You are one of those people who lift regularly and take pride in working out five days a week. You eat six meals a day to stoke your metabolism, eat lots of complex carbs and lean protein. Mentally and physically you feel better then ever but you actually may be leaving out a key component to muscle growth...SLEEP!
You can do all of these things throughout the day and live a "healthy" lifestyle but if you rule out a healthy sleeping pattern, it may be detrimental to the potential of YOU GETTING JACKED (like this guy).
There a couple of things that can improve drastically if you get at least eight hours of sleep.
1.) When you are sleeping your body releases the most amount of growth hormones. Yes, it is true that your muscles do also release these growth hormones throughout the day but not in the large amounts when you sleep. By sacrificing this time by going out to party, playing Call of Duty, or watching movies till the early morning will stunt the potential for your muscles to be the best that they can be. It will also make you feel like a loser.
2.) The working out process and sleep work hand in hand with one another. When you do workout what happens is that you are breaking down your muscle tissues and they need to repair. Your body works more efficiently throughout a good night's sleep to repair muscles rather than when you get only a 5 - 6 hours a sleep per day. If you don't get enough rest your body won't have enough time to fully recover your muscles and your next workout you will feel weaker and still sore. Why in the world would you want to sacrifice growth because you're too busy catching up on the latest episode of Spartacus. Yes, I understand that those guys are jacked and their abs look like a hershey chocolate bar but you won't get to that level if you keep this up!
3.) The less sleep. The less your metabolism is going to work. As stated before, if you eat six small meals a day to try and boost your metabolism. If you don't get adequate amounts of sleep your metabolism and body will hate you. Blood sugar levels are not where they are supposed to be and because of that there is a larger chance that you will gain fat!
Recently, I decided to change this pathetic habit and I am slowly easing into going to bed at a reasonable time. I find with a regulated sleep pattern, my body doesn't hate me as much. My muscles are not as sore as they were when I was getting only 5-6 hours of sleep a day.
Just take a step back and ask yourself this question.
Have you taken the necessary steps in order to be the best that you can be when it comes to a healthy lifestyle?
If not, take it little by little. I am not saying apply these changes and if you don't you are a failure. The fact that you are reading this right now and eager to change that says so much about your willingness to improve.
If you have any questions just email me and I could help you out if you don't know where to start!
One of my favourite pieces of research on this topic is regarding a fighter who was trying to cut weight.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure you can find the cited articles on exercisebiology.com.
But basically a fighter was doing everything he was supposed to do regarding training and eating and his trainer could not figure out why he wasn't getting to the weight he needed to be at in order to fight at his weight class.
Low and behold they checked out his sleep patterns and it turned out he was an insomniac. Thus, his body was not recovering effectively from his day of activity.
Bottom line, your rest periods are just as if not more important than the actual time you put into the gym.