Curious to see what everyone’s thoughts are on guitar performance/improvements in relation to consuming adequate amounts of water and 7-8 hours of sleep…How important do you think this is for guitarists/musicians and have you noticed less “off” days occurring?
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I think of nutrition/hydration, exercise and sleep as a three legged stool that your sitting on. If you remove (or shorten) one of those the whole thing is at risk of crashing down.
No doubt maintaining your best health (different for everyone) promotes your best performance…however it will be difficult to really draw direct causation between drinking water and guitar performance.
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Hydration is definitely a big one for me - I drink way too much coffee and tea and sometimes straight don’t get enough water. If I let it go on too long, I ache plenty. I don’t get dehydrated to the point of sickness, but more a persistant aches pains and muscle strain.
As for sleep, I hardly ever get 7 hours. In my younger days I would get away with 4-5 hrs (not advocating to do this), I’m such a night owl. In my even younger days my friend and I would buy the latest playstation game and basically play it though the night - 24hrs straight!
Over the last few months I have made a big effort to see if an increase in sleep makes any difference in my life… so far nothing, just less time actually practicing guitar!
What I always wonder about is how the amount of sleep affects what you have learned on a certain day. As far as I know the muscle memory is sleep related and your body kind of undergoes a storage information process during your sleep. So I would assume that the amount and quality of sleep you get could affect the efficiency in your learning process? But I am no expert on this and could certainly be wrong. I do try to get at least seven hours of sleep, sometimes a little bit more, but often it is only six or even less (because I am in bed but stay awake for no reason…surely stress related).
As far as hydration goes, I too drink a lot of coffee, but also around 1,5 to 2l of tap water everyday. So I can not report anything from there since I believe I drink enough (I read somewhere that you should get around 30ml of water per kilogram weight you have).
My eating habits, on the other hand, are not that great, because I suffer from some kind of restrictive eating disorder for around 20 years. Basically I can not eat most vegetables and even a lot of fruits because I hate the texture. Even if I try, my body constantly tries to throw up. I do try to eat healthy otherwise though, little processed and no sugar (to complex for me to really write it up here since I am not a native speaker). Generally I feel very healthy and I am barely sick at all.
Edit: Otherwise, as with sports or any other art, I do think that taking care of and paying attention to your body is extremely important to achieve peak performance.
Its a very interesting point…
What I’m hearing here is that shortening all 3 legs would be more stable than just shortening one. Sounds to me like I need to eat a lot of ice cream and watch a lot of TV to make sure that my nutrition and exercise legs are as short as my sleep leg has been for the last 30 years 
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It depends how low the ground you want your health optimized.
I don’t think that a chair with very short legs is that comfortable, so better keep those legs at a proper length.