You might have noticed that we’re kind of obsessed with sleep.
We have nutrition tips to help you get better sleep, tips to measure how well you are sleeping and meditations to help you drift off after a stressful day. Sleep is one of the most important factors when it comes to living a healthy and happy life. But the reality of life today is that sometimes missing out on the sleep you need is simply unavoidable.
Tired, grumpy and... no muscle?
When you’re training hard to gain muscle, good quality sleep (do you know how much you should be getting?) is essential to help your body recover, and your muscles to repair and build. And if you’ve had a bad night, then destroyed a dozen chocolate bars to make it through the next day, you’ll know that lack of sleep can also impact your hunger and food choices.
Research also indicates that inadequate sleep doesn’t just prevent muscle gain, it is actually associated with LOSS of muscle mass. When you’re sacrificing sleep to fit in a workout around work and all your other obligations, this is the last thing you want to hear!
But wait, could HIIT help?
If only there was a magical style of training that could make all the negative impacts of a lack of sleep disappear. Well, it turns out there is: call up your fairy god-trainers Luke and Ingrid because it’s HIIT to the rescue! That’s right, new research suggests that HIIT can cancel out the effects of lack of sleep on muscle mass.
Hit ‘save’ on this HIIT session with Luke and come back to it when you’re short on sleep.
A group of very smart researchers – many working in elite sport, where lack of sleep can have a significant impact on performance and results – took it upon themselves to investigate whether high-intensity interval training (HIIT) may have an impact on muscle loss induced by lack of sleep.
HIIT is often recommended as the best form of cardio exercise to use in conjunction with strength training in order to preserve muscle mass. This is because HIIT has been found to increase the rate of muscle protein synthesis (your body’s muscle-building process).
The researchers took a group of healthy young men and compared their muscle mass on normal sleep (8 hours in bed), restricted sleep (4 hours in bed), and restricted sleep PLUS three HIIT sessions a week.
The study drew some pretty complex conclusions about the relationship between our muscles and sleep, but there is a big takeaway for the sleep-deprived among us: data suggests that while muscle protein synthesis is acutely reduced by sleep restriction, it can be maintained by performing HIIT.
Sum it up – I’ve got muscles to build!
For the sake of long-term health and well-being, we should all be aiming to get sufficient sleep. However, for those times that life gets in the way, you can offset muscle loss and maintain those gains by staying on top of your exercise with regular HIIT sessions. Now, who’s ready for a workout?
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