Sleep and Recovery Sleep. For some, it is the best thing about the end of the day. For others who suffer from sleep problems, it’s a source of worry and concern. But for an athlete, it is essential. In addition, to eating right, taking the right supplements, and getting adequate hydration, sleep is a necessity for post exercise recovery and improving fitness performance. Most people don’t deal with daily sleep deprivation, meaning they don’t go days on end without any sleep. However, going day after day without enough quality sleep can have lasting effects on your body’s ability to recover from the tough training that you put it through. Research has shown that this type of sleep deprivation affects the body’s ability to learn new things, store and recall memory, make judgments, and rely on mental and physical speed and agility. In addition, and maybe more importantly to some, sleep deprivation can cause the loss of muscle mass and can hinder muscle recovery after natural muscle damage from exercise and/or an injury. This occurs because of hormone changes in the body that come with lack of sleep; cortisol output is increased due to the stress of not sleeping, sleep deprivation naturally causes testosterone to decrease and a hormone called Insulin-like Growth Factor 1 (IGF1-a growth hormone that is released mainly during sleep) does not get released in adequate quantities. So, if you have been feeling tired lately, unable to recover from workouts and/or your improvement is slow, you might want to take a look at your sleep. We know we need good sleep to do our best at the gym and we also know why, so what do we do with this information? There are three factors that need to be looked at when setting ourselves up for recovery and performance success when talking about sleep. The first is how long we sleep, meaning how many hours per night. It is a myth that everyone needs eight hours of sleep to feel rested in the morning. We are all individuals and have our own sleep needs. The average recommended sleep time is between 7-9 hours per night, but there are certainly exceptions to that rule. The most important thing about sleep time is that we go to bed when we are sleepy, meaning can’t-keep-your-eyelids-open-anymore-sleepy, and not before that. Some people go to bed at a certain time because it’s “bedtime”, and then they can’t sleep because they aren’t tired. Part of what makes us sleep well is something called a “sleep drive” which, in a nutshell, is how much “sleepiness” we have built up over the day. If we don’t have enough “sleepiness” built up, we will not fall asleep. Staying up until we are tired ensures we fall asleep right away and sleep solid through the night. This brings us to the next factor that is important in getting good sleep and ensuring good recovery- quality sleep. Quality sleep is more important than quantity of sleep (meaning how long you sleep). It is more important to have 6 hours of unbroken sleep than 8 hours of fragmented, broken sleep. This has to do with the stages of sleep. There are three stages of sleep we go through each night, in addition to REM sleep, which is when we dream. For the purposes of talking about recovery, we need to get to Stage 3, which is referred to as Restorative Sleep. This is the stage where we recover and repair our muscles through tissue repair, i.e the stage where IGF 1 is released. We cycle through the stages of sleep 4-5 times each night. It takes approximately between 17-25 minutes of sleep to move into Stage 3 sleep. If we have broken sleep, we start over at Stage 1 of the sleep cycle each time we fall back asleep and do not get the chance to cycle through to Stage 3 enough times. It should be noted that many people wake up throughout the night to turn over, use the bathroom, etc. This only becomes a problem if they cannot get back to sleep within 15-20 minutes. Getting back to sleep within this time period ensures adequate cycling through the sleep stages. It becomes a problem when people are awake for long periods in the middle of the night. If you are one of these people, it is best to get out of bed and do something quiet until you feel sleepy again. Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling works to reinforce the idea of not sleeping in your brain. Believe me, if you get up and do something else that is quiet, you will become sleepy much sooner than if you lie in bed thinking about the fact that you can’t sleep. The idea is to get back to sleep as soon as possible in order to get back into the sleep cycles again. The final factor in getting good sleep for good recovery has to do with our natural sleep cycle, or our circadian clock. Our body has many different circadian clocks and one of them regulates sleep. We have a natural “bedtime” that fits our clock and if we pay attention to it and go to bed when it fits our clock, we have a better chance of falling asleep and staying asleep through the night. For example, let’s say you are a night person and find that you don’t get sleepy until midnight and prefer to get up at 7 a.m. However, because of your work schedule, you like to go to the 6 a.m. Crossfit class. You are in bed at midnight, up at 5 a.m. to get to the gym at 6 a.m., which takes two hours of sleep from you, leaving you tired and not fully recovered. Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of arranging our day schedule around our natural sleep schedule, but it’s a good thing to be aware of. A few other helpful tips related to good sleep include not drinking too much caffeine, making sure your bedroom is dark and the temperature is comfortable, if you are going to take a nap, take it early in the day and make it 30 minutes or less, and try to go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning. The sleep drive and circadian clock both respond well to this. Thanks Sue for the awesome piece!
Posted on: Fri, 23 May 2014 13:54:11 +0000
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