Build muscle in your sleep

Build muscle in your sleep

We want to get the most out of our training. We workout hard, eat right and take time for recovery, but what if I told you; you can build even more muscle in your sleep? Many success-driven men consider sleep a waste of time. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger said in his six rules of success we only need to sleep six hours a night. Straight up this isn’t the best advice for anyone wanting to build more muscle. Because most of our muscle growth happens when we are asleep. Through a number of different processes. Including replenishing our muscles with glycogen to prepare us for the next day's work.

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In previous videos, I’ve talked about how sleep goes in waves and we go in and out of what is known as slow-wave sleep which is our deepest sleep. And it is when we are in this sleep that our pituitary gland releases growth hormone stimulating muscle growth and repair. We spend around 13 to 23 percent of our time in slow-wave sleep. So the longer we can sleep the more time we spend in this muscle-building phase.

But how much time do we really need to spend asleep, to get the most muscle-building benefits?

The study that is most often quoted when trying to establish this is one from 2010 which took two groups of people both in a calorie deficit and had one group spend 8.5 hours in bed and the other 5.5 hours. This is the total time spent in bed including the time it took for them to fall asleep. It is important to mention that these were sedentary people, not hard training adults.

The results after two weeks had both groups losing the same amount of weight. But the group that was in bed for only 5.5 hours lost 60 percent more lean body mass than the group that was in bed for 8.5 hours and although the group that slept longer lost less muscle mass they still did lose some muscle.

This study does little to tell us what we need to do to build muscle while we sleep, but what it does establish is that not getting enough sleep is detrimental to our muscle gains. Lending support to the standard recommendation of 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night.

So what do we need to do to build muscle in our sleep? This comes down to what we do during the day and it made me think of another study that was kind of an extreme one again they had two groups of men overweight but healthy and active. Just like the first study they were put in a calorie deficit. It was an extreme cut too, they cut their maintenance calories by 40%.

One of the big differences is they had them train and a lot, 6 days a week.

The next thing of note was the macro split, one group had a diet of 15 percent protein, 35 percent fats and 50 percent carbs. The second group had higher protein and less fat with 35 percent protein, 15 percent fat and still 50 percent carbs.

The results after four weeks of hard training and extreme calorie deprivation. Both groups lost a significant amount of body fat without losing any lean mass, but here is where it gets interesting the higher protein group actually gained on average 2.6 pounds of muscle.

In this study, they didn’t track how much sleep the participants had every night, but it clearly shows that in order to protect our lean muscle mass and build muscle we need to train regularly and provide our bodies with the proper nutrition. I would suspect the results would have been even better if they had been in less of a calorie deficit or even a small surplus.

So now we have started to train consistently and we have improved our diet. With our bodies having the proper stimulus and nutrients need to build muscle. Let take a look at what we can do to get a better night's sleep. Mentally unwinding before bed is key, reading a book is a good call and much better than watching TV, playing on your computer or anything with blue light.

One of the more important things to try and do is to go to bed at the same time every night. Having a consistent bedtime syncs up your natural circadian rhythm with your sleep schedule.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2951287/

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/103/3/738/4564609