Why Sleep is Important for Your Recovery

When it comes to achieving your body goals, we mostly focus on exercise and diet. However, there’s one other thing that we shouldn’t forget— rest. After all, it’s when our body is at rest that our muscles recover and build strength.

With that in mind, here’s the next big question: What’s the best way to rest? According to psychologist and award-winning author Margaret Lambert, sleep is the best form of rest. With that in mind, you must make sure that you’re getting the right quality and quantity of sleep. You can do this by investing in a high-quality mattress, making your bedroom conducive to sleep, and establishing a bedtime routine.

If you want to make sure that doing all these things is well worth it, let’s explore the importance of sleep for recovery and how it can affect your muscle-building progress and athletic performance.

How Sleep Affects Athletic Performance and Muscle Building

Sleep has significant effects on your recovery and athletic performance—physically, physiologically, and psychologically.

Psychologically

Let’s begin with the psychological effects of sleep. Whether you’re an athlete or a physically active person, you’ll need the motivation to adhere to your strict training regimen. Unfortunately, motivation can be hindered by a lack of sleep.

Additionally, it can also affect your cognitive performance, including your ability to focus. Lastly, it has a negative impact on your mood too.

Physiologically

We’ll get a bit scientific on this one so bear with us. More than the quantity of your sleep, you should pay attention to your sleep quality too.

When you get a good night’s sleep, the release of the growth hormone (HGH) is stimulated. This hormone plays a vital role in bone growth, muscle building, and repair. This hormone is also essential to bodybuilders as it can increase lean body mass and minimize fat mass. Because of this, it’s vital to boost athletic performance and encourage the muscle building and strengthening process.

Quality sleep also has an impact on the cortisol levels in the body. This hormone can affect our body’s ability to produce and metabolize glucose, which can have a significant impact on our endurance. The good news is the production of cortisol is reduced when you get a good night’s sleep.

Physically

Lack of sleep can increase our risk of illness and susceptibility to disease. According to studies,

1. people who have less than 8 hours of sleep are 1.7 times more likely to experience an injury than those who have 8 hours or more sleep.
2. people who have less than 7 hours of sleep are 3 times more likely to develop common colds than people who get enough sleep.

The Importance of Sleep to your Recovery

With the potential impacts that sleep has on performance and muscle building and strengthening, we can’t deny that sleep is vital to recovery. Despite these pieces of evidence, the question remains: why sleep is important for your recovery?

As we have mentioned, it’s while we sleep that our body repairs damages and recovers. To elaborate on that, here are the four stages of sleep and how recovery takes place on each step:

NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep Stage 1:

During the first stage of sleep, you will feel drowsy. Your muscles are still active but starting to relax. Your eyes will open, closing, and roll around, and you may make slow to sudden jerks from time to time. It lasts for about 5 to 10 minutes.

NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep Stage 2:

In the second stage, brain waves already slow down, and your body temperature also starts to drop. Both heart rate and breathing are within the normal range. We spend 50% of our sleep time at this stage.

NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep Stage 3:

This is the deepest stage of our sleep, and recovery takes place the most because of the release of the growth hormone. As your muscle relaxes and breathing slows down, the blood supply to the muscle is increased. The oxygen in the muscles facilitates tissue repair and growth. Energy is also restored.

REM (RAPID EYE MOVEMENT):

At this stage, the brain is awake and active. It is also the time when we have dreams. However, the rest of the body has completely shut down.

FINAL WORDS

With all the things we need to do and responsibilities that we have to fulfill, sleep takes the backseat, and the numbers prove it. Statistics show that sleep deficiency is the most common health problem in the US, with 1 out of 3 adults not getting enough sleep.

Sleep deprivation has many unwanted effects on a regular person, but its risks are more significant for physically active people and athletes. These include poor focus, low energy or fatigue, and slow post-game/ exercise recovery.

To prevent this, prioritize getting the right quality and quantity (9-10 hours) of sleep so your body can have the chance to heal and recover.