The Secret of Peak Performance: The New Science of Sleep and Success
The Secret of Peak Performance: The New Science of Sleep and Success
After all, despite what we all know about targeted working out being
essential to a good looking (and good working) body, our obsession with working
out often blinds us to the simple reality that sleep as the unsung, fundamental
building block of fitness success. It’s what MAKES your hardest workouts make
it all worth it and without it, you can often feel like all of the ass-busting
workouts you’re doing can be completely useless and your body’s potential
results could be very limited. And it’s not just about what you do while you’re
awake and “active,” it’s also about the deep physiological work that occurs
while you’re lying completely still.
The Science of Building Muscle: The Night Shift
The first, and perhaps most obvious, is muscle repair and growth. You’re not
exactly building muscle when you work out at the gym; you’re reducing muscle
fibers to get your body to build them back up even stronger. The real magic —
repairs and growth — come later, mainly during the deepest sleep.
This is when your pituitary gland releases a spurt of Human Growth Hormone
(HGH). HGH is a potent anabolic hormone that stimulates the production of cells
and cell regeneration. It’s the evening construction crew view that comes in to
repair the damage you’ve wrought through the day. It repairs muscle tissue,
builds new muscle mass and it even helps your body to metabolize fat. When you
don’t sleep adequately, your body is unable to produce HGH, and your muscles
are short staffed as they attempt to rebuild. You may be able to lift the
heaviest, perform the most technically perfect squats in the world – but if
you’re not giving your body a chance to recover? You’re not giving it the
chance to repair & grow either.
Sleep deprivation also serves to keep our stress hormone cortisol high. High
levels of cortisol can lead to the breakdown of muscle tissue (catabolism) and
increased fat storage in the body—definitely not what you’re looking for.
Performance, Injury, and Mental Fortitude
The effects of a lack of sleep aren’t only felt after a workout, it’s right
there in the passenger seat through your workout in the form of a sabotaged
performance. A single rough night of sleep can sap your strength, coordination
and endurance. Many studies involving athletes have shown that sleep deprivation
slows sprint times, reduces sustained running performance, decreases power
output and takeoff height on jumping, and lower weight-lifting Now, batting
average.
Sleep is the cornerstone of your motor skills – not to mention just brute
strength. Fatigue or weariness slows your reaction time, causes you to wobble
and limp form, among other things ( imagine stressing through a few too many
hard reps with lousy form ). But your training’s main goal also becomes less
and less effective, and you’re hugely more likely to catch an injury! To work
excessively hard with lousy shape guarantees a grip, strain, or something
worse, both during an intense course or just in daily life. From a more
intellectual point of view, sleep is the rations for your mental endurance.
It’s the only thing that lightens your spirit and gives you that willpower and
discipline to make it in a gym bag. Following a good night’s nap, your brain
and judgment improve better decisions and become more motivated; the internal
argument many of us post to exercise following a lengthy work day would more
often creep in for only one night of lost sleep. “When are you tripping
yourself off?” is the most crucial workout addition possible. It primes your
physique and intellect for what’s to follow. The conflict you do not see: the
combat for weight management. If people exercise for weight maintenance, few
can see how deeply interconnected sleep is with metabolic feature. Losing sleep
leads you nuts.Libidinal You’re building more ghrelin, the hunger hormone.
But it gets worse. And if that wasn’t enough, lack of sleep also makes you
less sensitive to insulin, so you’ll be less effective at using glucose as
energy, making you more likely to be tired and grumpy even after a full day’s
work. That may cause your body to store more fat, especially around your
middle. You can grind out hours and hours on the treadmill to try to work off
calories, but without a friendly hormonal system, you’ll get nowhere.
The Recovery Misconception
We also tend to equate “recovery” with little more than a day away from the
gym. But true, comprehensive recovery is multifaceted and includes the likes of
good nutrition and hydration and, most important, sleep. When you sleep
compromise yourself and you will magically get in an extra workout, it's the
classic transactive inflation error of trading something valuable here (your
health) with something not so valuable there (some incremental gain, yet
fleeting). You may be torching a couple hundred more calories, yes, but you’re
also incinerating with it muscle repair, hormonal balance and injury
prevention. The numbers just don’t work.
The gym is the place you ignite change, but sleep is the place where those
changes solidify. It is your single most powerful, performance-enhancing
accessory — and better yet, it is free. So, the next time you are burning the
midnight oil going back and forth between sleeping the recommended amount of
time and getting more stuff done, remember this: You may not make it to that
last set of squats, and that may be the best thing in the world for your body
and your fitness goals.
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