I know I’ve written about sleep before, but this morning, I feel like I need to reinforce it. You see, from Sunday to Thursday, I’m pretty sure I was running on less than 20 hours of sleep TOTAL. It didn’t affect my work at all, I’ve become very good at running on overdrive. But it really hit me last night at the gym.
I started with my cardio (Ellyptical: 5 min. warm-up, 30 mins. at 70% MHR, 5 min. cooldown). Normally this is no problem for me, but I knew I was tired. The only thing is, I basically had to let my body take over and go through the motions on (mostly) its own because I closed my eyes for a second, and instantly knew that even though I was working out, I could fall asleep. My eyes closing was enough for my body to take a hint to go to sleep. This was NOT good.
I did successfully finish my cardio, but didn’t end up doing my weight training. I knew that waiting between sets would give my body a chance to fall asleep. So I rolled and stretched and came home.
I’m writing to you just after I officially have gotten up out of bed. Of course, I woke up a couple times during the night/morning, but any typical day I cannot fall back to sleep. It was almost 12:30 p.m. I cannot remember the last time I’ve gotten up this late!
If you can take any example, take this. I went from barely any sleep, ending up with an entirely sore, unrecovered, achy body that was ready to fall asleep anywhere, to an actual recovery sleep that took much longer than necessary due to the amount of rest I’ve missed, and now feel neither sore nor tired nor achy.
Sleep can do so much for you and yet sometimes it’s the one thing that gets put on the back burner. If you don’t sleep, your muscle gains are lost, your fat will not shed, you will not be capable to do what you wish. Take my advice and make sleep just as important as anything else. It needs to be a habituated routine for your health.
Calm in Christ and Fitness 