So, you might as well just skip working out! Overworking your muscles is as bad for your progress as undereating!!! Sleep is huge for more reasons than I am even addressing here, but know that without consistent sleep (ideally, 7-8 hours) each night, your body will hinder the work you are putting into your results elsewhere, so try and go to bed at the same time each night and wake up at the same time each morning. I have two small children, so yes I know this is difficult.....just do your best for your sanity and your body!
Not sure how much sleep your body requires? Everyone needs a different number of nightly zzz's. To determine what your body's needs are and what your body clock is set to, forgo using an alarm clock for a few nights and see when you naturally wake up and how much sleep you got.....then just back into when your bedtime needs to be based on when you need to be up in the mornings. Best results for nightly rest and recovery is to have the same bed time and wake time each 24 hours.
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 Intake
While 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 ;-)
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