This article is near and dear to my heart. To give you some background, my wife is a beautiful, smart, caring person who started her nursing career 12 months ago working the night shift from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Over the course of her first four months of work, her health progressively started to deteriorate. I would like to think that we are a proactive family, but in this case we weren’t. Instead of nipping her health issues in the bud, we assumed that as she got used to her new schedule, these issues would resolve themselves. They didn’t. Since then, we have made a ton of changes that have helped return her to good health. Hopefully you can learn from our mistakes.

Nutrition is the foundation of good health, so naturally that’s the first place we looked to make changes. For the last few years we have followed a very manageable style of Paleo, whereby during the week we never stray from Paleo guidelines and on the weekends we allow ourselves a non-Paleo meal or two, to indulge in a few cocktails or whatever else strikes our fancy. Because there was room for improvement there, that’s the first place we started. We made two significant changes. The first was to eliminate our weekend indulgences (her because of this predicament and me because I was told I didn’t have a choice). The second was to add back in some of those grey area Paleo carbs. While we always eat a ton of vegetables, and she eats a ton of fruit, we added potatoes to her meals three to four days per week, and she aims to eat them on the days she works or on her heavy lower body workout day.

People tend to forget how important carbs are to the body. Much like most of you probably did, when we first went Paleo, we cut out pretty much all carbs that weren’t vegetables. You know what happens next, you start to look more ripped. So you continue to do it. And you wind up getting lost in this starvation six-pack of a world where a single carb will bloat you, so you avoid them at all costs. Within a week of adding them back in, she started to feel better. Her mood improved, and she said she was thinking clearer at work, which is always a plus for someone who has people’s lives in her hands.

We stuck with the Paleo onslaught (I now have to sneak my Crispin Cider in when she is working) and our focus then went to her training program. Since she was still training heavy and hard (Joe Kenn Tier Systems style), performing metcons and doing some longer distance cardio (not my influence), we began to tweak her program. Away went the distance cardio. Goodbye to any metcon that lasted longer than 10 minutes.

Here is a look at her typical training week. Assume she is working Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and Sunday is Day 1. If she were to work Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, then Monday would be day 1, etc. (We’ll delve into her schedule a bit more in a minute.)

Day 1 (Sunday): Max Effort Lower Body, Repetitive and Dynamic Effort Upper Body + short kettlebell metcon
Day 2 (Monday, work day): OFF
Day 3 (Tuesday, work day): OFF
Day 4 (Wednesday): 10-min. metcon
Day 5 (Thursday, work day): OFF
Day 6 (Friday): Max Effort Upper Body, Repetitive and Dynamic Effort Lower Body + very short body-weight metcon
Day 7 (Saturday): 10-min. metcon

We tweaked her three day a week Tier System Training to a more manageable two days per week with a quick finisher at the end of the workout. The other two workout days then became short and sweet metcons; Anything from 21-15-9, to 10 min AMRAPS, to Pavel Ladder 10-1, to Martin Rooney’s Hurricane Training. We just try to keep it fresh, quick and purposeful.

There were some great improvements in how she felt physically and mentally thanks to the combination of the changes we made with her diet and training, but we still thought that there were some other things we could do that would lead to her feeling even better and really adapting to this new lifestyle, because if you do shift work, as you know it’s not just a job, it’s a complete lifestyle.

Thanks to both of our backgrounds, we were familiar with the circadian rhythms of the body, but we always took them for granted. The literature out there is amazing, and what we found is pretty scary. From heart disease to bone fractures, cancer, diabetes and obesity, when you mess with your body’s natural clock, you are in for a world of hurt. But the estimated 15 million people out there that perform shift work, including my wife, don’t have a choice. Before she started work, she was in school. She had early classes and did school work all day and I am always at work by 6 a.m., so by the time the night rolls around we were in bed and sleeping by 9:30 p.m. most nights. Because of this, and our diet and training schedules, we both felt great. However, now that this schedule was thrown off for her, the next step we took was to get her schedule to be as regular as possible. She has to work three 12-hour shifts per week and every pay period (two weeks) she has to work one additional weekend night. Initially she tried working the 12-hour days in a row, which we thought would allow her to get in a rhythm where she would sleep all day and work all night. There were two problems with this. The first was that because she had to work one weekend night, she wound up working her six shifts either too close to one another or really spread out, without a happy medium. The second problem was that she was completely worn out from working the three shifts back to back. It mentally and physically beat her up and took her days to recover. The solution was to change to a two and one schedule, where she will work two days back to back and then one odd night later in the week: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, or something similar. After making this change, she significantly started to feel better and her ability to recover from work really started to increase. This schedule enabled her to sleep the days of her shifts, and the days after her shifts, without beating her body completely down from working three nights in a row, and also allowed her to get in the required weekend shift as well

