Does Sleeping Help You Grow Muscle Faster?

By Author: Sean Nalewanyj
Total Articles: 53
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If you want to grow muscle faster, the simple, and often overlooked truth is that you need to get enough sleep every night.

How does sleep affect your ability to grow muscle faster?

Well, let's check out how your body reacts when it doesn't get enough sleep...

1) Mental focus will decline.

Studies have shown that just a single night with insufficient rest will have a significant negative impact on your mental focus and willingness to perform difficult tasks.

2) Physical performance will suffer.

Without proper sleep, your strength levels will decrease, and you'll end up using less weight and/or performing fewer reps than you would normally be capable of, both of which are required to grow muscle faster.

You cannot grow muscle faster if you don't focus on steadily adding weight and reps to all of your exercises, so you have to keep your strength up to achieve this.

3) Recovery will be interrupted.

As you are probably already aware, your muscles do not actually grow while you are IN the gym. They get bigger and stronger only while you are resting, eating, and sleeping, ...
... OUT of the gym.

An important time for the recovery and healing of damaged muscle tissue is while you sleep.

You also need to rest your joints, central nervous system, and immune system in addition to your muscles.

4) The production of certain hormones is compromised.

You limit the production of some of the most important muscle building and fat burning hormones that circulate inside your body if you do not get ample sleep.

This includes important hormones such as cortisol, testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin.

In truth, without adequate sleep, all these hormones get affected...

a) Cortisol: A catabolic stress hormone, cortisol is responsible for building up abdominal fat storage and helping breakdown muscle tissue for energy.

Research shows that when you don't get sufficient sleep, your body produces more cortisol.

b) Testosterone: The major muscle building hormone. The more testosterone you have, the more muscle you can build.

Sleep deprivation measurably lowers testosterone levels.

c) Growth Hormone: Plays a major role in regenerating the body and building and maintaining muscle.

Sleep promotes a natural surge in the levels of growth hormone.

Without enough sleep, the natural surge of growth hormone is compromised.

d) Insulin: It delivers important nutrients to the cells of your body.

Without enough sleep, your body experiences an increase in insulin resistance levels. So your body will release excess insulin to compensate. This can lead to excess fat storage, diabetes, or heart disease.

Which brings me to the question: how much sleep is sufficient to grow muscle faster?

As with most things, it's certainly an individual factor and varies from person to person.

A good rule of the thumb is to try and get 8 hours of shuteye every night. Don't scrimp on sleep when building muscle; if you need 9 hours or more, go for it. Your goal is to get enough sleep to be at 100% performance levels in the day.

In terms of strength and how to grow muscle faster, proper amounts of sleep will:

- Improve mental focus and energy
- Make you stronger
- Ensure ample recovery in between workouts
- Lower cortisol levels
- Raise testosterone levels
- Increase growth hormone levels
- Help your body decrease its resistance to insulin

All this should help motivate you to get more sleep.

Sleep tight!
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