Good Night! Sleeping for Fitness

Sleeping is a big part of our daily lives. It makes no sense to develop a highly tuned training routine and leave out the one third of the day you spend sleeping! There are two main variables related to the health effects of sleep. One is how long you spend sleeping and the other is how you divide your sleep time among the different stages or types of sleep.

The deep links between sleep and the daily cycles of our biology and biochemistry (called Circadian cycles) mean that the best way to sleep is consistently. You should try to maintain both constant length of time asleep and a constant bedtime. There are two main stages of sleeping: deep sleep and rapid eye motion (REM) sleep. Deep sleep normally occurs in the early phase of your sleep time. Deep sleep is especially important to your training because it is during deep sleep that the body works on building and repairing muscle. That means deep sleep is when a lot of your muscle growth happens!

So while training it is important to always go to sleep at a constant bedtime, because if you go to bed late you could miss out on the deep sleep that happens at that early phase. Also make sure you can get good quality early sleep. For example, if you find that early in the night there is still a lot of highway or traffic noise going on in your neighbourhood you should look for earplugs or another way of damping out the sound. Or if your family or roommates are still up when you go to bed, their noise and activity could impair those all-important for muscle growth early sleep hours.

The last part of your sleep is mainly the REM type sleep. REM is the stage where you are preparing to wake up. It is best to wake from this stage. Too much REM sleep has been linked to depression and emotional demotivation so you don't want to let the morning sleep in stage go for too long. But be careful not to cut your REM sleep short: you need it too. Too little REM sleep can leave you with high levels of lactate in your blood the next day, which tires your muscles out sooner. If you find yourself emotionally down and hard to get yourself motivated, try cutting back on your REM sleep by getting up earlier.

Sleep is highly individual and it is difficult to measure or sometimes even suspect its role in our lives. But the most important thing is to maintain consistent bedtimes and sleep time and make sure your sleep is high quality. Make sure your bed is comfortable and that your bedroom is dark and quiet. Although it is hard to quantify ahead of time, paying attention to quality sleep will benefit your training and your life!