The most overlooked aspect of shift work is that, for the most part, people who do shift work are active for their entire shifts. From police officers, to firefighters, to nurses, the job itself is mentally and physically draining (sorry phone call center operators). Not taking anything away from anybody, but there are jobs out there that are strictly physical, and jobs out there that are strictly mental. When you add the stress of both of them together, along with the destruction of sleep patterns and circadian rhythms, you make an environment in the body that is ripe to fail health wise.

It was after she was able to get on a strict working schedule that she began to feel significantly better. Because of this, we hypothesized that proper sleep would have the biggest impact on her health. The nutrition was great. The changes to her training were terrific, but now our focus changed to creating a fantastic sleep environment.

The first change to her sleep environment was so simple I wish we had thought of it sooner. I hung black out shades in our bedroom. After reading about melatonin and how and when it is released (night) and what suppresses melatonin production (light), I went to Home Depot and purchased, for a total of $12, two nonpermanent, blackout shades which hang up thanks to the miracle invention of tape. Our room is now a cave. When you enter and close the door, it could be midnight or it could be noon. It is impossible to tell the difference. Instantly it became easier for her to fall asleep and to stay asleep. We know this because we were tracking her sleep using the free Sleep 101 app on the iPhone. She began to use it to track her sleep just after we made the changes to her diet and then throughout the entire process. Having the data helped to reinforce that the changes we were making were actually working and convinced us that we were headed in the right direction.

Now that I’ve touched on the melatonin subject, you may be wondering if she supplements with melatonin. I brought it up, but my wife wasn’t convinced that it would help and after all, it’s her body. To those of you out there wondering if you should, I would make all these other changes and then give it a try. Outside of greens powder and a bit of whey protein, we just aren’t big supplement people. I know some of you out there are, and by all means figure out what works for you, but for us, and her specifically, she decided against it. To each their own.

The next change was the biggest, baddest, and most blasphemous. She had to fight the meanest bitch of them all, that whore called caffeine. The one that keeps you suckling at her teet for just one more hit, one more ounce, one more shot of espresso. Now, she didn’t cut out caffeine altogether, as that would be crazy. But before where she would have four to six 200mg servings over the course of her shift, she now does one cup of coffee at the beginning and one with five hours to go. After much experimentation, she found that the five-hour window worked best because it is about seven hours before she will go to sleep. We found that if she shortened up that window any more, she had trouble falling asleep. And we now knew, getting a better night’s, err, day’s sleep had the most influence on her feeling better.

The biggest mistake you can make when you start working the night shift is to attribute how horrible you feel is you just “getting used” to working nights. It’s not. It is the beginning of your body breaking down and failing you. If you ignore it for long enough, it becomes your new norm and you will be setting yourself up for a slew of heath problems in your future. I encourage you take an active roll in your well-being and not sit idly back and let your job control you. You must control your job, your life and your health.

BONUS

This is not the typical article that I would write as I am usually only concerned with increasing performance. Because of that, I will leave you with one performance tidbit. If you are working the night shift, it will be damn near impossible for you to be an elite athlete at any level, any sport, anywhere. Sorry. Elite athletes put training before everything else in their lives. If you are working the night shift, something has already come between you and your goals. If you want to be elite any anything, from CrossFit to Olympic lifting to basketball, find a new job. I’m not saying you can’t be good, I’m just saying you can’t be great, and your training program always needs to reflect your priorities in sport and in life.