The effect of sleep on athletic performance and 3 exercises for better sleep

The effects of sleep reach into a whole range of aspects of human life. One of them is the body's recovery after exercise, where sleep plays an irreplaceable role. Professional athletes, bodybuilders and people on a diet swear by it, because sleep is able to affect processes linked both to muscle cells and to fat cells. More than on the quantity of sleep, though, it depends on its quality. And the article that follows is about exactly that — how to achieve quality sleep. Sleep as medicine and the best helper in muscle recovery Sleep is crucial for the human body in various ways. From the point of view of physical activity it is important above all for recovery, building muscle mass and increasing physical performance. That's why it's good to allow yourself at least 7 hours of it every day, both the night before a planned session and after it. The most nourishing phase for the body is REM, which alternates at regular ninety-minute intervals with the deep NREM type of sleep. Both phases are responsible for rebuilding and updating the neural circuits that also influence our brain and mental state. For both phases to alternate several times during sleep, however, your sleep has to be long enough and of good quality. The best way to achieve that is to pay attention to your circadian rhythm and go to bed before midnight. With the onset of night and the fading of daylight, a hormone called melatonin starts to build up in the body. It controls our internal clock and creates the desire for sleep. Over the course of the night its amount falls again, and during the day, until the late hours, it is produced and builds up once more. But did you know that you can disturb your optimal melatonin level with blue light from screens and thus adversely affect the quality of your sleep? Yes, that's how it is. An unbalanced melatonin level can cause insomnia, depression, exhaustion and a bad mood, which will certainly do nothing for your physical performance. How to deal with restless f…