Why You Need Sleep to Build Muscle
To build muscle, you need to get serious about sleep. When you work out, you break down your muscles. But after you drift off, your body regenerates them. That's when you build muscle.
As you sleep, the pituitary gland releases growth hormone, which in turn stimulates your body to produce insulin-like growth factor—hormones essential for muscle repair. While your body doubles down on turning protein from your diet into amino acids, the insulin-like growth factor pushes carbs into your muscle cells, giving them energy to use those amino acids to create new cells and repair broken-down tissue.
This rebuilding process enables you to run faster and longer, lift heavier, jump higher, and look and feel great. In addition to what you do in your workouts, you can also support your body's nighttime repair work, research shows.
Here are five tricks to maximize the process to boost your strength, endurance, and reaction time.
Sleep Longer
Your muscles can't grow if you're not getting enough sleep. Aim to be in bed for eight hours each night. If you're working out intensely— training for a marathon, for instance—you may need an hour more for proper muscle repair and recovery.
Less than eight hours can shrink your muscles, research shows. Not enough sleep keeps your cortisol levels, a stress hormone, high at night, "which inhibits the repair of muscle tissue.
Sleep Deeper
The quality of your sleep is as essential for your muscles as the duration. So practice good sleep hygiene. Turn off electronics 30 to 60 minutes before bed; keep your bedroom cool, dark, and quiet; and go to bed around the same time every night.
The most significant growth hormone spike occurs 70 to 120 minutes after you fall asleep. An erratic sleep schedule throws this off, though. Research shows that if you usually turn in around 10 p.m., going to bed at midnight once will reduce your growth hormone level significantly, even if you still sleep for eight hours. A late night or two every so often won't be enough to kill your gains but to maximize your muscle health, try to make bedtime as regular as possible.
Skip the Extra Drink
Having one or two cocktails can lower growth hormone levels slightly. But if you drink enough to get intoxicated, they plummet by 70 percent, and new muscle-mass formation drops by 63 percent. Alcohol reduces sleep quality, which may be why it interferes with growth hormone production. It also boosts inflammation, which can make you sorer the following day. (So that 's why we often wake up early—and often with a headache—after a night of drinking.)
A glass of wine with dinner a few times a week is probably fine. But leave plenty of time between your last drink and lights out. The same goes for dessert. Food containing processed sugar will increase cortisol, often to levels that can disrupt sleep. If you hit a fitness plateau and aren't quite sure why try cutting back on alcohol and sweets.
Eat Protein Before Bed
Muscles are made up of amino acids, which come from protein in your diet. If you don't have enough in your body overnight, your system could break down more muscle than it builds. If you eat 30 grams of protein half an hour before you go to sleep, your body will have adequate amino acids for your muscles to use for their repair work. Stick to casein protein, found in milk, yogurt, and cottage cheese. It's a slow-digesting type, so it will sustain you all night. (25 Tips on How to Lose Weight)
While you certainly can eat your way towards better sleep all day long, you may not need this extra hit of protein if you get enough during your other meals and snacks. Active women should try to get 0.5 to 0.7 grams per pound of body weight a day; for a 140-pound woman, that comes to 70 to 98 grams daily.
Active men need more protein than sedentary men to help maximize athletic performance and improve the muscle-to-fat ratio. The amount of protein an active man needs each day is based on his activity level and body weight. The Institute of Medicine recommends that all men, regardless of activity level, consume at least 56 grams of protein every day.
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics reports that men need 1.4 to 1.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight each day to build muscle mass. This means active men trying to build muscle should consume 0.64 to 0.82 grams of protein per pound of body weight each day. For example, a 160-pound man trying to increase his lean body mass should consume 102 to 131 grams of protein every day, and regularly participate in strength-building resistance exercises.
Finally, Be Consistent with Weight Training
Of course, sometimes getting eight hours doesn't happen. Luckily, there's evidence that strength training can reduce or even halt the muscle-shrinking effects of not enough sleep.
In an article in the journal Medical Hypothesis, researchers reported that resistance exercise boosts testosterone levels, growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor, which may help protect the muscles from atrophy.
Even though you may struggle to build muscle without enough rest, sticking to a regular weight lifting routine can keep you from losing what you have.