subject: Get Thinner and Stronger While You Sleep [print this page] To gain all of the benefits from exercising intensely it is absolutely necessary to get great quality rest and proper sleep. Sleep and rest are just as important, possibly more important than the actual exercise and workouts. During resistance training at high levels, muscles will a bunch of tiny tears. This is the first step in gaining more muscle as the body will respond to this tear by adapting and repairing, creating a stronger and larger muscle. Larger muscles of course lead to a body which burns more fat and becomes leaner with less work.
If you do not get enough rest or sleep it will be much more difficult to build fat burning lean muscle and reaching your goals of having a fit body. And here is a another secret, when the body is stressed due to lack of sleep or rest, it tends to hang on to fat as a survival method. Over training is a very common problem which people just do not understand. Give your body the time to repair itself and it will reward you! It is even possible to wear your entire immune system down.
The repair process won't take place if the body is not allowed to do its job, and this job occurs during periods of rest. Often people rush back to the gym as we have been taught that "more is better". People are blown away when they cut back on their workouts and actually get much stronger and grow muscle faster. It is so important for the body to get the proper rest. If we don't we experience poor results, get demotivated and possibly give up.
The repair process does not happen overnight. It usually takes 2 days or more so make sure to keep between one to three day sof rest between your resistance training workouts. Otherwise you may be short-circuiting your results and chances to burn fat and build muscle. If you do workouts which train larger amounts of the body at once, this is very important. You can sometimes get away with less rest if you focus a resistance workout on a single muscle group per workout.
What is a good amount of sleep to get? Seven and a half hours might be perfect! Research has shown we sleep in cycles of 90 minutes and waking before or after one of these cycles is over can lead to a feeling of grogginess for an entire day! 5 90 minute sleep cycles is 7 and a half hours. Try it out yourself and see if you feel better. You will most likely feel well-rested, energized and you will kick start your Fat Burning Furnace.
