep is a good quantity.

Tracking sleep quality is a lot trickier. It’s subjective. According to the National Sleep Foundation, this is a good checklist to figure out if your sleep quality is good or not:

• You fall asleep soon after getting into bed, within 30 minutes or less.
• You typically sleep straight through the night, waking up no more than once per night.
• You’re able to sleep the recommended amount of hours for your age group.
• You fall back asleep within 20 minutes if you do wake up.
• You feel rested, restored, and energized upon waking up in the morning.

I’ll be honest even I, someone who’s never had any problems with sleep, can’t say that I can check all of these boxes every night. Quality sleep is hard.

As you can already guess, sleep (or lack of it) has major implications on performance. There are so many studies and examples that I’m not even going to go into the negative effects here. I’m just going to focus on the benefits of sleep on performance.

Getting enough sleep helps produce growth hormone, which means more muscle mass and faster recovery.

You’ll also produce more cytokines, which are key to a healthy immune system and fighting off diseases.

While you’re sleeping, you go through 5 different stages of sleep. The changes in your heart rate and breathing throughout these stages promote cardiovascular health.

One study showed a 9% improvement in both free throws and three-point shots in basketball players who extended their sleep to 10 hours a night.

Another showed that tennis players who increased their sleep by at least 2 hours per night increased their serve accuracy from 35.7% to 41.8%.

There are plenty more examples, but the message is the same. If you want to feel better in the gym, in your sport, or just in life, you need good sleep.

We chose the ingredients in Metcon Recovery very carefully. Every ingredient is safe with no negative side effects, and has a research-based reason to be in there. I’ll go through each of the 6 ingredients below and tell you what they do.

You might be thinking, collagen?? Isn’t that a supplement for skin and joint health?

Yup, at least that’s how it’s usually marketed. More extra benefits for you!

But another thing that collagen has is an amino acid called Glycine.

Glycine helps build proteins needed for tissue and hormone maintenance. More importantly (at least for this product), Glycine helps improve sleep quality.

Taking Glycine before you go to bed helps lower your core body temperature, which lets you fall asleep faster and stay in deep sleep longer.

The recommended dose of Glycine for sleep is 3g.

About ⅓ of collagen is Glycine, which is why Metcon Recovery has 9g of collagen.

9g of collagen = 3g of Glycine.

You probably know a friend or 2 who takes Magnesium because they heard it helps with sleep.

It’s true, Magnesium has been shown to help with falling asleep faster, sleep efficiency, sleep time, and regulating your circadian rhythm.

The thing is…

Not all Magnesium is created equally.

When you take Magnesium it goes into your gut. It doesn’t necessarily get into your brain, which is how you get all the sleep benefits.

The most common form of Magnesium you’ll see in supplements is Magnesium Citrate, which is actually a better laxative than a sleep aid.

Magnesium Malate is another common one, but that’s better for treating muscle soreness.

Magnesium Glycinate or Biglycinate (same thing FYI, scientists like confusing us) is one of the forms of Magnesium that can cross the blood-brain barrier effectively. This is what we use in Metcon Recovery.

Full name: Gamma-AminoButyric Acid

Are you one of those people who have trouble falling asleep because you have a million thoughts racing through your mind?

Well GABA slows down your brain activity, making you less anxious and more primed to fall asleep.

One study showed a decrease in the amount of time to fall asleep from 13.4 - 15.7 minutes down to 5.7 - 6.2 minutes.

Tryptophan in itself doesn’t help with sleep. It’s what your body turns it into that does.

L-Tryptophan gets converted into 5-HTP in your body, which then produces serotonin, which then produces melatonin (an ingredient we do not use in Metcon Recovery, I’ll explain why later).

L-Tryptophan -> 5-HTP -> Serotonin -> Melatonin.

The biggest thing that this helps with is reducing your “wake after sleep onset”.

Translation: You’ll wake up less throughout the night and stay in deep sleep longer.

See, even if you think you’re asleep all night, you actually wake up multiple times throughout the night. If you have a sleep tracker like a Whoop or an Oura Ring, you can see how much time you spent awake.

Personally, I have a Whoop and it’s telling me that I woke up 25 times last night with a total awake time of 1hr 5mins.

The less awake time we have (ie. interrupted sleep), the more quality sleep we get which means more recovery.

This one is another relaxer. It reduces your resting heart rate, making it easier to fall asleep.

Here’s a fun fact. You’ll see L-Theanine in most energy drinks these days because that relaxation effect means you’ll get less jitters from the stimulants. Less jitters means you’ll be able to drink more. Devious.

When combined with GABA and Magnesium, L-Theanine has even more sleep benefits such as improving NREM sleep.

Our neurons constantly have stuff coming in and out of them.

What Apigenin does is turn on a chloride ion channel that turns off your neurons a bit (in a good way). It’s almost like a form of a sedative.

It’s actually the same relaxation compound found in Chamomile tea. No wonder people like to swill that before going to bed.

There’s a lot of hesitation around melatonin right now, and for good reason.

For one, there just aren’t any data on the long-term effects of supplementing melatonin.

Melatonin regulates hormones, especially the ones that trigger the onset of puberty. Even if you’re already past puberty, we don’t know what effects Melatonin supplementation could have on other hormones. It’s not worth the risk (unless you have some major sleep disorder).

Even in the short-term, common side effects include:

• Headache
• Dizziness
• Nausea
• Daytime drowsiness

Any one of these would ruin my day.

Another downside of Melatonin supplementation is that it helps with falling asleep, but doesn’t help with staying asleep. In fact, many people who take Melatonin to fall asleep report waking up a few hours later and have trouble falling back asleep.

What’s more, the doses of Melatonin in supplements are wildly unreliable. 3rd party testing has shown that the actual amount of Melatonin in supplements could be as low as 15% of what they say, or up to 400 times more than what’s listed on the bottle.

Yikes.

Even if you could trust the doses you were given, the amounts in each pill are 10-100x more than what we produce naturally. This could make our bodies produce less melatonin naturally, and again, we don’t know what long-term effects these mega-doses can have.

With Metcon Recovery, the ingredients we chose help increase the amount of natural produced Melatonin (ie. by your body). That way you get all of the benefits of Melatonin without all of the negative effects of its supplement form.

It’s simple!

Just take a packet and mix it with hot water - I recommend 150ml but you can use more or less as you like. Drink within 1 hour of going to bed.

I would try to use the smallest amount of water you can so that you’re not getting up to pee in the middle of night.

Another pro tip: drink it slowly.

The faster you drink water, the faster you expand blood volume. The faster you expand blood volume, the faster your body wants to get rid of it.

So if you don’t want to get up in the middle of night, sip any liquids that you drink in the last 3 hours before going to bed.