Everyone "knows" the importance of sleep. Yet, for spending roughly a third of our lives sleeping, many of us don't assign enough importance to improving both the quality and quantity of it. The same people will obsess over the minutia of their training and nutrition but neglect a huge variable like sleep, and wonder why they're not making the kind of progress they want.
So, here are some of the meat and potatoes of poor sleep and how it affects our training and eating.
1. Poor sleep makes sticking to your diet harder
This is a big one because we already know how important nutrition is to achieve any kind of health or aesthetic goal. When we have a bad night's sleep, our bodies will produce more cortisol. Now, cortisol isn't the big evil, and while it's often called the stress hormone, it might be better to think of it as a "readiness hormone (shout out to Christian Thibaudeau for the term), as it helps to raise adrenaline to deal with potentially threatening situations. We need cortisol to wake up in the morning and get going, focus and have better training performance. That said, when it's chronically elevated as a result of poor recovery, we can have issues balancing out our blood sugar levels. Major swings in blood sugar levels can lead to very reactive eating habits as a spike followed by a sudden crash is often followed by the need to eat something sugary, which can easily lead to a day of mismanaged eating.
Studies have also shown that short or poor quality sleep leads to an increase in ghrelin and a decrease in leptin levels. Both are hormones associated with hunger and satiety, with ghrelin signaling hunger and leptin a feeling of fullness after eating. When we experience a night or frequent disruptions to sleep, it's pretty common to feel hungrier the next day because the hormone that tells us we're hungry is elevated, and it's less likely that we feel full after eating because the hormone that tells us we're full is lowered. Add to the fact that we're probably experiencing unstable blood sugar levels and now you know why you couldn't say no to the donut at work and are now shaming yourself for succumbing to that beautiful sugar-coated Krispy Kreme.
2. Poor sleep negatively impacts muscle strength
Most people can probably relate to the demotivating feeling of picking up the weight that you lifted in the previous session, and as soon as you grab hold of the dumbbells you're struck with the realisation that this just feels too damn heavy today! Last week you managed 8 reps, today only 7. While there could be many factors that account for not beating the logbook, sleep is arguably the most common.
Chronically poor sleep is often correlated with a reduction in muscle strength in particular with compound movements, such as squats, deadlifts, and presses. While it's not uncommon to occasionally have "good" sessions even with disrupted sleep, more often than not it's a debt that has to be paid back eventually.
We're not talking about rocket science here. The ability to lift heavy things hinges on our ability to coordinate and recruit muscle fibers sufficient to meet the demands of the task. Strength is also a skill, one that takes repeated practice, and anyone who's had to learn a skill and become good at it will attest that it's not easy to do while in a tired state. Less than 7 hours of sleep causes a drop in our psychomotor-visual skills. That's a fancy way of saying, cognition, hand-eye coordination, and movement. Repeated days of less than 7 hours of sleep cause coordination problems. Ability to create muscle tension drops.
3. Poor sleep leads to poor sleep
Yeah, you read that right. After 10 days of less than 6 hours of shut-eye each night, your melatonin drops. Melatonin is the hormone that helps to control sleep patterns by making you fall asleep faster and less likely to make you wake up in the night. So in this case, bad sleep literally makes your next sleep even worse.
What's the fix?
Set yourself a bedtime.
Establish a sleep routine.
Limit blue light in the evenings.
Don't eat a huge meal right before bed.
Don't chug a litre of water and hit the sack.
Avoid stimulants like pre-workouts and caffeine in the afternoon.
Get up at the same time each morning.
Cultivate the same kind of discipline with your sleep as you do with your training and diet.
Sleep more, sleep better.
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