Why Sleep Matters More Than You Think

Sleep usually isn’t the first thing you think about when you decide you want to get healthier, lose body fat, build muscle, or improve your fitness.

My guess is, you think about workouts and nutrition, maybe you’re tracking calories, eating more protein, adding another day of training, or trying to get more steps in.

And yes, those things matter.

There is one other massive part of the equation that doesn’t nearly get enough attention: recovery.

You can create your ideal training environment. You can lift weights, do cardio. You can make good nutritional choices and generally stay active throughout the day, but eventually your body needs an opportunity to recover from everything you’re asking it to do.

That’s where sleep comes in.

Training Is Stress—Even When It’s Good Stress

Exercise is good for you, but it’s still a stressor.

When you lift weights, you’re asking your body to adapt by becoming stronger. When you do conditioning, you’re asking your cardiovascular system to become more efficient. A good training program intentionally applies stress so that your body has a reason to change.

But applying the stress is only half of the process. You also have to recover from it.

I like to think of it this way: the teeter-totter.

On one side, you have your stress:

• Your training goes there
• Your work stress goes there
• Family responsibilities go there
• Lack of sleep
• And all the other things that life throws at you

On the other side, you have recovery.

Your goal shouldn’t be to eliminate stress. As you can probably figure, that’s not possible. Some stress is exactly what creates a positive change in your body, and that’s what we’re looking for.

Your goal is to make sure the teeter-totter occasionally moves back in the recovery direction and not always on the stress side of things.

If you’re constantly adding more training, more work, more responsibility, and more stress without providing enough opportunity to recover, eventually your body is going to let you know.

Maybe You’re Not Overtraining. Maybe You’re Under-Recovering.

I’m not a big believer that the average person needs to worry constantly about “overtraining.” I don’t think you train hard enough, consistently enough, for a long enough period of time, and neither do I.

However, I do think most people are probably under-recovered, and there’s an important distinction.

You might be able to train hard and get stronger for quite a while despite poor recovery. But eventually you may start noticing things going in the wrong direction.

The things that jump out to me:

• How about weights that you normally feel are manageable or suddenly heavy
• Maybe you’re more sore than usual
• On top of that, maybe your joints are achy, and those aches start to hang around
• Maybe your motivation to train drops
• And your performance, as a byproduct, follows suit

I do hear in conversations frequently something to the effect of “Should I add this? Should I add that? I need to work harder.”

Maybe you don’t. Maybe what you need to do is recover better.

There are absolutely times when I’ll tell someone to push harder, but if you’re already training hard three to four days a week, you’re eating reasonably well, and you’re constantly telling me you’re tired and achy, another workout probably isn’t where I’m going to start with you.

I’m probably going to start asking you about recovery.

Sleep Matters for Body fat, Too

This is probably simultaneously one of the simplest and most challenging things for people to undertake.

Sleep is especially important when it comes to trying to lose weight and change your body fat, but it’s one of those things that can immediately be set to the side and replaced with more stress and more things to do around your house, and more work and more time doing other things.

It’s tempting to reduce fat loss to a simple equation of exercising more and eating less. Energy balance obviously matters, but sleep can influence how easy or difficult it is to consistently make the choices that support that goal.

Think about the last time you were exhausted.

Were you excited to prepare a balanced meal, go for a walk, and train hard?
Or did the couch and convenient food suddenly become a lot more appealing?

Sleep can affect appetite, food choices, energy, training performance, and the ability to follow through on the habits you’re trying to build.

Research has even found that improving sleep duration in people who habitually weren’t getting enough sleep can reduce how much they eat without deliberately putting them on a diet.

It turns out it’s not a magic pill, but it certainly seems like it works by magic.

It also means sleep is part of creating an environment in which your nutrition and training have a better opportunity to work.

Sleep Doesn’t Only Matter in the Gym

For parents, there’s another piece of this conversation that I think matters just as much.
How do you show up when you’re exhausted?

