Exercising regularly is essential for overall health and wellbeing. Physical activities can enhance your cognitive function and mood, decrease risks of diseases among other medical conditions and alleviate anxiety. Working out has also been shown to improve sleep quality.
Symbiotically, a good night’s sleep is fundamental to your workout. Sleep not only strengthens your tissues and muscles but also allows your body to recover, which can help you avoid exercise-related injuries. Therefore, it is crucial to maintain good sleep hygiene.
If you experience difficulty getting a decent amount of sleep, try finding solutions to improve your sleep hygiene. For instance, if you sleep on your stomach, you can look for the best mattress for stomach sleepers to ensure you are comfortable enough to initiate sleep and stay asleep. Aside from finding a mattress to suit your sleep position, you can also establish a favorable bedtime, implement a sleep routine, limit your caffeine intake and light exposure.
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What is Sleep Hygiene
Similar to personal and dental hygiene, sleep hygiene is the set of rituals you implement every day to guarantee you get enough sleep at night and wake up feeling refreshed and alert. By putting good sleep hygiene practices to use, you can benefit from quality sleep every night since it reduces instances of sleep deprivation.
What Aspects of Your Workout Are Affected By the Quality of Your Sleep
Motivation
Poor sleep habits such as inadequate sleep quantity and inconsistent sleep times negatively affect your impulse control and make it hard to maintain a routine workout. If you struggle to keep up with your workout regime, you should overhaul your sleep habits. By observing good sleep hygiene, you will be refreshed and motivated to partake in physical activities.
Rest and Recovery
When you tear a muscle in the gym, you repair it and grow even stronger muscles by getting proper rest. Since recovery time is vital to your fitness, it is imperative to pay attention to your sleep hygiene. Ensuring you get at least 8 hours of sleep every night may help you build lean muscle quicker, feel more energized, and work out better than when you are sleep-deprived.
By resting, you allow your muscles to recover adequately, which guarantees that you go back to your workout feeling stronger than before. Adequate sleep also promotes hormonal balance and improves mental health.
Performance
Leading an active lifestyle mandates that you are well-rested. Getting a good night’s sleep allows you to perform at your best capacity. This means that adequate sleep enables you to have intense workout sessions with minimal fatigue.
To make sure you don’t feel exhausted mid-workout, you should schedule your day to fit in time for physical activity along with 8 hours of sleep in order to balance the effects of both. Quality sleep plays a key role in preparing your muscles and body for the next workout.
Metabolism
A study conducted by the University of Chicago Medicine indicated that adequate sleep is an incredibly vital component of energy metabolism. Research shows that fat cells do not function properly in sleep-deprived individuals, leading to low energy, which affects both their appetite and the frequency of their workouts.
Fat cells are responsible for releasing and sto6656ring the energy that your body needs to function appropriately and perform physical activities. When you lack enough sleep, your body undergoes slow metabolism and becomes resistant to insulin. This means that your body will start relying on lipids to pump more insulin into your system; excessive insulin can be harmful since it leads to fat storage in all the wrong places.
Generally, lack of sleep causes a slow metabolism rate, slow muscle repair/growth, and insulin imbalance which leads to severe weight gain and, in some cases, diabetes.
Inaugurate Good Sleep Hygiene
The amount of sleep that you need to feel well-rested may differ from everyone else due to a variety of factors. Therefore it is important to find how much sleep you need and work towards achieving that every night. With good sleep hygiene, you will wake up feeling more productive and with the ability to put more intensity into your workouts.
