Sorry I Missed Sunday ……Actually No I Am Not!

In the past I would have felt guilty about this……

I did still ask myself the question, “Am I being lazy or am I knackered?”……

The answer on this occasion was the latter!

I had my shorts on, my heart rate monitor on and I was setting up for an hours run on Sunday…..I looked in the mirror and thought….I am knackered….I need to sleep right now!

So that is what I did at 5pm, 1 hour 30 mins later…Jo woke me up 15 mins before I was meant to be out the door for dinner with mum for mothers day. Good job I don’t have much hair and I am beyond the help of make up!

Seriously though, sleep is the most important aspect of your long-term health and wellbeing.

This is one of, if not the hardest things for me to help my clients to sort out, yet if you’re not getting enough sleep, or aren’t sleeping at the right times, your fat loss and overall health mission will stick in a rut which you can’t train , eat or post workout supplement your way out of. The cycles of light and dark affect just about everything, and certainly everyone. Big one this week, I noticed a few absentees on Monday at our group session, no big deal but definitely the shift of the clocks had an effect.

Sleep is when your body can repair itself, and in particular, between 10 pm and 2 am, is a four-hour window where the physical repairs take place. From 2 am onwards, the focus switches to mental repair until we wake up. Growth hormone (GH) has several purposes, including reducing the amount of fat in the body, increasing muscle mass, enhancing heart function and exercise performance, boosts mood and feelings of wellbeing, as well as strengthening bones and helping wounds heal faster. It’s released while you sleep, and if you lack of sleep however, you won’t produce enough. Our old friend cortisol also comes into play. Basically, when you watch TV, work on your laptop, of generally have lights on at night, your body thinks it’s got to be ready for something, and so releases the stress hormone cortisol (which if you have read my blogs and emails before, you already know is a big player in making you fat). This all comes back to the day – night cycles of light and dark. So you can forget your creatine or amino acids pre or post training if you are neglecting your sleep.

It’s a great idea to start to wind down as best you can after around 7 pm, and dimming the lights will help with this. By bedtime, your hormones will be in a better state than if you were to be watching TV late at night, or on the computer. Try to make sure you’re in bed by 10pm, and have a good 7-8 hours sleep. This will make MASSIVE improvements in your health and fat loss, and you’ll also feel a million times better as a result of the improved quality of your sleep.

The little pyramid below, is just an illustration of my view of the importance of each of the aspects in attaining your health. Sleep taking up the widest space at the bottom and supplements…still really important but perhaps more irrelevant when the others are being ignored or neglected.