Don't worry, this post isn't about Cristiano Ronaldo's conquests. It's university exam season in much of the world, and some research news I ran across this morning is immediately applicable by all the students thinking of staying up all night to study:

Researchers, led by Jessica Payne of Harvard Medical School, set out to determine if sleep boosts the creation of emotionally salient memories, and memories relevant to future goals, when it follows soon after learning. At the heart of the study is the notion that the sleeping brain actively and selectively consolidates memory. So, let’s say that what you are trying to learn is a side of beef, and your sleeping brain is the butcher. When you sleep (according to this hypothesis) the butcher takes the side of beef and trims it down to a stack of top sirloin and fillet mignon.

It turns out that’s not too far off the mark, but it’s even better than that. The results show that not only does sleep consolidate the most relevant, adapative and useful information, but the effect can last for up to four months. The trick is that you have to sleep soon after learning. Waiting 24 hours after learning greatly diminshes the effects.

This research adds more substance to the argument that the sleeping brain isn’t dormant in any sense of the word. It’s actively calculating what’s most important about our recent experience, and selecting what can be consolidated for long-term storage.

There you have it - sleeping is an important component of learning and you will not learn more by pulling all-nighters. Well, they might be effective in helping you pass that exam tomorrow morning if you really are unprepared, but if we define learning as the acquisition of actual knowledge and not the passing of exams, sleep is an essential component.

So that's for intellectual young folk. Some of us are long past the age of having exams, though. Sleep is important for us, too. Coach Charles Poliquin has a piece of excellent advice, as well as a quick test of whether a guy is getting high-quality sleep:

High-quality sleep means putting your head on the pillow and not waking up until the next day. You also want to wake up at the same time every day.

But quantity of sleep isn't the only problem. Erratic sleeping patterns are also bad for your health and your physique. If you wake up in the middle of the night to go pee, it's not good sleep.

Remember, all the anabolic-hormone cascades depend on the quality of your sleep. A lot of males with low Testosterone levels can be cured simply by fixing their sleep patterns.

A low estimate is that 68% of the population doesn't sleep properly. When I work with pro teams as a consultant, the first thing I do is teach them all the tricks I have for improving quality of sleep.

Now, a young guy can go out on Friday night, hunt for quiff until 4 a.m., then go to the gym on Saturday morning and deadlift without it affecting him much. Eventually, though, it starts to take a toll on you. Many men these days start to see a decline in Testosterone at age 31. Thirty-one is the new 50.

If you're not sure if you're getting quality sleep or not, this is your standard: You should always wake up under a teepee. If you don't have a boner so solid you have to do a handstand to take a morning piss, your Testosterone levels are probably low.

Since I read that last month I've been making a deliberate effort to stop getting up in the middle of the night but no, I'm not going to tell you how well it's working according to that test. Sorry.