The Importance of Sleep for Muscle Recovery
The Importance of Sleep for Muscle Recovery
Training is not the only thing that can suffer from lack of sleep. Sleep has a significant impact on muscle recovery, and if you don’t get enough it will affect your efforts in the gym as well. When we are tired during our workouts, we may be able to push through anyways but this takes its toll on our body composition goals too! We become more easily distracted or discouraged with poor exercise performance when sleepy which leads us into bad habits like skipping out for an extra hour or two of shuteye later at night.
The Sleep Cycle
In order to understand the impact of sleep on muscle recovery, it is important to first be acquainted with two main stages. REM (rapid eye movement) sleep occurs in cycles that range from 90-120 minutes throughout the night and accounts for up to 20-25% of total adult human's sleeping time. The later stage comprises most of this percentage mainly because we spend more hours asleep at nighttime than during daytime where our body may not need as much energy restoration due to less physical activity occurring then. REM provides the brain with enough fuel that will sustain us when awake so a good nights' rest helps maintain mental health too!
Non-REM sleep is the slowest phase of your slumber, accounting for 40% of total time. It's essential to muscle recovery and restoration because it's during this stage that blood pressure drops and breathing becomes deeper and slower. Your brain isn't going through very much in terms activity, so there are more resources available from oxygenated blood flow which delivers extra amounts of nutrients to muscles while they rebuild themselves when you're not awake!
Not getting enough sleep will lead to a decline in growth hormone production that affects tissue and muscle repair. This is why it's important to get adequate deep REM sleep for your body’s recovery process. If you don't, then you risk losing mass and capacity from lack of restorative hormones like these ones which are released during the non-REM stage when they're needed most!
It's never too late to get a good night sleep! In order for your body and muscles to grow you need the proper amount of resting. It is said that if one sleeps 7-9 hours per day, they will be able to recover more efficiently than not sleeping at all, which can lead them towards looking their best in any situation. If being prepared before going into physical training sessions or wanting increased muscle mass are important factors about yourself then it may also benefit you from improving quality of sleep by getting an appropriate number of restful hours each evening.