Exercising also improves sleep for many people. Specifically, moderate-to-vigorous exercise can increase sleep quality for adults by reducing sleep onset – or the time it takes to fall asleep – and decrease the amount of time they lie awake in bed during the night.
If you're an athlete in training, you may need more. "Just as athletes need more calories than most people when they're in training, they need more sleep, too," Geier says. You're pushing your body in practice, so you need more time to recover. Athletes in training should sleep about an hour extra.
Most athletes are recommended to get between 7 to 10 hours of sleep, because it is so crucial. When your muscles recover adequately, you are more likely to come back stronger than before. Sleep also improves mental health and hormonal balance.
Is 6 hours of sleep enough to build muscle? No way. You should try to get between 7 to 9 hours of sleep every night in order to maximize muscle growth and support your health.
National Sleep Foundation guidelines1 advise that healthy adults need between 7 and 9 hours of sleep per night. Babies, young children, and teens need even more sleep to enable their growth and development. People over 65 should also get 7 to 8 hours per night.
This is because our brain is constantly forming new connections while we are awake. The longer we are awake, the more active our minds become. Scientists believe that this is partly why sleep deprivation has been shown to reduce symptoms of depression. However, there are negative outcomes of this, too.
Is 5 hours of sleep OK? 5 hours of sleep is not OK. Studies show getting five hours or less sleep puts you at greater risk of having two or more long-term health conditions.
If you nap in the morning, the sleep consists primarily of light NREM (and possibly REM) sleep. In contrast, napping later in the evening, as your sleep drive increases, will comprise more deep sleep. This, in turn, may disrupt your ability to fall asleep at night. Therefore, napping late in the day is discouraged.
Not getting enough sleep will backfire on you since it will make your body more catabolic and will also delay muscle growth, especially if you're using a high-intensity training style such as lifting heavyweights. Your body will produce less protein than it otherwise would.
Sleeping for 7-9 hours per night is crucial, especially if you are looking to change body composition, increase muscle mass and/or if you want to be ready for your personal training session the next day. Sleep enhances muscle recovery through protein synthesis and human growth hormone release.
You're sleep deprived
Exercising when you're running on empty also increases your risk of injury. So if you're exhausted, the best thing you can do for your body is to get a good night of rest and get back in the gym the next day.
Both sleep and exercise are key components of a healthy lifestyle and shouldn't be pitted against each other, Dr. Czeisler said. Sleep is important for workouts, he noted, reducing the risk of injury and allowing muscles to recover from exercise.
Making the Choice: Sleep or Exercise
If you're really sleep-deprived, meaning you've slept too few hours or slept poorly for consecutive nights, you should choose more sleep. Otherwise, exercise is the best choice. “Thirty minutes of exercise is more impactful health-wise than 30 minutes of extra sleep,” Kline says.
Interestingly, there is a clear difference between team and individual sports when it comes to how much sleep professional athletes require. Research shows that individual sport athletes sleep on average 6.5 hours a night while team sports come in at 7 hours.
Similar to findings of previous studies, being fit was associated with living longer. This held true at any age. The researchers also saw a relationship between CRF and survival rates: the higher the level of fitness, the higher the survival rate.
Without sleep, your muscles can't recover from the stress you put them through during workouts. It doesn't do you much good to keep breaking down your muscles without giving them time to recover and grow stronger. Lack of sleep may also contribute to joint pain and stiffness, as well as headaches and body aches.
Despite these trends, the research mostly agrees that six hours of sleep is not enough for most adults. Experts recommend that most adults need at least seven hours of sleep every night.
Chronic sleep loss is a potent catabolic stressor, increasing the risk of metabolic dysfunction and loss of muscle mass and function.
“A power nap is a nap that's short — less than 30 minutes long,” says Safia Khan, MD, a specialist in sleep disorders and an assistant professor in the department of family and community medicine and the department of neurology at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
It's the body's way of recharging and healing. For some people, it's also a great escape. Dreaming is fun, and sleep is a way to get away from problems in the real world. Sleep enthusiasts know that a good snooze is a great cure for things like stress, anxiety, and a bad mood.
Elon Musk says he is "fairly nocturnal" and only sleeps about six hours a day. The world's richest man made the comments during an August 5 episode of The Full Send podcast. He said he usually goes to sleep at about 3 a.m. and wakes up after about six hours at 9 a.m. or 9:30 a.m.
10 HOURS OF SLEEP AND ONE-SECOND NAPS
It's common knowledge that sleep is good for your brain – and Einstein took this advice more seriously than most. He reportedly slept for at least 10 hours per day – nearly one and a half times as much as the average American today (6.8 hours).
Sometimes life calls and we don't get enough sleep. But five hours of sleep out of a 24-hour day isn't enough, especially in the long term. According to a 2018 study of more than 10,000 people, the body's ability to function declines if sleep isn't in the seven- to eight-hour range.