The importance of sleep for fitness

Keeping track of how consistent your sleep is, in terms of how many hours of sleep you get per night, is important in more ways than you might think.

Of course sleep helps to reset the body as the night turns to day, and it definitely is a major factor in post-workout recovery.

Quantifying and keeping track of your sleep cycle can help play another very beneficial role as well.

If you take stock of your actual sleeping hours, say 6, you can subtract these hours from the total hours in a day (24) and thus come up with a figure which represents the number of hours you are awake – in this hypothetical example 18 hours of wakefulness.

Aside from the number crunching we just performed, (difficult, I know) this figure is important in figuring out the quantity and consistency of our meals.

For example, if you take the 18 hours, and divide them by 4 (this represents the number of hours in between feedings) you are left with 4.5 which represents the number of meals you should consume or number of feedings. If you were to swap the numbers and make the number 4 represent the number of feedings, then the 4.5 would represent amount of hours in between meals.

So if you are awake for 18 hours, you should either:

A) Eat 4 meals daily, one meal every 4.5 hours   -OR-

B) Eat 4.5 meals every 4 hours – this is a little more difficult to quantify, but we can rationalize it by looking at a fairly intense workout day. You would eat a hearty breakfast early in the day, a snack right before lunch, your lunch which would represent your pre-workout meal/snack and then a post workout meal

Obviously, the easiest way to calculate meals vs time between meals is to divide your number of hours that you are awake by the number of feedings you aim to take in.

I typically sleep between 7-8 hours every evening (thanks to my wife who wakes up much earlier than me, and sleeps earlier than I do). Eight hours of sleep leaves me with 16 hours of awake-time – if I aim to eat 4 times, that leaves me with 4 hours between feedings.

If i choose to eat 5 times, that leaves me with about 3 hours and 15 minutes worth of gap-time between feedings.

My breakfast would be at 7am, snack 1 at 10am, lunch at 115pm, pre-workout snack (2) at about 5pm (workout around 615pm) and then a post workout feeding at approximately 8pm – it should be noted that I typically consume 6oz-8oz of a recovery drink immediately following my very intense workouts and slightly less following a moderate workout.

I hope the above guidelines have been helpful to you.

Should you have any questions or concerns feel free to contact me via email.

Warmest regards,

- John Tzor

Tags: fitness, nutrition, sleep, weight loss, workout