Rest & Recovery: The Forgotten Exercise
Before I begin this post, I cannot express how many people lack an understanding on the deeper effects of sleep. And it’s honestly not even their fault because it is hardly discussed in our education system, yet it is something we spend nearly 1/3rd of our lives doing! So, I decided to take a much deeper dive in this post regarding both sleep, and recovery. It may be longer than the others, but the information within is rich.
One of the biggest mistakes when I first started my pursuit towards a healthier lifestyle was ignoring the importance of rest and recovery. First off, I just didn’t know or understand the research back then. In fact, I just figured exercising involved showing up and lifting some weights for a couple of hours a day, 6 days a week. I didn’t consider sleep important towards attaining my goals. It was about 4 years later that I learned the impact rest and recovery had on me. Not just towards my fitness goals, but also my hormones, which ultimately translated to how I felt and how far I could actually progress with exercise.
It is important to learn this now when you are starting out to have as many factors working for you, not against you. And if you are not someone who is just starting out, let’s make sure you aren’t making the same mistakes I once was. Had I known what I know now, I would have been so much further ahead, with less effort and greater efficiency. So, the goal of this post is to make sure you leave with an understanding of what is rest and recovery, why it is important, and how to optimize on it.
Rest
What do I mean by rest?
I’ll keep it very simple, it’s sleep. This is basically the time where your body does all of its repairs, and makes its “upgrades” from the work you put it that day. If you do not find the time to allow for that repair and growth, you’ll repeatedly break down the muscle before it is truly ready for use. This will prolong the overall process and lead to more injuries. You have no idea how many people miss this key concept. It is one of the three pillars of health and fitness, with the other two being exercise and nutrition. Rest is basically the activity of inactivity where your body can divert its resources to prepare you for the next day.
Why is it important?
There are a variety of reasons why rest in the form of sleep is important but the three main components I want you to commit to memory is: Hormonal regulation, muscle synthesis, and effect on metabolism. Let’s start in order.
Hormonal regulation
A study done from the University of Chicago discussed the “Effect of 1 Week of Sleep Restriction on Testosterone Levels in Young Healthy Men.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445839/
In just one week the testosterone for men fell about 15% which is quite significant. Now you may think that this study only applies to men however you would be wrong. Testosterone is also found in women and functions similarly. Men however do have more of it at baseline explaining why they typically have larger muscle mass, bone density, and so forth. The biggest issue with this study is it only involves 10-12 subjects. However, those 10-12 subjects were extensively studied under close and strict rules. In fact, they were getting blood draws to check hormone levels every 30 minutes!
Another study looked at the “Role of Sleep and Sleep Loss in Hormonal Release and Metabolism.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3065172/
This one does have quite a bit of information to sift through, but it essentially found that insufficient sleep has a significant effect on growth hormone, cortisol (your “stress” hormone), leptin (the hormone responsible for making you feel “full”), and insulin (responsible for regulating levels of sugar in your blood). Based off that study, a lack of sleep lead to decreased growth hormone spikes, increased cortisol, decreased leptin, and worse insulin sensitivity leading to higher blood sugar levels. Now with this information let's translate that into something the average person can understand.
A decrease in growth hormone is pretty straight forward in that you will see less muscle synthesis and bone growth, especially during adolescence.
Increased cortisol will lead to increased sugar levels, increased fat storage, decreased muscle mass, high blood pressure, and so forth. This hormone can be useful in small doses, but damaging in the long run.
Next we have decreased leptin, which means you will feel hungry more often and will likely consume more food.
Lastly, we have insulin which is responsible for getting sugar into your cells for energy use. Lower sensitivity to this will lead to higher blood sugar levels, thus increasing your chances of type II diabetes.
The “black bar” represents the period of sleep
It's clear from these two articles (and there are many more if you do a quick search) that a lack of adequate sleep is detrimental towards your pursuit of health. It is associated with increased obesity and type II diabetes. These papers also included analyses from multiple different papers increasing the power of this study, along with some other telling graphs, such as this one.
