I've got to tell you, I am of the belief that I need at least
8 hours of sleep every night.  I am not a morning person.
Getting me out of bed can be like taking on a grizzly.

At least that WAS the case.  I committed to some goals
this past year to reach a very low body fat level.  In
doing so, I needed to get out of bed and get to the
gym earlier to do cardio as doing cardio in the
morning on an empty stomach burns fat up to 300%
more effectively.  So, I do it.  Every day when that alarm
goes off, I remind myself why I'm getting up so early.

I got interested in sleep research and found this info
Tom will be telling you about.  I got the book he
refers to and it woke me up to a lot of misconceptions.

I now believe that I was simply telling myself I had to
get that much sleep as I've been getting by on 6 a day
for quite a few months now with increase in muscle
mass, not a reduction.  And now I'm doing my club's
Fitness Boot Camp, so get up at 5:00 am.  I made
use of the material I found out in the book and I
think I'm better for it.  One of the best tricks I learned
was about being tired and exercising.  I used to avoid
exercise when I was tired, but now have learned first
hand through experience that in fact exercise can wake
you up.  I also make sure I don't wear my sunglasses
all the time, so I get enough natural light too.  All the
little tricks that come together in a nice little package.

This article by Tom Venuto is a very good read.

Rob

FAT LOSS Q & A With Tom Venuto, CSCS, CPT
http://www.formerfatguy.com/burnthefat

Q: Dear Tom,

Your fitness newsletter is great - please keep it up! It is
very motivating to receive it every week. I had a question
about the importance of sleep to those of us who are trying
to gain muscle and stay lean. The weight that I am able to
lift when doing most of my routines continues to increase
steadily. However, I am still finding it difficult to gain
much lean muscle. I am 38 yrs old and about 5'9" and 165lbs.
Over training doesn't seem to be an issue - I am lifting about
4x per week and working each body part 1x about every six days.
My diet is also pretty solid and I am getting at least 1 gram
of protein per lb of body weight each day. The only issue seems
to be lack of sleep. Because I have a fairly demanding Wall
Street job I am only able to get about 6 hrs of sleep per
night during the week and about 8 hrs on the weekends. Do
think that this could be keeping me from putting on more lbs?
Let me know what you think Tom.

Regards,

Dave F.

Sleep is very important, but sleep is also a very misunderstood
subject. Three years ago in my monthly Fitness Renaissance
newsletter I wrote something about sleep that stirred up some
controversy and really disgruntled a lot of readers:

In issue #6 of BFS newsletter, August, 2001 in an interview
with Lori Braun from female muscle.Com, I wrote:

"Sleep is for wimps! A friend of mine likes to say, "Life
is for living; there's plenty of time for sleeping when
you're dead!" I don't sleep that much. There's too much
to do, see, read and enjoy and just not enough hours in
the day to be sleeping them all away. Usually I sleep 5-6
hours a night. I wish I could get by on 2 or 3; I would
get a lot more done that way.

I'm being a little facetious, but seriously, though, I think
the amount of sleep you need is largely an individual issue,
a matter of certain lifestyle factors and is also tied into
your belief systems. I believe all the emphasis on needing
8-10 hours a sleep a day to recover and grow muscle is a
bunch of crap. I've achieved the absolute best condition
of my life sleeping only 5 1/2 to 6 hours before contests.

Take a look at high achievers in any field: sports, business,
whatever, and you'll see a lot of people who don't buy into
the 8 hours theory. I remember reading Skip Lacour's daily
training journal from 1999 and he said he slept less than
I do - maybe 4-5 hours a night (Skip is arguably the best
natural bodybuilder in the world). He was up at 4 or 5
am doing cardio - What a guy! And he won the overall Team
Universe at around 225 lbs. Doesn't seem to have hurt
his gains!

