Log truck drivers often have demanding jobs. LTSC shares a few tips on how to maintain good health by balancing diet, exercise, and sleep.
Most people know that diet and exercise are both important in maintaining good health. Often, sleep is not covered. For most log truck drivers, it’s hard to tackle all three while managing busy lives and sedentary jobs such as sitting in the cab of a truck.
However, by eating healthy and creating a balanced diet, there are a complex number of conditions that can be reduced, such as strokes, diabetes, and obesity. Exercise, too, offers improvements over and above just your diet.
The effects of bad diet choices can decrease energy and the ability to get through the day; it’s important to give your body the right fuel, which can also often reduce anxiety and the development of depression.
Sleep is also affected by a higher intake of calories; too much fat and caffeine prior to sleeping can lead to a disrupted night. Many truck drivers start before 5am and so getting a good seven to nine hours of sleep is important; that means going to bed before 9pm and getting good, solid sleep.
Research shows that including exercise in your daily routine can also have a positive effect on the quality of your sleep. Exercise does not have to be cardio either but can be resistance training, such as weightlifting.
For a truck driver, throughout the day, there’s an opportunity to probably get a bit of both in. Although exercise is the cornerstone of health, and the long-term effects of exercise can also support better weight control, stronger bones, and a reduced risk of many diseases, sleep offers the body and brain a chance to restore and recover.
When people don’t get enough sleep, they are more prone to overeating and choosing unhealthy foods. As we run around with our busy lives, we can make this an excuse not to prepare the right food and also select food high in fats.
Physically, sleep deprivation can also affect the body’s release of ghrelin and leptin—two chemicals that tell our brain when to consume calories. Often, without the ideal quantity of sleep, we can be driven to high-calorie foods.
Sleep also allows the muscle tissue time to recover, and a good night’s sleep also ensures you have the energy to exercise. The timing of exercise is important, too, as ideally, early afternoon and early evening helps with sleep but exercise too close to bedtime can disrupt good sleep.
Recommendations that promote quality sleep can include:
- Don’t eat too late—push your meals to earlier in the evening, as our metabolism slows down when we sleep, making digestion harder
- Avoid caffeine—stimulants such as coffee, energy drinks, and soda, if preferred, are best to eat early in the day
- Move your body—schedule regular exercise to improve your sleep and best to get a moderate quantity of exercise a few days a week rather than small amounts throughout the day
- Avoiding exercise too close to bedtime, which allows your body to wind down before bed
- Get some light—being outdoors exposes you to natural light and keeps your body in sync with its natural sleep rhythms. The least reliable methods of reducing fatigue risk are temporary measures to stay awake. They must never be relied on as a long-term fix. The benefits of using temporary fatigue measures have been shown to last for not much more than an hour, with fatigue symptoms and effects kicking back in. Temporary fatigue measures are more likely to be self-initiated by drivers and could include:
- drinking stimulants such as coffee and sports drinks
- mental alertness techniques, e.g. singing
- getting out of the vehicle for a quick walk
- taking a short nap.
Poor planning can mean drivers constantly rely on temporary fatigue measures. This is ultimately the responsibility of their employer or transport operator. Some of these suggestions are not possible in the life of a truck driver, but it’s about fitting in the best you can for your body and attain a balance between sleep, nutrition, and exercise. These three activities are also imperative to good mental health.
Sleep is a good investment, and like nutrition, has an impact on our well-being. Also, remember that any form of exercise is good for you, and you’re the only one that can make the most of every opportunity you have.
The family can get onboard, too, and work together to help each other achieve this. A later pre-dinner walk with the kids and the dog can make all the difference. Fatigue cannot be overcome by willpower, experience, or motivation. It can only be overcome by getting enough sleep.
This leads to the funded campaign ‘Get Real Behind the Wheel’, which has been developed as a way of packaging up driver fatigue in a creative way. The campaign looks to cover three main topics that were brought to the forefront as being real concerns for operators, in the contribution to the state of fatigue:
- unhealthy eating
- lack of exercise
- poor quality of sleep
Fatigue is a real consequence behind the wheel. The project looks to promote that it’s okay to talk about daily challenges—issues that contribute to a fatigued state and be able to provide real, tangible solutions.
The final campaign has been developed by combining the idea of a travelling ‘Confessional Cab’ balanced with real solutions from a health
advisor/guru. The campaign will start in October 2022.
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Photography: Supplied