Thursday, December 25, 2008

Muscle Building, No Sleep Leads to No Gain

By Ricardo d Argence

Going to to the gym, you will think you can get relaxed and muscles will grow by themselves. Working your muscles throught weight training is not the only factor, neither is physically working out.

Among the most neglected factors involved is the necessity of appropriate amounts of rest, not only between workouts, but really getting a proper night's sleep to end your day. By adjusting your sleep time table so that you get a regular night of good sleep nightly can lead to big transformations in the outcome you get from your bodybuilding plan.

There are actually several reasons why sleep is so important to be successful at bodybuilding. For starters, your body recovers and rebuilds muscle while you are asleep. This is the crucial time when other parts of your body are shut down and not consuming energy or internal resources that your body uses to repair damages from bodybuilding.

Without enough of this quality rest, simply put, your body won't have enough time or availability to repair old muscle and build new muscle. You will be severely inhibiting your gains by not allowing your muscles to heal, mend and grow properly.

Another reason that sleep is so important for bodybuilding is that a lack of sleep can cause you to have a lack of focus and a lack of physical energy. A lack of mental focus can destroy your results while you're in the gym. You can have the best intentions in the world, but if you get in the gym and you can't visualize the exercises you are going to do and you can't focus on moving from one to the next, you aren't going to get a great workout.

Then at the same time, you may not even have the physical energy or motivation required to get a good weightlifting session in to begin with. There's only so much your body can handle over the course of a day with a tiny amount of sleep. And after, work, school, family commitments and anything else you may be dealing with, working out to your full potential is often what remains undone.

Sleep is critical because it allows your body to recover and control the rhythm of your body's hormones. Hormones, that are essential for proper metabolim and muscle gain, are released during sleep. Hormones, released during sleep, are essential for proper metabolism and muscle gain. At the same time, sleep also inhibits other hormones that can lead to fat gain and other unseemly consequences.

That means that sleeping for 2 hours on friday night and then sleeping for 12 hours on saturday night doesn't amount to the same benefits as sleeping 7 hours both nights in a row of no matter what you want to maintain a consistent sleep schedule. And that's what you should shoot for, at least 7 hours a night. You must sleep if you want to succed at bodybuilding under any circumstance. - 15275

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