Get some sleep, build more muscle

Sleep. It’s important. I could stop writing this article right now and that should be enough said, but it isn’t. Many of us lack good, quality sleep. If you’re training hard and expect to make progress, then sleep should be right up there with diet and exercise as your main focuses for improvement.

When we are asleep, our body goes into repair mode. We aren’t moving around doing damage to ourselves. Sleep mode puts our body into a state where it can go back through the damages of the day and replace what was lost, repair what was broken, and recover, recover, recover!

if you are training hard, eating right, and doing everything else you can to grow, then you should be paying attention to the amount of time that you sleep. If you are, have you ever paid attention to how often you sleep? I don’t just mean at night, but taking naps during the day.

Many people experience an afternoon “crash”, and it usually happens around 1-2pm. This isn’t just lunch settling in, it’s the body’s natural desire to take a break. If you ignore it, like most busy folks do, then you may be missing out on an opportunity to aid in your fitness goals.

While it may not be possible to just stop what you are doing and crash for a few hours, the concept of a “power nap” is actually a good one. It enables the body, and brain, to take a little break to recover from the morning’s activities. The “power nap” isn’t more than a few hours, and sometimes as little as one hour or less. If you’ve ever tried it, chances are good that it made you feel pretty darn good!

What if you’ve tried for the “power nap” but failed to wake up after a short time? It can have affects on your night time sleeping patterns, but it doesn’t have to. Want a good tip? Drink a cup of coffee BEFORE you lay down to rest. Caffeine doesn’t start working in the system for about 45 minutes, which would be just enough time for you to pop up again and go about your day.

For those that have very flexible schedules, such as college students or work at home folks, the concept of “polyphasic sleeping” might interest you. With polyphasic sleeping, you sleep in installments, rather than in one large chunk of time. Instead of 8 consecutive hours, you’ll be sleeping a few hours at a time at different points throughout the day.

I’ve spoken to a few bodybuilders in my time and they’ve mentioned their sleeping habits. When they are in contest prep, they do biphasic (two phases) or polyphasic (many phases) sleeping in order to maximize their energy and recovery. Get up in the morning, eat and train, take a nap. Wake up and do cardio, eat and nap. Throughout the day, the body is being worked and then allowed to recover.

Will polyphasic sleeping have an affect on your regular life? Of course it will! You’ll most likely be up most of the night and asleep a lot more during the day. This is a much more hardcore sleeping arrangement than most can accommodate, but the concept is certainly worth mentioning.

Despite this being a great idea to recover, it’s not something that one can simply jump into and do successfully. The body’s natural sleep cycles adapt to daylight, and we are used to running on the standard 24-hour day. (Fun Fact: If deprived of natural day and night, the human body will actually run closer to a 25-hour day than a 24-hour day!)

One of the first things that one must do to adapt to a new sleep schedule is to modify the ambient light. If you are trying to sleep during the daytime, go as dark as possible to convince yourself that it is night. If you are sleeping at night, turn the lights on. You may have a bit of trouble falling asleep at first, but it will be easier to wake up to a brighter “daylight” setting than to the existing low light levels of the night.

What about REM sleep? As the body gets used to decreased duration of sleep time, you’ll fall asleep faster, go into your deep sleep patterns faster, and will awake more refreshed.

The body will adapt to a new sleep schedule over time. How long? Typically, it’ll take about 30 days, depending on the person. Whether it is just adapting to a “power nap” or a true polyphasic cycle, the increased rest and recovery time will do your body a world of good.