Fast and easy way to improve your recovery?

Men and women spent hundreds on supplements and recovery tools. They completely overlook the most powerful recovery tool already within them. Sleep.

Let’s face it:

6 out of 10 adults don’t get enough sleep every night. That means a majority of people are missing out on the single most effective way to recover physically and mentally.

Sleep

• Is your body’s natural recovery system.
• Helps repair physical damage.
• Improves mental recovery.
• Sleep disorders can hold you back from these improvements.

Sleep Is Your Body’s Natural Recovery System

Picture sleep as your body’s factory reset button.

Every night while you sleep, the body goes into recovery overdrive. Muscles recover. Brain solidifies memories and rids the body of waste. Hormones return to optimal levels.

If you don’t get quality sleep, the body can’t properly execute any of these processes.

What most people don’t know:

Recovery does not occur during training or other while awake. Instead, the body truly recovers while you’re asleep at night. Sleep is downtime the body needs to rebuild stronger than before.

Adults that sleep well experience higher life satisfaction. Reportedly, 88% of adults who have a quality sleeping life are flourishing versus adults that are sleep-deprived at less than 50%.

The correlation is apparent–quality sleep contributes to a quality recovery.

Sleep Repairs Physical Damage

The moment the body experiences deep sleep is when something truly remarkable happens.

The pituitary gland secretes growth hormone. This hormone rebuilds damaged tissues and creates new muscle. During these hours of heavy sleep, this process increases substantially.

Blood flow spikes to the muscles during these heavy sleep cycles. In addition to this, this increased blood carries oxygen and additional nutrients to the muscles to quicken the healing process. Damaged fibers are being fixed while cell regeneration is occurring.

If sleep becomes interrupted and isn’t complete, the body doesn’t get the opportunity to enter these stages of deep sleep for a length of time to where this process can’t complete.

Research has uncovered that sleep deprivation enforces a catabolic environment within the body. In other words, muscle tissue is breaking down as opposed to growing.

Sleep deprived athletes are placing themselves at high risk for injury and disaster.

Teen athletes that don’t sleep eight or more hours have nearly a two times more chance of getting injured.

How Sleep Affects Recovery Speed

It’s not just about repairing the damage but instead how quickly the recovery happens.

People who have issues with recovery don’t realize they may have a sleep disorder. Sleep apnea for example, disrupts the deep sleep stages where recovery takes place. With the proper sleep apnea treatment online recovery can be the difference in spending months in a state of poor recovery and getting back into peak physical shape as soon as possible.

Sleep quality is just as important as the quantity of sleep someone gets. Someone can lay in bed for eight hours and still wake up exhausted.

The body requires deep sleep with as many interruptions as possible to:

• Release ideal amounts of growth hormone.
• Help decrease inflammation throughout the body.
• Restore glycogen levels within muscles.
• Reset stress hormones to normal levels.

Any disturbance to the body in these processes causes a delay in recovery. Every bad night’s sleep takes back progress.

Mental Recovery: The Forgotten Benefit

Physical recovery gets all the glory. But mental recovery is just as if not more crucial.

The brain performs some serious housekeeping while asleep. The brain solidifies memories from the day, the brain empties metabolic waste that has accumulated during the waking hours. It brings neurotransmitter levels back to baseline.

It is similar to deleting the trash from a computer. The brain becomes cluttered and slow without this nightly maintenance.

Curious as to what takes place with no proper mental recovery?

Decision-making ability decreases, reaction time is slower, focus and concentration wanes. Mood takes a plunge downward.

People that do not receive enough quality sleep are far more likely to experience anxiety and depression. The connection both works in unison–mental health gets worse with poor sleep, and poor mental health disrupts sleep even more.

Mental fog from sleep deprivation is far more than just irritating. It is hazardous.

Athletes make risky decisions, workplace accidents are common, drivers run into their cars.

Sleep Disorders That Affect Recovery

Approximately 70 million adults throughout the United States alone have some type of a sleep disorder. That is a significant number of people that can’t recover from their activities each and every day.

The leading sleep disorders are:

• Sleep apnea causes breathing to be repeatedly interrupted.
• Insomnia sleep disorder where people can not fall asleep or stay asleep.
• Restless leg syndrome interferes with the deep sleep stages.
• Circadian rhythm disorder where sleep timing is off.

These disorders not only make people tired and fatigued. These illnesses can stop the body from going through its recovery process.

A person that has untreated sleep apnea may lay in bed for eight hours and never reach deep sleep. The body ceases breathing repeatedly throughout the night. With each time the body restarts breathing it yanks the person out of deep sleep.

The result:

Zero chance for recovery to occur even though the person has spent plenty of time laying in bed.

Exactly How Much Sleep Does Recovery Need?

The average adult will need about seven to nine hours of quality sleep per night. This is merely the bare minimum required for maintenance.

People that are healing from injuries need even more than this. The same for athletes in training or any individual battling sickness or high-stress levels.

Here’s something interesting:

Adding just an hour to the number of hours slept each night is equal to an entire extra night of sleep in a week. This extra recovery time compounds into significantly greater benefits.

The quality of those hours also matters. Eight hours of interrupted, light sleep will do far less good. Six hours of deep uninterrupted sleep might provide superior recovery.

Make Sleep Work For You in Recovery

Treat sleep as an afterthought and you’re making a huge mistake.

For anyone serious about recovery–whether that is from training, injuries, or daily stress–sleep needs to become a top priority.

The good news:

Unlike supplements or complicated protocols, sleep is free. Everyone can access this powerful recovery tool if they make it a priority.

Start by setting a sleep schedule. Head to bed the same time every night. Wake up the same time every morning. This should be the case even on the weekends.

Create an environment that is optimal for deep sleep to occur. Make the room as dark as possible. Keep the room as cool as comfortable. Eliminate noise or use white noise. Turn off screens at least one hour before bed.

Investigate any sleep disorders that might be present. Snoring, excessive daytime sleepiness or waking up exhausted are all red flags that sleep apnea may be present.

The Bottom Line on Sleep and Recovery

The bottom line with sleep and recovery is this: recovery occurs during sleep.

Period. No way around it.

The body heals physical damage during the deep stages of sleep. The brain flushes out toxins and consolidates learning. Hormones are reset to optimal levels.

Skip sleep and the body can no longer effectively execute these processes. Recovery grinds to a halt.

Quality sleep enhances recovery by:

• Helping release growth hormones to repair damaged tissues.
• Increasing blood flow to damaged areas.
• Helping reduce inflammation in the body.
• Resetting mental and physical stress response.

For anyone serious about their performance, their health or recovery, sleep needs to become the foundation of their program. Everything else is built from that point.

Getting better sleep doesn’t take any special equipment or complicated protocols. Just a commitment to make rest a priority.

The majority of people already know sleep matters. The difference between those that know and those that take action is what differentiates those who recover quickly and those who struggle for months and months.

Make sleep non-negotiable and watch recovery speed up dramatically.