My father’s neighbor often drinks coffee before he heads to bed, and it doesn’t affect his sleep. Yet on some nights when he doesn’t, he tosses and turns and feels as amped up as if he just downed eight shots of Italian espresso.

Pretty odd, huh?

But not any odder than what a visiting Kiwi told me on a bike ride years ago. That he’s so sensitive to caffeine that a single cup of the decaffeinated stuff will keep him from sleeping well that night - even if he has it first thing in the morning.

So why mention these two coffee oddities and their effect on sleep? Because of two recent studies.

But before we assess those, let’s keep to the theme of oddities just a bit longer.

For isn’t it odd we tend to cringe at change and cling to the status quo although we want our health to continually get that little bit better? Yet all the while we know those two tendencies can keep better health from happening?

It certainly is, and it’s certainly something I hope you keep in mind as you read on. Another hope is that you haven’t forgotten what I so often urge you to do.

Experiment, experiment, experiment based on what you know about yourself and what recent studies have shown.

Like the one done by a group of international researchers whose results were published in letter form by Nature Metabolism this March. It finds “a functional link between circulating levels of the natural alkaloid trigonelline ... and muscle health in multiple species.”

Now the letter is lengthy enough to pass for a novella - and as difficult to follow as an assembly manual from hell - so I’ll cut to the chase. The researchers discovered trigonelline, a chemical produced in your gut and contained in coffee, “correlate[s] positively with muscle strength” and aids the mitochondrial process in your skeletal muscle cells that powers bodily movement.

This discovery started when the researchers compared blood samples from 20 Chinese male senior citizens suffering from sarcopenia to ones taken from healthy senior citizens and noticed a big difference in the amount of trigonelline present.

The sarco sufferers didn’t have nearly as much as their healthy counterparts.

In case you need a quick refresher, sarcopenia is the loss of muscle mass that leads to diminished strength and function as a result of aging.

It can begin as early as your 30s and can reduce lean-muscle mass up to 8 percent in that decade. By age 45, the rate usually increases to 1 percent per year and accelerates again in your 60s.

So how do you stop it? You don’t.

But past studies have found a combination of consistent weightlifting occasionally taken to the point of muscle failure along with consuming plenty of protein slows it and can even temporarily put it on hold.

So you can see why this latest research is big news by suggesting trigonelline can do so too.

Once the researchers detected the lack of trigonelline in the sarco sufferers, they then treated muscle tissue samples from both groups with it. They found doing so raised the level of a key coenzyme needed in many of the ways your body produces energy, including the most important one, the aforementioned mitochondrial process.

Subsequent work the researchers did with mice suggested the same.

All of which leads one to assume and the authors of the letter to suggest that ample trigonelline in your body equates to extra energy. As well as for me to suggest it may be time for you to experiment.

For you to start drinking coffee or increase up your consumption of it if you do (without consuming so much it makes you jittery or lose sleep at night, of course).

And if that experimentation does lead to extra energy and you become more physically active, you may find yourself doubly blessed. Because more physical activity appears to help create something we only seem to truly appreciate when it evades us.

Sound sleep.

Researchers led by Erla Björnsdóttir PhD, a clinical psychologist at Iceland’s University of Reykjavik, assessed the responses of over 4,000 European adults who participated in the 10-year, three-phase European Community Respiratory Health Survey. The participants (between 39 and 67 years of age at the start) answered questions about their frequency and duration of physical activity three different times and based on that were placed into one of four groups: “persistently non-active; became inactive; became active; and persistently active.” To be considered “persistently active,” participants needed to exercise at least two to three times a week for at least one hour or longer per week.

Those determined to be that were found to be 22 percent less likely to suffer from any insomnia symptoms, 42 percent less likely to have difficulty falling asleep, and 55 percent more likely to get what the researchers deemed to be a normal amount of sleep, between six and nine hours.