Most people who are dedicated to achieving premium fitness and living to their full potential wake up with a mindset something like this:
Today, I’ll train for 40 minutes, eat nutrient dense, get a lot of work done, take my wife out for a nice meal, and drink plenty of healthy fluids.
Which is all well and good.
But there is something very essential to weight loss, fat burning, and the building of lean muscle mass that’s missing here.
Sleep.
You need to design your days around sleep, not vice versa. You need to privilege sleep to the same extent as you do your workouts if you want to get leaner, more muscular, and keep your synapses firing at maximum capacity.
This means getting more sleep—at least 8 hours. Not 6, not 7, but the whole 8.
Why? Because positive gains from our dieting efforts and strength training happen at one point in our day: during a phase of sleep called deep wave sleep.
Without reaching this phase of sleep and staying in it long enough, you’ll start to notice a dead halt in your progress toward fitness.
Most Busy Individuals Are Not Sleeping Long Enough – At all
I see these people at the gym working out at four or five a.m. with me when I’ve got an early consult. But the difference is, they’re only getting about three to four hours sleep while I’m getting 8 or 9. These are always the clients who have the most trouble losing weight and building lean muscle mass, and they don’t know why. There are over dedicated to the point that they believe if they push themselves and get up earlier and earlier, they’ll get lean and fit.
But with fitness and weight loss, the early bird does not get the worm. The one who sleeps a long time will.
Throwing yourself into a healthy fitness regimen is good and I hate to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm when they’re going at it with that much fervor and positivity, but I have to, because working out when you haven’t slept is not only dangerous for your heart, but you’re not going to experience any healthy losses and gains until you get 8 hours of sleep.
Likewise, if we wait until too late at night to engage in cardiovascular exercise, we can also sabotage their sleep, because they go to bed with an elevated heart rate, which sometimes greatly impairs sleep and keeps us from going to sleep easily, and we sit there, staring as the clock changes for 1 a.m. to 3 a.m., dropping off for maybe three hours before we have to get up.
Sooner or later these individuals come to me, desperate, and they always say something like this:
“I’m doing every single thing right . . . I’ve given up sugar, grains, snacking, and working out the right way. What the heck is going on?” Then I ask them how much sleep they get 5-6 hours on average, and it’s always the same.
See, sleep can cause a complete halt, a complete plateau, in your fitness and weight loss regimen. Your body fights you when you do not get sleep the same way it does when you try to lose a lot of weight. The body does not really want to lose weight. It’s an unnatural process for the body. Likewise, the body doesn’t want to lose sleep either.
Consequently, most people are never making it to that crucial delta wave sleep when into stage 3, where growth hormone (GH) is released and fat burning happens. You don’t want to lose this crucial phase of sleep. That will lead to muscle atrophy and adipose tissue gains.
A recent 2014 study of 1,046 children as they grew from infancy to age 7, evidenced that between two groups of children, those who slept at maximal capacity and one’s whose sleep was intermittently interrupted, the latter group had more incidence of obesity, truncated obesity, and a higher fat mass index.
It’s just as important to recover from exercise as it is to exercise, it’s that simple.
Let’s look more at the science of sleep. The more you learn about the different phases of sleep and what they do for the body and mind, the more you’ll want to enhance your sleep length and quality, and I can help you do just that.
The Architecture of Sleep
Sleep architecture follows a pattern of alternating REM (rapid eye movement) and NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep throughout a typical night in a cycle that repeats itself about every 90 minutes.
The National Foundation of Sleep has a good page that describes all the phases of sleep. If you’ll note, we don’t experience any healing to the body or the mind, recovery from exercise, or weight loss until stages 3 and 4. These stages together are called slow wave SWS, or Delta Wave Sleep (DWS).
Have you ever noticed when you have a cut, it looks much more healed after you get a really long night or two of sleep, but more aggravated when you don’t sleep?
That’s because delta wave sleep is the stage when the body repairs, fat burning is itself a form of healing.
That process of healing, recovering from exercise is when the body turns on the growth hormone that builds muscles up to make them stronger and rids the body of excess fat – it’s healing us of fat and making us healthier.
Of course, we have to exercise to recover from it.
The problem is, we have to sleep long enough to experience more than one cycle of delta wave sleep to really see gains, and we need more than one cycle of REM sleep to replenish the mind, as well. We need the whole 8 hours. You’ll stay heavier the less you sleep, even if you’re getting up to go jog.
The Science of Sleep
Sleep is fascinating. Dreams, sleep, all of it, are our body’s way of healing the mind and body, replenishing our energies, helping us to heal emotionally, repairing from physical and emotional trauma, and healing all the molecular, chemical, and biological systems in the body. Researchers affirm that without sleep, our wounds cannot heal. So without that stage of sleep, we cannot heal physically, because GH is not released and consequently we don’t burn fat or acquire muscle either.
Stages one and two are all about moving into the unconscious sleep phases, stages 3 and 4 are where repair occurs. It is this deeper, slow wave/delta wave sleep that is most important for everyone and for those interested in lean muscle gains and fat loss, because the release of growth hormone (GH) is what makes all that happen, in stage 3/4.
