by Drew Copeland & Teresa DeNike from Sleep Better NYC
It's been about a month since you posted your #newyearnewme goals on Instagram and wrote your resolutions on sticky notes that next your bathroom mirror. You decided to meditate more, eat healthier food choices, and sign up for 6 weeks of personal training at Apex. You are determined that 2022 is the year for self-improvement and peak performance at the gym, at work, and home. But . . . can you achieve your peak performance without quality sleep?
We won't make you guess. The answer is NO.
Countless studies about mental health and physical fitness prove that you can’t optimize either one without quality sleep. According to neuroscientist Matthew Walker, "Sleep might be the greatest legal performance enhancing drug that too few athletes are using!" Quality sleep will optimize your body and mind to achieve the peak performance abilities that you've been training for.
Energy
It turns out, you don't *just* need sleep for wakefulness and energy to complete your workout; Your jump height, running speed, max lifts, lung capacity and lactic acid build-up in your muscles are all impacted by the quality of your sleep.
Healthy sleep can speed up the time to physical exhaustion up to 30%. That could mean a few extra miles in your daily run or the ability to hang in there through those last 15 minutes of hot yoga. If you're training to reach a certain fitness goal or work towards an athletic competition, that extra 30% could make all the difference.
Just 30 minutes of aerobic exercise has been shown to improve sleep quality that same night. According to studies, both aerobic and resistance exercise help you stay asleep throughout the night, especially in people over 60 years old.
Weight Loss
So, you're working hard in the gym and you're eating right. The number on the scale is going down... but what exactly are you losing if you're not sleeping enough?
Consider this study from 2010 in Chicago: Participants who slept 5.5 hours lost 55% less fat than when they were sleeping 8.5 hours. This proved that sleep deprivation increases weight loss of fat-free body mass.
Translation: your sleepy body actively HOLDS onto fat and burns lean muscle when you’re sleep-deprived!
What do hormones have to do with it?
If you've ever read anything about sleep and hunger or weight loss, you've seen the words "ghrelin" and "leptin." If you haven’t, here's a quick summary: ghrelin is a hormone that tells you you’re hungry and want to eat, while leptin tells you that you are satisfied.
With just ONE night of poor sleep, these hormones are thrown out of balance. The increase in ghrelin makes you feel unsatisfied, even after you finish a typically fulfilling meal. When that happens, it is easy to see how this can push us towards a path of overeating and/or snacking, leading to weight gain.
With the healthy balance being off in these hormones, you might also notice a change in your general appetite and desires. When viewing MRI scans of well-slept and under-slept people, there is a significant difference in brain activity. Specifically, the emotional part of the brain (the amygdala) lights up much brighter for sleep-deprivpeople who are under-slept, when they are shown "unhealthy" foods. It also appeared that, because of sleep deprivation, the pre-frontal cortex (that's the part of your brain that controls these desires) was barely communicating with the amygdala.
HELLO late night popcorn-chomping and chocolate-binging...
So What Do You Do?
If you’re having trouble improving your sleep or understanding the root cause of your sleep situation, you have two options:
You can spend tons of time searching through articles, posts, studies, videos and workshops for recommendations.
Or you can work with a sleep coach to get up-to-date education, an in-depth sleep assessment, and customized tools that will be helpful to you.
Just like a personal trainer, a good sleep coach can help you stay on track, hold you accountable, and refer you to a specialist if needed. Your coach can guide you, and their encouragement can have a big impact on your motivation, especially if things aren’t improving easily or as quickly as you’d hoped. With this support, you can truly improve your sleep and quality of life.
Join our Instagram Live with Apex Fitness on February 10th at 6pm!
We’ll answer questions and discuss weight loss, sleep & athletic performance.
ALL APEX Members get 20% off Sleep Coaching Packages with Promo Code APEX20 . Enter the code during checkout with Sleep Better NYC. Click HERE to view the coaching packages, and check back in a few weeks for self-paced programs!