Sleep the Ultimate Performance Enhancer

Sleep the Ultimate Performance Enhancer

You have the ultimate performance enhancer at your fingertips. Lifting weights, diet, cardio, and mobility are all focused on, but what about SLEEP? Often imitated but never duplicated, you can not out-train or out-eat sleep. 

Sleep in General

Sleep is a vital ingredient in our short and long-term health. Sleep length, quality, and timing affect growth and stress hormones, our immune system, appetite, breathing, blood pressure, and cardiovascular health. Good sleep affects them positively, whereas bad sleep affects them negatively. We will focus on the relationship with fitness for this and the effects of good vs. bad sleep. One main factor is the relationship between cortisol (stress hormone) and sleep. Poor sleep is a stressor mentally and physically and increases cortisol.

Muscle Growth

Poor sleep will affect your skeletal muscle protein synthesis or in other words, the process of producing new muscle protein. This is important because this is your body’s ability to grow and maintain muscle. Studies have shown that one “all-nighter” decreases muscle protein synthesis by 18%. 

Other analyses do suggest that poor sleep does reduce muscle mass and hinder muscle recovery. This remains in line with the extreme example of one night of no sleep above. This may be due to the increased levels of cortisol (stress hormone) from less sleep. Cortisol plays a role in reduced muscle strength and mass. Even further, cortisol has also been linked to breaking down muscle tissue as opposed to building it.

Fat Loss

Fat gain is another side effect of poor sleep. By getting poor sleep, you spike your cortisol levels which can lead to excess weight gain. While your body will naturally have elevated levels of cortisol in the morning (which causes the production of more insulin in your body), as the day progresses, cortisol levels decrease. However, research has shown that poor or no sleep keeps cortisol levels in your body higher for longer throughout the day. With higher insulin levels your body with convert more carbohydrates and fat into stored body fat. 

Sleep is a regulator of your stress for both physical and mental health. With physical stress, your body will go into survival mode and hang on to more resources. In this case, it would be storing body fat for later use. 

Testosterone

Sleep and testosterone do go hand and hand, not only the quality but also the timing of sleep. Testosterone is naturally the highest in the morning and most testosterone production happens in those hours. By optimizing your sleep, you will increase your testosterone production. Research has shown that testosterone is the lowest at 10:00 pm and accumulates in the evening during sleep peaking around 8:00 am (on average). By not sleeping or having interrupted sleep, testosterone production is reduced. High testosterone does increase lean body mass and reduce fat, but we all know that. You can do this naturally, by getting good quality sleep.

Sleep Will Affect You

There are many factors in regard to weight loss or gain (calories, training, eating habits, genetics, etc.) but the overall facts remain the same. Better sleep equals more muscle and less fat. Numerous research studies have shown that sleep is a common element. One study even showed that the difference between sleeping less than 7 hours and more than 8 hours was 6-7 pounds of fat. 

While many people focus on that extra supplement or that extra set, don’t sleep on sleep, it makes a large difference in your results.

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