The Stages of Sleep Explained
NREM (75% of night): As we begin to fall asleep, we enter NREM sleep, which is composed of stages 1-4, we cycle through each cycle and a round of REM sleep around every 90 to 100. minutes.
Characteristics of NREM Stages
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stages 3 (or 3 and 4)
Here’s a graph from a physiology textbook showing how the waves look in different stages of sleep, notice the big spikes and valleys in delta wave sleep, which means there’s a lot going on in the body then.
REM (takes up 25% of all sleep, if it’s good sleep):
REM sleep first occurs about 90 minutes after falling asleep and recurs about every 90 minutes, getting longer later in the night.
Aspects of REM Sleep
Here’s how much time we spend in each stage total.
Stage 1: 2 to 5%
Stage 2: 45-60%
Stages 3 (Delta/slow wave sleep): This is the most healing phase of sleep.
REM Sleep: 20-25%, body becomes rigid, intense dreaming occurs, breathing, heart rate, and brain activity increase now.
Now, these percentages cover all the cycles of each stage we go through, because a good night’s sleep contains multiple cycles of all stages like this: stages 1, 2, 3, REM, then 1, 2, 3, REM, then 1, 2, 3, REM.
So . . .
You can see why going to sleep late and getting up really early is preventing you from getting lean and sculpted, right?
In fact, I notice my best gains (and fat loss) when I get 9 hours of sleep.
Now, when I tell you everything that happens during delta wave sleep, you’ll really want to get more sleep
I’m going to skip stages two and three and go right into the two phases of delta wave sleep, which are most important for enhancing fitness, and so we need the whole 8 to 9 hours to experience 3 or 4 delta wave sleep periods. This kind of sleep is what I call “ultimate delta wave sleep.” It’s the kind of sleep that enables you to lose ultimate fat. Who doesn’t want that!
Why Deep Wave Sleep is So Necessary for Lean Muscle Gains and Weight loss
What it comes down to folks is that if you’re not sleeping, you’re not burning fat. Period. All that good stuff happens when you sleep long, deep, and more than six hours a night.
Fix the sleep and you’ll fix the problem. You’ll notice immediate improvement in everything you’re striving for –and will be a leaner, stronger, better version of you.
To what extent does sleep benefit our fitness regime? A lot.
Insomnia and lack of sleep, less than merely 7 hours a night, slows the metabolism and increases appetite. This is because the body is trying to keep going on nothing and wants more food to replace the restorative effects sleep would have accomplished. These cravings are often voracious and eating only makes you sleepier at this point. Lack of sleep also leads to weight gain, a slower metabolism, increased eating, increased waist circumference, and risk of type II diabetes.
As Dr. Kristin Knutson notes, the effects of lack of sleep on metabolic processes boils down to this:
One study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that women who are sleep deprived are 1/3rd more likely to gain 33 pounds over the next 16 years than those who receive just seven hours of sleep per night.
In another study, dieters were put on different sleep schedules. Those women who slept 8 hours a night, experienced significant fat loss. Those who got less that 6 hours a night of sleep, however, experienced a 55% reduction in fat loss compared to the 8-hours of sleep group.
Poor Sleep Changes Your Fat Cells
When your body is sleep deprived, especially over the course of several nights, you develop what is caused a “sleep debt.” Four nights of disturbed sleep in a row lead to consequences in hormones that are released throughout the body such as fat storing cortisol and fat-enhancing insulin.
In an article titled “Even Your Fat Cells Need Sleep,” University of Chicago researchers found that when participants in their study were deprived of a full night’s sleep for four days, their insulin sensitivity dropped by more than 30 percent.
This kind of lack of insulin sensitivity causes disaster for fat loss. Why? Well, when your insulin is out of whack, your fat cells remove fatty acids and lipids from the blood stream and start storing this fat in all the wrong places. This is the same thing that happens when you starve the body. The body doesn’t like to lose thing—calories, food, or sleep, and it will fight you by encasing your organs in fat in case your body is under siege in war, drought, famine, crisis.
Sleep Sabotages Your Desire to Work Out
A lack of sleep affects exercise in all kinds of ways:
Let me explain the last one a bit. A lack of sleep, or a sleep debt, is the archenemy of muscle. In fact, some doctors in Brazil found that sleep debt decreases protein synthesis (your body’s ability to make muscle), causes muscle loss, and can lead to a higher incidence of injuries.
Equally important is a lack of recovery from exercise. Recovery is when the magic happens. Super fat burning and muscle development from that hour on the treadmill or that hour on the machines happens in deep sleep. It’s like working out for nothing but increased risk of heart failure if you exercise tired.
Conclusion
As you can see, a lack of sleep inhibits your goals for fitness, muscle acquirement, and improved health in every single way possible.
If you want to become more lean, muscular, and strong, to have ultimate energy, to prevent diabetes, heart disease, and cognitive decline, get that 8 hours of sleep, tonight.
And stop exercising if you’re exhausted. It does more harm than good.