Top 5 Recovery Benefits From Quality Sleep

Recharge Hormone Levels3 – Good, deep sleep is going to do more than just recharge energy and nervous system, but also allow your system to create and balance hormone levels. Proper hormone levels will help you heal and grow muscle faster, along with optimizing insulin levels and fat mobilization

     Repair Tissue - Most tissue growth and repair occurs during sleep. When you exercise, you are actually causing micro-trauma to your muscles. The faster you repair this unavoidable damage, the faster you will no longer experience muscle soreness

Glucose Metabolism2 – If you are training and eating properly, your body is relying on glucose to fuel it and power it through your workouts. Minimizing your sleep will decrease your body’s ability to metabolize glucose which will decline both physical and mental performance

Really, its quality over quantity. Some top training athletes shoot for as much as 9 hours, but 6 hours of quality sleep will out do 9 hours of poor sleep any day of the week. Ultimately, you want to shoot for a minimum of 7 hours, being closer to 9 hours is optimal.  If you want to improve sleep quality, there are many things you can do. 

Top 4 Ways To Improve Sleep Quality

Some will tell you that an infrared session, matched with a cool shower, is relaxing enough to put the biggest insomniacs to rest.  But there is some science behind why Infrared Sauna can help improve your quality of sleep, and in the process, boost the rate at which your body is recovering from physical activity.

Increase Serotonin – This neurotransmitter is critical in maintaining a circadian cycle.  Serotonin helps to properly time your wake cycle, as well as make your system more sensitive to signals from the body to shut down, start sleeping, and amp up recovery processes.

Oxytocin Release – This happens in more than one way with infrared. The first can come from the relaxing state that is created during a sauna session, some refer to it as forced meditation. A second way to boost it is with a cool shower post sauna. Although a little bit of a shock at first, the time after creates an oxytocin fueled zen rush.

Raise Melatonin Levels – many are familiar with this natural chemical, some even supplement with it. But there’s nothing better than the real thing. Melatonin works in cooperation with serotonin, helping the body fall asleep, successfully hit all cycles of sleep, and signaling your wakeup upon recuperation.