Getting enough sleep is one of the most important things in life. It allows your body to completely rest and recover, which is necessary to help your health and when your body rebuilds muscle. So not getting enough is preventing progress.
Without sleep our body would not fuction properly, do you ever get those days where you feel slightly nauseous or have a painful headache. Often it is because we arent getting enough sleep or not getting enough good quality sleep.
How does sleep rebuild your muscles.
When you go to the gym, for a run or a basic circuit workout at home, you are using your muscles to perform the exercise. This movement causes your muscle fibres to tear as they are being worked, and so we need to allow our bodies to recover in order to repair the muscles into bigger and stronger ones.
Sleep allows your body to enter a non-conscious mode, where you are in a dream state. It allows the body to truly focus on repairing and regenerating your energy levels for the next day. This is the perfect time for your body to repair and grow those muscle fibers that you have torn in your workout session, and the longer you sleep the longer your body has to complete its task.
If you need some more understanding of the science of it all check out this post from the National Library of Medicine.
Sleep helps you to perform better.
Your body needs sleep to regain energy that has been used up that day. But without enough time to restore the needed energy the body cannot perform as well as it should.
This is why you need to be at least getting 7-8 hours of sleep each night. If you are not able to give your workout 100%, do you expect to be making significant progress? The answer should be no.
It is important to exercise with the same intensity each time (note: shortening a run or using a lighter weight one day is not dropping the %). You just need to make sure that you are exercising to the best of your abilities in order to make good progress.
Increasing the amount of sleep and the quality of your sleep will give you the energy you need to complete your workout with the intensity it needs. Keep reading to learn how to improve your sleep.
Do you struggle to get enough sleep?
It is not an uncommon thing to struggle to get enough sleep each night. There could be so many reasons as to why you aren’t sleeping as well as you should be. Things like; stress, anxiety, and temperature can all hinder your ability to fall asleep.
If this is you why not invest in a sleep tracker, which will provide you with a personalised nighttime routine that will allow you to fall asleep with no problems and enable you to enter a deep sleep to ensure you are getting good quality rest time? And to help you make sure you are making progress with your workouts.
Better Sleep.
Better Sleep is a sleep-styled tracker which provides various sounds, meditations and exercises to help you achieve better quality sleep.
How Does it work?
When you go to sign up to better sleep it will take you through a series of questions in order to help it try to build the best sleep routine for you.
Once you have this setup you can have the Better Sleep app track your sleeping habits; it uses the sounds that you make in your sleep to create a report reading for you to read in the morning. The important thing to remember is to turn the sleep recorder on otherwise it does not know to start tracking your sounds!
From the reports, you can analyse your sleep patterns and aim to make adjustments to your lifestyle to help you get a better nights sleep.
Small changes you can make to improve your sleep and optimise your progress!
1. Not using your phone right before you go to sleep.
We all know by now that the blue light our phone screens give off results in us feeling more awake. What the blue light does is tricks our brain into thinking that it is daytime leaving it switched on and not ready to turn itself off. This leads to it taking longer for you to fall asleep.
I know that our world revolves around technology but try to put your phone/tablet/laptop away at least 20 minutes before you go to sleep. Try to make this a habit that you do each night so that it just becomes part of your routine. (If you want to learn more about making sustainable habits try reading Atomic Habits)
You could even try these blue light glasses to help your brain not think that it is daytime as much. This is not as good as not using your phone at all but it will help a little.
2. Cutting out that excess caffeine.
A cup of coffee in the morning just hits the spot before a long day of work/school/tasks but constantly having caffeine refills throughout the day, may be the reason you are struggling to sleep at night.
Try to only have 1-2 cups a day and have them before 2.00 pm so that your body has enough time to get rid of the effects of caffeine by the time you go to sleep.
If you are someone however who drinks a lot of caffeine, say 5-7 cups a day, don’t cut straight to 2 cups. You will be hit by a wave of discomfort. Just reduce the number of cups that you have slowly, so that it isn’t as much of a shock to the system.
If you are someone like me who loves the taste of coffee, try having decaffeinated coffee instead. Here are some of the best brands for decaf coffee.
3. Reducing the Alcohol consumption
Alcohol reduces the quality of your sleep significantly, yes you may be able to fall asleep easier but you are not getting a good quality sleep. This is why you usually wake up with a bad headache, partially water and partially to do with the quality of sleep that you had.
Aim to reduce the amount of alcohol that you drink in the evening, try to just have one glass of wine with dinner or even better only have a couple of drinks on a friday, saturday evening.
Just by reducing the amount you drink will help your sleep quality improve.
If you like the taste of alcohol but still want to improve your sleep quality try Tanqueray’s 0% gin or if you prefer beer try 0% Guinness. Enjoy the flavour of alcohol without the side effects.
4. By Exercising
If you are reading this article you likely so already exercise, maybe you go to the gym 3-4 per week or go for 2-3 runs in the morning. However the exercise I am talking about is getting outside for some fresh air.
It does not have to be complicated, it can be as as simple a 15-minute walk around the park, walking with the kids to drop them off at school, or walking the dog around the block. But aim to get out of the house for a small form of exercise every day.
This exercise is not aimed at getting in shape or building loads of muscle. It provides your brain with a sense of calm as the oxygen is better quality, and your body with some vitamin D. Both of these will aid you in getting to sleep and having a better quality one.
The better your sleep the more progress you are going to make.
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