Sleep

Sleep is essential. It is literally just as important to our bodies as eating, drinking and breathing and without sufficient amounts of it, our mental and physical health deteriorates.

Here's some examples of the positive impacts good, consistent sleeping habits can have:
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• Boost Your Immune System.
• Help Prevent Weight Gain
• Strengthen Your Heart
• Increase Productivity
• Increase Exercise Performance
• Improve Memory and brain function
• Better Sleep = Better Mood

The four stages of sleep are also very important to understand:

Awake- self explanatory

Light sleep
This is the second stage of sleep after being awake. Our muscles relax, respiration slows down, heart rate decreases and body temp drops.

Deep sleep
Our blood pressure drops and our bodies start to promote growth and repair. You can already guess how important this stage is. The blood flow increases to our muscles and growth hormone is released. Tissue growth and cell repairs then take place. This is also the stage where our brains flush any waste.

REM (rapid eye movement)
This is the final stage of the sleep cycle before wakening up and all of the above is repeated to some extent. Our respiration and heart rate increases, body temp control switched off, muscles become almost immobile due to vivid dreams and our brain activity accelerates, benefitting our memory, learning and problem solving.

For most adults, the recommended average daily sleep is between seven and nine hours. Anything less than that and you are shaving off vital periods of the sleep stages.

There's a common myth that you can adapt to chronically restricted sleep, but there's no evidence to suggest that the body will functionally adapt to sleep deprivation.

Therefore, if you follow any fitness "influencers" who claim getting up at 4am is more beneficial than "sleeping in" to 7am, be very careful about absorbing that information.

So we would recommend not rising at 4am to "smash the day" if you aren't able to be in bed sleeping by 9pm. 

Remember, your body needs sleep to recover. If you are consistently lacking sleep, you will be tired, grumpy, stressed, anxious and you will really start to feel like you are making absolutely zero headway with your training and fitness.

We want the opposite of all those feelings for our members!!! There's a lot more to be said for a good night's sleep, but for now, time for bed folks...zzzzz