I’ve experienced this myself. When I don’t sleep enough, and it’s more frequent now than I really would like, I find that I have less patience. I have a shorter temper with my family and my kids, and the guilt is real when that happens because I know it’s something that I could improve when my sleep is better.

As you know, as I know, your kids tend to be really good at finding those buttons.

That’s part of health, too.

The point of becoming healthier isn’t simply to squat more weight or change the number on the scale. It’s to have the physical and mental capacity to show up for the other parts of your life.

If improving your sleep helps you train better, make better food choices, have more energy, and be a little more patient with the people you care about, that’s a pretty significant return on investment.

It’s Not Only About Getting 8 Hours

“Get 8 hours of sleep” is easy advice to give. But we all know that real life is a bit more complicated than that.

If you have an infant that’s waking up multiple times every night, telling you to simply sleep 8 hours uninterrupted isn’t particularly useful and can be more annoying than anything.

With that in mind, we need to separate sleep duration from sleep quality and consistency.

If getting more sleep genuinely isn’t an option right now and there are certain cases where this is the case, then what can you control? The first thing that comes to my mind is:

• Your bedtime and your wake time
• Making sure your bedroom is dark, like pitch black
• Making sure that you adjust the temperature to suit and facilitate good quality deep sleep
• Maybe making sure that you don’t have caffeine too late in your day
• Perhaps another is putting your phone away before bed and creating a short winding-down type of routine.
• Lastly, maybe it’s getting outside and getting some sunlight when you first wake up and getting some sunlight just before bedtime.

That’s a lot of stuff, no doubt, but you also don’t have to overhaul everything tonight. Here’s what I would do: I would pick one thing, make it an automatic thing if you can, and then build the rest of the habits around that.

If you have heard of habit stacking, then that can be a really powerful tool for you for building better sleep hygiene.

Sometimes 8 Hours Still Isn’t the Whole Answer

I recently had a conversation with a client who told me sleep had become a challenge.

Naturally, I started asking questions.

How much are you sleeping?
What time are you going to bed?
What time are you waking up?
Are you waking during the night?
Do you feel rested in the morning?

What we discovered was interesting.

She’s still getting roughly 7 to 8 hours of sleep, but her schedule had simply shifted later than it had previously. This is where coaching comes in. It would be easy for me to say, “There’s your problem: go to bed earlier.”

But I don’t know that yet.

Sleep duration matters, but so can sleep quality, regularity, timing, light exposure, stress, caffeine, alcohol, training load, nutrition, and a host of other factors.

So instead of jumping to a solution, we investigate.

What’s changed?
How consistent is the new schedule?
How does she feel when she wakes up?
What’s happening before bedtime?
What’s happening during the day?

My goal isn’t to diagnose a sleep problem (I’m not a doctor after all).

My job is to help identify the behaviors we can control and see whether changing them improves the situation.

Start With What You Can Control

Sleep is important. You know that, I know that, and it’s especially important for busy parents.

Start simple.

I would pick the simplest, easiest thing for you to start from the habits above and do it tonight. Don’t talk about it, don’t plan for it, just do it tonight.

And if you can’t increase the amount of sleep you’re getting right now, work on improving the environment around the sleep you can get.

Then see what happens.

The Goal Is Adaptation

Last week, I wrote about why workouts aren’t enough. Sleep is a perfect example of what I meant.

Your workout creates a stimulus. But you still have to give your body an opportunity to respond to it.

You need both sides of the teeter-totter.

Stress and recovery.
Work and adaptation.
Training and sleep.

You don’t become fitter simply because you’re willing to work harder and harder.

You become fitter because you apply the right amount of stress, recover from it, adapt, and then come back ready to do a little more.

So if you’re training consistently, trying to improve your nutrition, and still feel like you’re spinning your wheels, don’t automatically assume you need to do more.

Take a look at your sleep. Seriously, start there.

Better recovery might be the thing that finally allows all that hard work to pay off.