The Power of Sleep: How Sleep Impacts Muscle Building and Fat Loss
May 24, 2020I’m revoking your bragging rights!
There’s something you may be neglecting that can help you lose fat, build muscle, improve your mood, increase cognitive performance, enhance productivity, and even improve your relationships.
It’s sleep.
You need to sleep more and sleep better.
We are no longer going to glorify a chronic lack of sleep.
I get it—it can be hard to prioritize sleep when it feels like wasted time, but sleep is anything but a state of inactivity.
As we sleep, our brains are busy solidifying memory and learning. Our bodies are busy, too—sleep helps our bodies heal.
Sleep is a fundamental aspect of our overall health and well-being, but it's often overlooked in the context of fitness and body composition goals (whether you want to lose fat or build muscle).
We’ve seen so many people who focus on exercise and nutrition but neglect the critical role that sleep plays in optimizing muscle building and fat loss.
Since sleep is often neglected, I want to share the science-backed connection between sleep and body composition, specifically how sleep impacts muscle building and fat loss and why prioritizing quality sleep is essential for achieving your fitness goals.
Why Sleep is Important
Sleep deprivation leads to raised inflammatory markers and lots of other not-so-good stuff, such as a decrease in your anabolic hormones and an increase in your catabolic hormones, which leads to muscular atrophy (muscles shrinking).
A study by Nedeltcheva et al. (2010) looked at how sleep deprivation affects fat loss and muscle building.
In the study, a group of participants, all of whom were in a calorie deficit, were randomly assigned to one of two groups.
The first group slept 8.5 hours per night, and the second group slept 5.5 hours per night.
The results showed that both groups lost weight (as they should have because they were all in a calorie deficit), but those who slept longer lost 55% more weight from fat mass, whereas those who slept less lost 60% more weight from muscle mass.
So although both groups lost weight, the changes in body composition were different.
How Sleep Affects Hormones
The hormones that are impacted by sleep are leptin, ghrelin, and human growth hormone.
Sleep deprivation disrupts the hormones leptin and ghrelin, which regulate your appetite.
Leptin is responsible for telling your body when you are full and is down-regulated by poor sleep. When your body doesn’t produce enough leptin due to lack of sleep, your body believes that it needs more energy than it does, which leads to increased hunger cues.
Ghrelin is the hormone that tells your body when you are hungry/need energy. If you don’t sleep enough, you end up with excess ghrelin, which leads to increased hunger, reduced daily activity, and fat retention because your body thinks you need more calories/energy than you do.
When leptin and ghrelin are out of balance, so are your hunger and satiety cues, which can lead to overeating and fat gain rather than achieving your fat loss goals.
Human growth hormone is your muscle-building hormone, and it is naturally produced while you sleep. Sleep increases the blood flow to your muscles, which increases tissue repair and rebuilding.
Sleep deprivation will impede your efforts to build muscle because your muscles won’t be able to recover or synthesize protein.
How Much Sleep Do I Need?
This is the question so many of our clients ask when we start addressing sleep issues.
Many people are used to functioning on less-than-optimal amounts of sleep and don’t realize how much sleep deprivation impacts them.
The standard recommendation of 7-9 hours of sleep still stands to best support your muscle-building or fat-loss efforts.
But like everything, the amount of sleep you need depends on you as an individual. The more active you are, the more sleep you will need.
On that note, research shows that strength training helps you fall asleep faster, have better quality sleep, and wake up less frequently throughout the night.
Lifting is good for your sleeping, and sleeping is good for your lifting!
How to Get Better Sleep
Now that you understand the importance of sleep for your fat-loss and muscle-building efforts, you probably want to know how to improve your sleep.
Try these tips for better sleep:
- Wake up and go to sleep around the same time every day.
- Use your bed only for sleeping (don’t work in bed, don’t watch movies in bed, etc., though there may be one exception here 😉).
- If you’re having a hard time sleeping or falling asleep—GET UP. Grab a glass of water. Don’t keep lying there as frustration rises.
- And, of course, the usual: limit caffeine, keep your bedroom cool, dark and quiet, no electronics near bedtime, and get regular exercise.
And here’s a bonus suggestion that I never see anyone recommend:
Mindful awareness and acceptance.
Instead of fighting your to-do list thoughts at bedtime, accept them. Acknowledge the thoughts, and accept they are important but will still be there in the morning.
Be mindful of your breathing and bring awareness to that (try progressive muscle relaxation–here’s a quick video on how to use PMR!).
When other thoughts crop up, again, acknowledge them, and then go back to focusing on your breath.
The research on mindfulness for insomnia is VERY compelling. So don’t *sleep* on this “woo woo” stuff.
Getting adequate sleep is an important part of reaching your health and fitness goals. Whether your goal is to lose fat or build muscle, you need to ensure you get enough sleep on a regular basis.
If you want to make just one small change toward improving your health, let it be getting enough sleep.
And if you’re ready to take another step to improve your health, check out our FREE self-sabotage workshop to learn the why behind your cravings, all-or-nothing thinking, and other psychological barriers that are preventing you from reaching your health and fitness goals.
Click here to get started for free today!
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Sources
Bennie, J. A., & Tittlbach, S. (2020). Muscle-strengthening exercise and sleep quality among a nationally representative sample of 23,635 German adults. Preventive Medicine Reports, 20, 101250.
Garland, S.N., Zhou, E.S., Gonzalez, B.D. et al. The Quest for Mindful Sleep: a Critical Synthesis of the Impact of Mindfulness-Based Interventions for Insomnia. Curr Sleep Medicine Rep 2, 142–151 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40675-016-0050-3
Nedeltcheva, A. V., Kilkus, J. M., Imperial, J., Schoeller, D. A., & Penev, P. D. (2010). Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity. Annals of internal medicine, 153(7), 435-441.
