How sleep and lack of it can affect your workout?

[RobertoME]

Hi everyone, now that I'm starting my journey to loose weight and building muscle, my trainers at the gym always recommend to me I need to sleep better. My question comes from this particular recommendation; How sleep and lack of it can affect your workout?

Apparently with a nice workout session and increasing sleep time, marked improvements in performance, including faster sprint times, longer endurance, lower heart rate and an overall better workout. So if considering that quality sleep keeps you performing at your best, poor sleep habits may be altering the intensity of your workout. Less overall energy means less energized workouts

In addition, rest is critical to the recovery process because while you're resting, your body is building muscle. This happens most efficiently during sleep, and without enough quality sleep, your body cannot fully recover from exercise. Finally, a lack of sleep can affect diet and eating habits. It says sleep loss can interfere with hunger hormones increasing appetite during the day and bringing on cravings.

In addition to your fitness routine, these are a few more ways sleep can impact your health:

• Regulate blood pressure and cholesterol
• Reduce stress
• Increase energy levels
• Boost immunity
• Manage cravings and appetite
• Stimulate mental clarity and memory

I believed this topic in some way is related to my previous post about: 5 tips to improve sleep.

What do you think about this, can you bring more ways sleep can impact a nice routine at the gym or in a daily basis activity? 

[wxboss]

I used to lift weights quite a bit years ago, and I hope to get back into the habit of doing so, but I do recall that when I lifted on a regular basis, my sleep would improve and I became more aware and concerned about the foods and drinks I consumed.

If you commit yourself to a regular workout schedule, I think that you will begin to see everything begin to fall into place. The hardest part is making a committment and sticking with it. Once that is done, you'll begin to see a lot of benefits even though they may come in slow and small increments at first, but that is the whole point - getting the body fit and exercised and watching the benefits roll in.

[WavyDavey]

Sleep has a profound impact on my ability to lift weights. If I consistently don't get enough sleep, poundage progression slows, then stalls. My resting heart rate will go up 5bpm from normal. Using Fitbit has made it really easy to see the correlation between sleep and workout strength.

Getting 8-9 hours of sleep that is contiguous is important to my workout success. If I sleep 6 hours, then try to grab a 2 hour nap, it's not near the same as if I'd slept 8 hours straight through the night.

When sleep isn't going well, I've learned it's crticial to back off intensity and/or frequency until the body recovers. There's no "pushing through" bad sleep.

Also, of note, is that they body does most of its rebuilding during sleep, as well as release hormones like HGH during deep sleep. Even sleeping the right length, but without enough deep sleep will show up in workout performance also.