Do you get enough sleep?!
If you have physique goals and you are not getting proper rest it can affect your progress.
Many studies have found that people who are sleep-deprived report having an increased appetite. This is caused by the impact of sleep on hunger hormones, ghrelin and leptin.
Ghrelin is a hormone that signals hunger in the brain. Levels are high before you eat, which is when the stomach is empty, and low after you eat.
Leptin is a hormone that suppresses hunger and signals fullness in the brain.
When you do not get enough sleep, the body makes more ghrelin and less leptin, leaving you hungry and looking for food for energy. Lack of sleep usually results in lack of motivation to perform workouts or the intensity of the training just isn’t there when you are fatigued.
If muscle building is your goal, sleep is crucial! Muscle building growth hormone is secreted during DEEP sleep. Strength training causes small tears in your muscle, they are repaired while you sleep. They have to repair to grow and become stronger. Sleep allows muscles to fully relax which means less tension/pain the next day.
7-9 hrs of sleep is recommended. This has been a huge personal goal for me since start of 2021 and boy has it shown in my progress. I used to always put sleep on back burner to get things done. Using my fitbit watch has been helpful to track my sleep stages and make it a daily goal to prioritize my sleep.
This may not come easy and may take the body some time to break habits. If you consume alot of alcohol on a regular basis, that’s a sure fire way to have a terrible night of sleep. Listen to your sleep cues instead of fighting them to stay up later. Like so many things, sometimes we don’t even realize how bad we feel because we’ve done it for so long it begins to feel normal. Change your ways and let the results speak for themselves.
Hope this helps!
