Exercise helps you build muscle mass, especially if you perform strengthening exercises. Getting in a moderate to high-intensity workout every day also promotes better sleep, so long as you finish your workout before the mid-afternoon. You might be surprised to learn that high-quality sleep and enough of it can actually help you build stronger muscles. Here's how this works and the science behind it.
How the Body Repairs Muscles
Whether you like to lift weights or use your own body as resistance, you know that these strengthening exercises are designed to help you build bigger and stronger muscles. When you do a workout involving lifting or resistance training, your muscles experience small tears and injuries. In order to repair those injuries, your body needs two things: protein and sleep.
Increased Efficiency of Muscle Repairs While You Sleep
While you sleep, your brain triggers the release of human growth hormone. This growth hormone gets to work on many different cell types, including your muscles. When you work your muscles, they grow. Sleep is also when your body's repair mechanisms spring into action. Those tiny tears and other cellular injuries that happened during your workout are taken care of while you are asleep.
When you get seven to eight hours of uninterrupted, quality sleep, you body has enough time to make these repairs and secrete the growth hormones that build muscles. Conversely, if you don't get enough sleep or wake up before you're able to complete a full sleep cycle, your body doesn't have time to repair injuries or grow new muscle cells.
Improved Muscle Coordination Also Comes from Sleep
Not only do your muscles grow and repair themselves while you're deep in sleep, they also get more coordinated. This takes place in your brain rather than in the muscle tissue itself. When you do a workout, your brain remembers what you've done. If you performed a new exercise, your brain forms new memories of what you did. While you sleep, your neurons make new connections with each other.
The new exercise you did gets recorded in the memories held within your brain. Your brain also takes the time to create muscle memory. The second time you perform that exercise, you will do it with more coordination. Your movement will be smoother and more efficient. This enhanced coordination can only happen if you get enough high-quality sleep the night after your workout.
More Benefits of Sleep for Your Muscles
While you sleep, your whole body relaxes. This includes your soft tissues. If you strain your muscles or overused them during your waking hours, deep sleep gives them a chance to release the tension. During the rapid eye movement stage of sleep, the release of tension reduces your risk of pain from repetitive movements. When you're in the N3 stage of non-rapid eye movement sleep, your body increases blood flow to your muscles. This helps oxygenate your cells and remove waste products that built up during your workout. In a small study of basketball players, those who slept two additional hours per night had a five percent increase in their reaction time and speed.
If you're a competitive athlete, you may need nine or more hours of sleep in order to gain the most benefits from the tissue repair and muscle growth.
