The third topic of the “Change Your Life” series is sleep and recovery.  Sleep is something that many of us lack and it is far overlooked when thinking about fitness and reaching the goals you have set.  Six to Eight hours of sleep per night is absolutely critical for you to be hitting those goals and moving on to your next set.

Make sure that you have slept good the night before your hit the gym and even more important make sure you sleep well the night of your workout.  What we fail to remember is how much work our body does while we are sleeping.  Since you are physically much less active while sleeping, it allows your body to switch over to cruise control and get to work restoring itself.  Your workout was stressful and damaging on your body, so without that proper sleep, you’re making things harder on yourself.

Sleep is crucial for our brain to function correctly and allow for us to have an optimal workout.  Along with that, adequate sleep keeps your metabolism running higher and your bodies overall biology to be in a much better state.

If you consistently are having trouble sleeping, you will begin to have trouble in your daily workouts.  You can exercise all you want but if you do not rest and recover, you eventually will stop making progress or actually lose some of the progress you have made.  Everyone is very busy with life but sleep needs to be added on that list of priorities each day.  Start to sleep better and you will make up for those couple of hours you lost while in bed.  Guaranteed you will be more productive in your everyday tasks and in every workout.

Not only is sleep absolutely necessary, so is some sort of active rest or regeneration. This consists of things such as stretching, getting a massage or taking an easy relaxing swim.  Active recovery is essential because it actually will speed up the healing process of the stresses you place on your body during exercise.  Regeneration will be the main topic of tomorrow’s post, along with some of the best ways to recover from exercise and maximize your results.