Importance of Sleep, Post Workout Snack, & Water Intake

Here are some excerpts from Women's Health article, "A Hotter Body No Sweat!" by Jayme Moye in the March 2012 issue out now:

"As soon as you slip off your sneakers after a workout, your body starts repairing the 'damage' you did to your muscles.  In fact, it's actually this recovery process--not  exercise itself--that makes you stronger and leaner, says Stacy Sims, Ph.D., an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist at the Stanford School of Medicine's Prevention Research Center in Palo Alto, California.  'To speed your results, research shows that what you do when you're not exercising is nearly as important as the workout itself,' she says."

Benefit of Sleep
"We know, we know--if you could lose a pound every time you heard about the advantages of sleep, you'd never have to work out again.  But if seven to nine hours of shut-eye still isn't a priority, here's some incentive:

Not only does deep sleep kick up production of tissue-repairing growth hormone, but studies show that lack of it is a weight gain double whammy:  It prompts your body to consume more calories and shuts down its ability to recognize a full stomach.  When you're tired, your gut produces more ghrelin, a chemical that triggers sugar cravings.  'It causes your body to seek quick energy from food to try to keep you awake,' says neurologist Chris Winter, M.D., medical director of the Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Meanwhile, fatigue suppresses leptin, a fat-cell hormone that tells your brain, 'OK, stop eating now.'  For this reason, says Winter, 'prioritizing sleep is probably the best thing you can do, recovery-wise, to meet your body-shaping goals.'"

Post Workout Snack & Water IntakeWhile the article goes on to talk about the importance of staying on the move, massage, upgrading your post-workout snack, and how dehydration substantially slows your metabolic rate, I am simply going to refer you to Eating Supportively.

I have wanted to relay the importance of sleep on muscle recovery but hadn't wanted to get too technical about it, so when I came a across the simplicity of the explanation in this article I thought it was the best way to share this with you ;-)