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To Sleep or Not to Sleep

In my life before the fitness industry I used to “survive” at times on as little as two or three hours sleep in a night. I would get through the next day and still be able to function, still be able to do all the social things that I thought were a requirement before I went seeking sleep. Very rarely did I make an effort to catch up on sleep and it was very rare for me to get more than 6 hours sleep in any night. I thought I was living life!

I look back now and wonder how I did it because I now am a little bit more awake to what my body says to me when I try and do that to myself. It doesn't feel good and I am sure that it didn't feel good back then but that feeling was something that I just simply ignored. When was the last time you strung two or three good nights of sleep together? If it has been a while try it, it feels really quite nice to be well rested. You are more alert, more productive, less stressed and more pleasant to be around, and that's just the surface benefits.

While you sleep your body goes through a whole series of processes that are involved in the repair and rejuvenation of your bodies systems. When you hear someone say that you need 8 hours sleep, they haven't just divided the day into three and said you need to work 8 hours, play 8 hours and sleep 8 hours, as nice as it sounds. You need 8 hours of sleep because that is how long your body needs to go through all the processes of repair and rejuvenation. Approximately 4 hours for mental repair and 4 hour for physical repair.

Knowing this it seems a little bit silly to me for people to start working out with a goal to improve their health and fitness if they are not allowing their bodies the appropriate recovery, not sleeping enough. I am not going to go into all the details of all the things that could go wrong as a result of not getting enough sleep because that would take me all day and you would get bored. I do reiterate though that there are many surface benefits as well as internal benefits to getting enough sleep.

If you were to look further into sleep and sleep patterns you would find that you have a circadian rhythm that does designate when the best time for you to get your sleep is. It depends on where you were born but is usually between 10pm and 6am. I wouldn't worry too much about this until you have addressed the first challenge of getting enough sleep in quantity and then consider quality.

Luke

Focus and Belief Personal Training