Sleep for Muscle Building

Welcome back to BETTER, the email series that provides tools, strategies, and knowledge to help you progress toward a healthier and fitter future.

This week, we are providing strategies to help your muscle-building efforts.

Today's installment covers sleep strategies to enhance your muscle mass!

1. Get 7-9 hours of sleep a night. Getting enough sleep positively affects everything in our muscle-building toolkit. It supports healthy hormone production, recovery from hard workouts, and inhibition of the processes that break down muscle tissue.

2. Go to bed at the same time every night. When we keep our bed and wake times consistent, we give ourselves the best chance for our bodies to enter into deep sleep during the night. Deep sleep is when most of our physical repair happens, and most of us experience the majority of deep sleep in the first third of our nightly sleep. Here's the kicker: If we go to bed late and miss that window, we don't get it back. The golden rule is to keep your bedtimes within a 20-minute window.

3. Leave space between your last meal and bedtime: Having your last big meal 2-3 hours before bedtime will give your body a chance to focus more on sleep and less on digestion. If this sounds unrealistic, try to shift some of your calories from nighttime to the middle part of the day or early afternoon.

4. Avoid Alcohol. Alcohol acts like a physiological stressor to the body, giving it priority over everything else. That means you'll experience less muscle growth if you train hard and drink often. It's best to avoid alcohol if you want to maximize your muscle mass gains.

Stick to these ideas and set your sleep up for gains!