Does sleep impact my workouts?
The amount of sleep you get can be a determining factor on hitting a personal best on a run, lifting heavier weights, losing weight and injury prevention. Having enough sleep not only can influence your physical fitness performance but also affects your mood, cognitive skills, and motor abilities. What does this mean exactly? Lack of sleep, whether it’s a short-term or long-term deficit, can be blocking your ability to focus during a workout and the ability to coordinate your body movements.
In my experience, both as a trainer and someone working out, when we lack focus during our workouts we most likely moving with improper form. It’s more like going through the motions of the movement without really thinking about it. The body takes the path of least resistance which means that it’ll perform the motion in the most energy conserving way meaning that we might be using the muscles that are not the intended participants. Not only does that make the exercise kind of a waste of time but also could lead injuries. Over time, it creates the possibility for certain muscles to be undertrained/underused leading to instability or some muscles to be overtrained which could lead to tendonitis or tightness in the body. Neither of those things are what we want when we exercise. We want to be able to have and maintain a mind-body connection. We exercise to be strong, to move better and to feel better.
Most research on the effects of sleep on athletes has studied sleep deprivation but let’s also talk about what happens when we get MORE than our normal amount of sleep. Sleep is not only an essential part of recovery for the body but one study also found that when sleep was ADDED to an athlete’s typical routine there was a significant improvement to their performance. Cheri D. Mah set out to measure athletic performance after having a normal amount of sleep, and then spent weeks trying to extend the athlete’s sleep as much as possible, to see what effect it would have on objective measurements of athletic performance.
By the end of the extra-sleep period, the Cardinals basketball players that participated in Mah’s study had improved their free throw shooting by 11.4% and their three-point shooting by 13.7%. Also, every single player on the team was faster than before the study had started. Mah’s research strongly suggests that most athletes would perform better with more sleep. Researchers speculate that deep sleep helps improve athletic performance because this is the time when growth hormone is released. Growth hormone stimulates muscle growth and repair, bone building and fat burning, and helps athletes recover. Studies show that sleep deprivation slows the release of growth hormone.
So at the end of the day, whether you are looking to PR at your next race or to make significant gains on the gym floor here are my 3 main takeaways on how to use sleep to improve your workouts:
Make sleep a priority in your training schedule.
Increase your sleep time several weeks before a big race.
Go to bed and wake up at the same times every day.
Click HERE to request my PDF on 5 tips on how you improve your sleep. I’m curious, how much sleep do you get a night? Do you feel like it’s enough? What other questions do you have about sleep? Leave them in the comments below!
Sources:https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090608071939.htmhttps://www.huffpost.com/entry/sleep-exercise-sleep-in-america_n_2784457https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/building-better-athletes-with-more-sleep/382019/