November 9, 2018

The Benefits of Sleep for Strength Training


The Benefits of Sleep for Strength Training

Lots of athletes know all too well the vital importance of correct training if they are to make the kind of progress they want to achieve. This also counts for the awareness when it comes to a balanced and healthy nutritional diet. But, can the same be said for getting high-quality sleep? We’re saying that it will almost always be the afterthought.

That’s not strictly true, because any athlete who knows their stuff will know that rest is key to progression, but often, when they think of rest they think about it while they’re awake; not sleeping.

So, here’s where we’re going to move on and discuss the benefits of sleep for strength training. As around a third of your life will be spent in dreamland, it’s only right that you get the best quality you possibly can to turn you into the best athlete you can be, right?

As an athlete, how much sleep do you need?

We all know that you need sleep, as a human being, that much is true. If you don’t you get tired, you get sloppy, you get ill. Regular people need to clock up 7-9 hours of sleep a night, as advised by, but athletes aren’t just regular people, so just how much sleep do you need?

Again, similarly to the normal sleepers who need the average 7-9 hours, athletes are all individual too, so they may need more or less than the next person who trains. Essentially, the more strength training you do the more sleep you will need; as a general rule of thumb, you need to be aiming for around 9-11 hours.

Lowered Energy Consumption

This is a biological mechanism your body enforces as resource conservation. If you don’t get the sleep that’s needed you will be excessively hungry, and not just living on the regular 4-6 for bodybuilders.

With strength trainers, you want to be saving as much energy as possible when you’re not smashing it out in the gym. Those 4-6 meals that you consume each day need time to be digested in order to replace energy and rebuild muscle, so making sound sleep choices is important.


You want the brain to be as ‘charged up’ as possible when you’re training, and as such, adenosine – the neurotransmitter that makes ATP is used as an indicator to inform the brain when it needs to go I to a stage of rest.

Your brain will go through peaks and troughs of in terms of the levels of adenosine concentrations and while you sleep, levels of adenosine are in decline, the experts from the website explains. Blocking adenosine in the brain has been shown to increase alertness, so this suggests to scientists that during sleep the brain is, in effect, recharging.

Over the course of the day, increased amounts of adenosine, suggest that the brain is getting tired, so resting the brain will have clear implications for bodybuilders because being mentally ‘switched on’ is needed while focusing on training.

When you’re mentally alert, your motivation will perform at its best level, therefore, you need to allow yourself not just good sleep, but a good routine that lets the natural occurrences take place in this time frame too.

Repairing and replacing

Give yourself the adequate amount of sleep advised earlier on in the article, you can expect to have your muscle and other tissues repaired and also have ageing and/or dead cells replaced with fresh new ones.

HGH (Human growth hormone) also gets released as you are sleeping. For men, 60% to 70% of daily HGH secretion takes place in the early stages of sleep; when the deepest sleep cycles happen. This goes without saying that poor quality sleep will result negatively on your human growth hormone levels.

Studies have established that while you’re in your REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage of sleep the body effectively restores your bones, organs, and tissue. What’s more, your immune cells are replenished, and human growth hormones are better-circulated.

You can see from this information that sleep has an utterly profound effect on muscle growth and physical well-being, so, if you focus on sleep, the rest will become that little bit easier, and you’ll see progress sooner rather than later.


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