Your Guide to Optimal Sleep
Your Guide to Optimal Sleep
The Most Important Thing You do Every Single Day
This post has been a long time coming, and I’ve purposely delayed until I felt completely comfortable it was the best article I could write.
Why?
Sleep is the single most important thing we do everyday.
Sleep regulates just about every single function of life—it is so important in fact, without proper sleep, we simply cannot function properly at all.
From a muscle building/fitness standpoint, it’s legitimately the deciding factor in how well you can recover and grow from your workouts.
Everyone wants a “hack” and sure, you can use steroids or whatever, but nothing even comes close to being as anabolic as:
Sleep
Food
You can do whatever program, steroids, supplements, etc., but if you’re failing in either 1 of these 2 departments, you won’t get any type of superior result.
Why Sleep Is So Important
We know sleep is important, but why?
Common sense leads us to the fact that it’s when our body can actually focus on growth and repair, which is a large part of the equation, but there is much more.
What actually happens when we sleep is our body completely “turns off” in a sense. Everything from your heart rate, body temperature, breathing rate, muscle tension, drops.
Sleep and our circadian rhythm play a HUGE role in regulating hormones.
During sleep is our largest secretions of growth hormone - which controls pretty much every “growth” function of our body. Growth hormone is crucial in it’s role for bone and muscle growth, as well as regulating our metabolism.
Our hunger and appetite regulators—ghrelin and leptin—are regulated during sleep. Ghrelin is what makes us feel hungry, leptin is what makes us feel satiated.
If we do not get enough sleep, ghrelin elevates and leptin decreases. This also negatively affects our metabolism.
Sleep and testosterone have a very close relationship—our body produces most of our testosterone while we are asleep. Our testosterone levels are the lowest right before we sleep and the highest as we wake up. Sleep acts as sort of “refuel” per se for testosterone levels.
Lack of sleep is directly tied to lower testosterone levels both acutely and chronically.