We've been brainwashed into believing it and if you believe
in something strongly enough, it will become your reality -
any good psychologist will tell you that. The truth is,
athletes, entrepreneurs, and people in other highly creative
fields are filled with so much "juice" and passion for life
and for what they do, that they can't wait to get up in
the morning and go do it!

Quote all the scientific studies and physiology you want,
but there are a lot of psychological "X" factors involved.
Some people oversleep simply because they're bored, they
hate their jobs or they're depressed and don't want to wake
up to face what they're depressed about."

Phew! You should have seen the emails that stirred up!

For example,

"Tom, have a question for you. In your last newsletter
you stated that sleep wasn't important but it seems
that every article I have ever read in a muscle magazine
says you need sleep for your muscles to repair themselves
(in other words, to get bigger). True?"

(Actually most of the emails weren't this nice - most of
them were people yelling at me because I was "irresponsibly"
giving "bad advice" and it was my "duty" as a certified
fitness professional to recant)

My reply was that I didn't say sleep wasn't important -
getting enough sleep is critically important - I said
that how much sleep (a) was an individual matter,
(b) was tied in to lifestyle factors (more on that
in a minute) and (c) was heavily tied into psychological
factors and belief systems. In other words, if you
believe you need 8 hours of sleep, you probably do.

I would even go a step further and say this myth is
hard-wired into some people at a level even beyond
beliefs, it has actually become a part of their self-image
and identity: "I AM just the type of person who has to
sleep AT LEAST 8 hours or I AM a ZOMBIE the next day!"
Nice self-hypnotic suggestion! Have you noticed an
increase in the living dead lately?

Well, I've stumbled upon some very interesting facts
about how much sleep you really need that you might
want to know about. I noticed a long time ago that I
seemed to require less sleep before bodybuilding
competitions. Then I started doing some research
because I was concerned about whether I was sleeping
enough for my health and my success as a bodybuilder.
My initial findings seemed to confirm the 8 hours
theory and I thought maybe I should sleep more.

I found studies showing that inadequate sleep:

Decreases testosterone (1998, Archives of Andrology:
Disturbing the light darkness pattern reduces circulating
testosterone in healthy men)

Impairs insulin function (1996, American Journal of
physiology: Relationships between sleep quality and
glucose regulation in normal humans),

Increases cortisol (1997, Sleep: Sleep deprivation
results in elevation of cortisol levels)

Decreases Growth hormone (1995, Journal of clinical
endocrinological metabolism: Nocturnal wakefulness
inhibits growth hormone secretion)

We've also learned from research that disruptions in
your circadian rhythms as a result of sleep disturbances
can promote disease and degeneration - literally making
you old before your time. (1998, Hormonal Research:
Alterations of circadian rhythms and sleep in aging:
Endocrine consequences)

And those are just a few selected studies.

YIKES! Based on the research, it looks like shortage of
sleep is a very, very bad thing and that's why most health
professionals continue to recommend between 7 and 9 hours
of sleep per night.

So what the heck am I talking about when I say some people
may not need as much sleep as they think they need, and why
the heck do I only sleep 6 hours per night if I'm so concerned
with health and building muscle? And how does a champion
bodybuilder like Skip Lacour get away with 4-5 hours of
sleep per night? Why aren't we terrified of increased cortisol
and other problems, if not now, then down the road?

As a matter of fact, I was and still am concerned with my
health and the results from my training. However, the more
I kept looking into it, the more I found more to the story
than just the results of these studies. For one thing, there
are some simple and easy ways you can improve the QUALITY
of your sleep, which can result in a slight decrease in your
required QUANTITY of sleep while giving you the same benefits.
Anyone who knows anything about sleep will tell you that 6
hours of undisturbed, quality sleep is better than 8 hours
of low quality sleep.

