Gaining muscle isn’t all about working out. You can lift every single hour of every single day and you will gain muscle, just not as much as you could be. In order for you to gain muscle, you need to tear your muscles microscopically first.
This is what you’re doing when you’re lifting heavy weights. However, those tears get repaired by your body using protein and a variety of other molecules, leading to muscle mass increasing, along with strength.
So, while you might get those microscopic tears in the first place, if you’re not recovering properly, you won’t see the full benefits of the growth. Recovery is so important for building muscle, which is why many people have rest days in between workouts.
However, one of the most important stages of recovery is proper sleep. When you’re asleep, your body is doing quite a bit of work. Specifically, your muscles are keeping themselves busy by repairing whatever damage you might’ve done to them throughout the day or during a workout.
Your blood flow to your muscles goes up quite a lot while you’re sleeping, and during that time the blood is carrying along key nutrients that your muscles will use to grow and recover.
This is the point in time where that protein you drink and that food you eat is going to get put to use. Your body even naturally produces some HGH, or human growth hormone, which some people take excessively and artificially like steroids.
These hormones are crucial to helping your muscles build up, so proper amounts of sleep are very important to making sure you’re healing up properly.You should be getting around eight hours of sleep per night.
This gives your body enough time to go through all of the necessary stages of sleep, including the stage that involves muscle recovery and growth. If you cut off your sleep early, you might not reach that stage, leaving you still feeling sore the next morning.
Find a way to fit proper amounts of sleep in your schedule, no matter what. If you don’t sleep enough, not only will you not see an increase in muscle mass, but you’ll also have weaker lifts.
If you’re not well rested when you go to work out, your body isn’t going to have prepared itself enough to reliably get working. If you want to see yourself lift heavier weight and put on more muscle, get to bed earlier and wake up on time.
