Everybody is familiar with the two most popular tenets of muscle building and weight loss – diet and exercise. There is a third and often neglected aspect for optimum body sculpting – proper sleep. As much effort as you put into gaining muscle and losing fat, you really need to get enough sleep to make the workouts pay off.
Sleep is the time the body uses to repair and rebuild the muscles exercised during workouts. Muscle stimulation occurs at the gym, but muscle growth happens afterward during rest. Lifting weights temporarily weakens muscles by tearing the muscle fibers. Without proper rest, you deny your muscles the opportunity to recover, repair, and grow. During sleep, your body reacts to the stresses and strains you put on it prior to resting. This principle is known as Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand, or SAID. It’s a very simple principal – your body reacts to specific demands with specific adaptions. Take a look at the thighs of a speed skater, or the calves of the Tour de France cyclists, and you can see SAID in action. When you work out specific muscle groups, those muscles will strengthen and grow in direct reaction to the demands you place on them. This process of growth occurs during rest, not during exercise. As they say, “You don’t grow in the gym, you grow out of the gym.”
The most common recommendation is 8 hours of relaxed sleep per night. Keep in mind that it is not possible to “store up” sleep, so sleeping 11 hours one night and 5 hours the next is not desirable. A consistent daily 8 hour sleeping pattern is necessary, although it can vary slightly from person to person.
An additional benefit of healthy sleep is that the body gets the energy to build and repair muscles from fat. So while you are comfortably snoozing and your body is regenerating, you are also burning away fat stores!