I first stumbled onto this completely by accident: One of
the things I noticed is that prior to competitions, my life
became MUCH more scheduled, structured and regimented than
any other time of the year. I ALWAYS went to bed at the same
time and woke up at the same time very early in the morning.
After a while I didn't even need an alarm. I woke up automatically
feeling very alert. I went to bed at the same time every night,
even on weekends and slept like a rock. There was no partying
and no late nights. Not a drop of alcohol touched my lips. I
only drank coffee in the morning before my early cardio session.
I stopped ephedra and all other stimulants. I often took a very
short nap right after training (especially leg day). I also
was NOT consuming any carbohydrates late at night.

During my contest training, the intensity of my workouts
increased dramatically and my volume of cardio increased
substantially. Even though I was probably on the verge of
overtraining the entire time, I noticed that I needed less
sleep and I felt more energy than usual. I maintained my
strength and lean body mass, and my body fat decreased
every week.

Earlier this year, I found out about a sleep science
researcher (Kacper Postawski) who was studying insomnia
to try to find a cure for this very common and life-
disrupting problem. During the course of his research,
he made some intriguing discoveries about why some people
sleep 8, 10, 12 hours a day and still feel tired and why
oversleeping like this is actually bad for you.

The reason Kacper's information grabbed my attention was
because he was studying the problem on two levels: The
physiological level and also the psychological level,
using Neuro Liguistic programming (NLP) as one of his tools.
I knew he was onto something because one thing I know for
certain is that lasting change of any kind - especially
health and fitness changes - must be approached from both
the physical and mental planes.

In Kacper's articles, reports and book (Powerful Sleep), he
mentioned some of the downsides of sleep deprivation I had
already heard about from my own research. But he also showed
another, little-known side to the story. He pointed out that
controlling sleep quality, sleep cycles, light-dark cycles,
circadian rhythms and lifestyle factors (exercise, stress,
light exposure, drugs, alcohol, caffeine, etc.), are possibly
more important than the quantity of sleep itself. I was amazed
at how Kacper's findings matched my pre-competition experience.

There was even more: He revealed info on psychological
"triggers" and NLP tricks to fall asleep instantly, sleep
soundly and wake up energized - automatically.

Anyway, the bottom line is that all of this information
reinforced what I had suspected all along - that the 8 hours
of sleep idea wasn't such a hard and fast rule after all
and that I could, by using a few almost embarrassingly
simple techniques, not only "get by" on less sleep, but
actually optimize my health and improve my muscle building
and fat burning efforts.

But I think the biggest benefit for me is that I've simply
gained more time - because time is life! Almost every person
in the industrialized world today complains that they don't
have enough time. Some people even say they don't have time
to exercise. If that's true, then you owe it to yourself to
explore ways to give yourself more time.

Strangely enough, one of the things I keep hearing over and
over again is that people who exercise regularly don't need
as much sleep. Some of my busiest clients, including Wall
Street executives, gave up one hour of sleep and used that
time to exercise early in the morning. After a brief adjustment
period where some willpower was required, they found that
they actually felt better on less sleep once the early morning
exercise had become a part of their lifestyle. According to
Kacper, "The biggest antidote to feeling tired is exercise
and movement, NOT more sleep!"

So, I'm NOT saying sleep is not important for muscle growth
and overall health - it is - and the research proves it.
The question is how much? I'm not saying you personally can
get by on 4 or 5 hours. Maybe you do need 7 hours of sleep.
Maybe you need 8. I am only suggesting that you should
optimize your lifestyle and sleeping patterns for quality
first and then see for yourself the impact it has on your
energy and your need for sleep quantity. Doing this, people
often find that they can reduce their sleep time from 9 or 10
hours down to 7 or 8, or even from 7 or 8 hours down to 5 or 6,
while at the same time increasing energy, health and free time.

If you pick up an extra hour or two a day, grab your calculator,
punch in the numbers and multiply that out over 10 or 20 years
and see how much extra time you'll have in your life to spend
doing the things you love to do most.

I highly recommend Kacper's book, by the way. If you are
interested, you can go look at his website now and download
the first two chapters for free:

http://www.formerfatguy.com/sleep

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