The left side (y-axis) is the amount of hours slept, and the bottom (x-axis) is the groups of ages. It’s fairly evident that as we age, we get less and less sleep. Part of that is understandable since we do get busier. Though this only goes up to the age of 18, I would infer that if the chart were to go on, we would continue to see a decrease in hours slept as we age. This offers insight into the effects we may encounter as they age given the impact sleep has on your hormones.
Muscle Synthesis
All of those hormones noted above are essential in the muscle synthesis process. They stimulate muscle repair and growth (anabolism), while inhibiting the breakdown (catabolism) of muscle. For example, Insulin, an anabolic hormone is responsible for bringing resources into the cells usually in the form of sugar, which then gives energy to build that muscle. Do you see the theme here? Getting quality sleep will aid you in your process while simultaneously protecting you from other detrimental effects. Here is one more article to reference. Again a lot of information but I don’t want to short you, or have people telling me I’m making this stuff up.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7785053/
If you read the article then great, if not then here is the main point along with a general summation of hormones towards muscle synthesis. They all play direct and indirect roles towards your muscle synthesis. Increased cortisol will lead to increased muscle breakdown. Decreased testosterone will lead to decreased synthesis. Decreased insulin sensitivity means increased fat from higher sugar levels, and decreased energy. I can keep going but the answer to keeping all of these hormones in check and create significant impact on your protein synthesis and your overall health…is sleep. If you get less sleep you will have decreased muscle synthesis, amongst other issues.
Metabolism
At this point you should be familiar with what Total Daily Energy Expenditure is along with its components. The processes behind TDEE are all regulated by hormones. How do we optimize our hormone levels most efficiently? By optimizing our sleep. I’ve already shown you the impact sleep deprivation can have on weight gain. What is interesting however, is that studies have depicted that a lack of sleep can actually increase TDEE? Strange right? Let me explain that logic. It was found that because someone sleeps less they are up and active for more hours hence the increased TDEE. But, since they are sleep deprived their leptin hormone is decreased and they found themselves eating more which led them to be in an overall calorie positive state, despite the increased TDEE. Therefore, they did in fact gain weight. Remember, at the end of the day, no one beats the law of thermodynamics. Sleep is not a miracle drug, but it is pretty damn close.
Recovery
What do I mean by recovery?
So if rest is a specific state of not engaging in physical activity, then recovery involves a variety of actively intentional actions and practices towards optimizing our physical and mental well-being, with the ultimate goal to restore capacity of the body’s peak performance.
Why is it important?
It is important to keep your body in tune and maintain its performance capacity. To continue to perform at a suboptimal level will cause you to lose efficiency resulting in wasted time, and more injuries. Though sleep offers incredible results, we can maximize results by playing a more active role. There is certainly some overlap between rest and recovery, but what makes recovery different is that it doesn’t stop at sleep. What you do throughout the day will affect your recovery. So if there are things that you can do, you should do. Here are some simple ways to help recovery:
Do NOT skip rest days. Read that again.
Ensure you are getting adequate protein, about 1.6 – 2.2 grams/kg
Hydrate with about 2L of water
Sleep (if you get nothing else out of this article other than the importance of sleep, I can be at peace)
Stretching – (for more information visit my post on it) as of right now, there is little to no significant research that supports the effect of post-exercise stretching actually reducing soreness. But there is good research on its utility for a pre-workout activity
My final message to you is that there are many posts about different tips and tricks from the media on how to improve everything we spoke about. But the difference between those and what I am saying is that at any given time I can find you 20+ solid, evidence based articles on what will actually work. More importantly, these tips are in line with our theme of keeping things simple whilst following the laws and principles of our bodies. Wouldn’t it be easier to commit to one tactic and do it well than to try and focus on 10 different recommendations? Keep it simple and you will find yourself adhering better to your plan and recognizing results at an accelerated rate.