You know the moment, when you wake up after a short sleep. You feel tired, lack of enegy and every sound makes your head heavier, then comes up a headache. In this case, any kind of workout will not be effective. Getting enough sleep is as important as your food. Why?
During the sleep your body repairs and regenerates damaged tissue from the day’s workout and builds muscle to be ready for the next workout session. People, who lead active lifestyle especially need that sleep time to make sure that muscles recover from workout. All we know, that sleep is the best repair time, so this is the main reason why people should prioritize this aspect.
To proove the importance of the sleep, let’s look at some research.
In Stanford specialists have studied how recovery influences on performance. During four weeks basketball players were asked to sleep from six to nine hours per day. After that, they were asked to sleep more – ten hours per day for the next five weeks. It turned out, that after 10-hours sleep each day for five weeks, basketball players improved significantly their speed.
For the distance of 282-foot long, they have run faster reaching 0,7 seconds better results. (16.2 seconds vs. 15.5). Players said, they were more relaxed and felt more energy after lenghtening nighttime sleep lenght.
Cheri D. Mah, the study’s research scientist at the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Laboratory said: “the study suggests that sleep is important for performance and that reducing an accumulated sleep debt can be beneficial for athletes likely at all levels. Sleep should be a high priority in an athlete’s daily training.”
The importance of the sleep comes up from the hormonal system. During the sleep, human growth hormone (HGH) is released by the pituitary gland and is transported into the bloodstream. Why HGH plays such a huge role? Because of the fact, that HGH has a power to rebuild damaged tissue while building and repairing muscles. Besides it, thanks to this hormone, our body can convert useless fat to fuel and help our bones stay strong. Sleeping less mean realising less HGH, so you can’t recover effectively. Lack of the sleep is also associated with overealising the stress hormone called cortisol. Overproduction of the cortisol makes harder to burn fat and make the progress.
No matter which kind of sports you do, sleep enough and help your body to reach better results.
Picture: assets.menshealth.co.uk/
Article based on the text: http://running.competitor.com/2014/05/recovery/better-sleeping-for-better-running_77427