When you sleep at night, do you prefer to sleep like this?
Or like this? Like this? Or maybe even like this?
You know, I don't sleep very well at all. I tend to get easily distracted.
What's up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com. Look, regardless of what position you sleep in
or maybe even what nighttime habits you have, today I'm going to show you what position you
should be sleeping in if you want to see not only the best gains in the gym, but to do so
with the least amount of pains. You see, you might be very well aware of the stimulation of
muscle growth happening in the gym. But did you know that the actual muscle growth is occurring
far away from the gym? It's when your head s on the pillow at night. But if your sleep position is
actually compromising your ability to get restful sleep, or worse, it's actually causing orthopedic
issues that leave you in pain so you can't even train hard enough to make new gains, well, that's
the problem. So today I'm going to cover the most common sleeping positions and show the good,
the bad and the ugly of each to help you arrive at the one that's best for you and your body to
get to the gains that you're looking for. So let's start off with what I think is the
worst sleeping position. But as my mom always taught me, if you're going to say something bad
about somebody or something, at least start by saying something nice, and I'll start by saying,
let's say the good and that is, this is pretty comfortable. Or at least the people that sleep
this way will swear that's the most comfortable way to sleep. But that's where it's sort of the
compliments end because this is really horrible for your body. You see what we're getting when
we sleep like this is an exaggeration of some postural elements that are ultimately going
to come back and bite you. The first thing is the exaggeration of this lumbar curve
because gravity is pushing down this way and we sink into the bed itself, we're getting
excessive strain into that extension. Anybody that has any type of stenosis issue this will
leave you almost incapable of standing when you got up in the morning. You don't want to do this
even if you don't have back pain. If you were to just stand up right now,
even with a healthy back and just lean backwards a little bit about 10 degrees or so and stay
there for a minute, you want to crawl out of your skin by probably the 40 second mark. It's
just not comfortable and putting that strain on your back consistently overnight is a bad
thing. If you work your way up the kinetic chain here, you see that the thoracic spine
is actually rounded because you want to hug the pillow that you're on to support your upper body
that creates just more thoracic rounding. Take that with you into the gym when you try to do a
set of front squats and you'll quickly realize how that's not setting you up for success, either.
Continue to work your way up the kinetic chain, the shoulders themselves are really not getting
a break either, because they're internally rotated and elevated position for, oh,
eight hours a night, which is a recipe for impingement. Which again, take that with you into
the gym and any overhead pressing exercise and that's not going to really work too well, either.
And finally, even just to be able to breathe from this position, you're going to have to turn your
head either to the right or to the left. You want to talk about muscle imbalances here,
it's not a good thing, guys. Overall, this position itself is just a recipe for disaster,
especially when there's many more you can get into that can be much kinder on your body.
And that brings us to position number two, and that is the side lying sleeping
position. Now here, guys, it depends on how you lay on your side that matters. You see,
there's three different options here: you can have your legs long like this,
or you can pull one leg up and keep one leg down, or you can pull both legs up and more
of this fetal position. The fact is, we have to look at the same thing that was
happening in the last position and analyzed the biomechanics of each segment of your body.
In this long leg position we have a few things working for us in our favor. Number one,
with the legs held a little bit longer, we have less likelihood that the psoas will get really
tight overnight, which contributes, as we know to low back pain. But what we do have is a chance to
create some low back pain another way. With this top leg, maybe kind of leaning down at this angle,
we can get a little bit of a lateral shift or a little bit of a stress on the low back
by pulling down on the leg. But we can fix that easily by taking a pillow and just putting it
in between your legs like that so we can create a more neutral position of this leg
on top of the bottom leg, which will create a much safer spine. Moving up into the mid back,
we see that the kyphosis problem that we had in the sleeping on your stomach position is actually
alleviated here and looks pretty damn solid. But we do have some issues up here to work into the
shoulders. You can see this shoulder here can tend to get a little bit internal and rotated
if you put your arm underneath your head like that. What I like to advise is to take the arm
and put it flat on the bed underneath the pillow to get a little bit more external rotation. And
every little bit matters when we're talking about sleeping in this position for a long time.
The last thing we look at is the neck itself, and we can see that the goal here is to support
your neck and not have it either too high by putting the pillow too far underneath your head
like that or having your head lean back like that. So the best thing I tell people is to make a fist
and put it on top of that bottom arm. If you can get that fist right there in between your cheek
and that bottom arm, you've got a pretty neutral position here of your neck. Now what do you have
to do? Simply fill the gap with the pillow to replace the fist itself and now you've got a
really nice neutral neck position to put you in a more comfortable side sleeping position.
But that's the key, sometimes people say this position isn't too comfortable.
Which might lead some to say, Can I sleep in the fetal position because it's a lot
more comfortable? I'll say yes, except there is one caveat when you sleep in this position with
your knees pulled up, you're actually just sort of inviting something you're probably doing too
much of already during the day and that's sitting. Because you're basically doing a sit in a sideline
position. We know that the hip flexors can tend to get tight in this position, so you want to
be wary of that. And if you're going to do this, make sure you're stretching your hip flexors with
this stretch right here, both before you go to bed and when you first wake up in the morning to give
yourself a chance of loosening that up, to make sure it doesn't become a problem long term.
You do have the option here once again of using the pillow and putting it between your knees
to maintain that more neutral position. However, I find that in this position,
it's usually a lot less stressful on the hip in the low back because the knees are brought
up into more of a flexed position. And finally, some might ask, But Jeff,
I am actually most comfortable when I pull one leg up to my stomach and leave the other one down.
How about that? And the answer to that is I'm not really a big fan. Because even though the rest of
the mechanics here are maintained in a more proper position than it would be lying on your stomach,
what you are doing here is introducing rotation at the lumbar spine. And if there's one thing,
the lumbar spine isn't really good at its rotation. Allowing this leg to sit up here
and then drop down causes rotation right in the spot that you don't want it. Guys, I'd recommend
not trying to do this. I'd stick to one of the other two positions already covered.
Which brings us to position number three and that is laying on your back.
By the way, are you alive? Yes, I just had a very long night,
last night, I was very distracted. So we're talking about laying on our back.
There are some very key things that I want you to be aware of. And we start again, as always
at the low back. And what we get from this position is definitely a more
neutral back position, right? However, we know that if we already have tight hip flexors,
what can happen is because we know that with the legs out straight,
it's going to pull a little bit arching your lower back that can lead to you waking up very stiff in
your lower back. We might want to take a pillow and put it up underneath the legs just like this,
which is going to ease some of that hip flexion strain and create a more flat back on the bed.
Working our way up into the thoracic spine, one thing you want to be mindful of here is how soft
is your bed? Because if your bed is really, really soft, what's going to happen is you're
going to sink down more and more into it, which is going to lead to excessive kyphosis or rounding of
that thoracic spine. We know if we take the pillow itself and get it too much under your shoulders,
that's only going to exacerbate that even more. You want to make sure that your bed is
firm enough to allow you to keep a flat back and make sure that that pillow, at the very least,
is not up under your shoulders. Talking about the pillow, though, and the neck
itself, we have a very important consideration here. You need to maintain the neutral neck
position. We can't have ourselves with a pillow so high that our chin is digging down into our
chest. Not only is this an uncomfortable nightmare orthopedically, but it could lead to apnea issues
and breathing problems because you don't have a clear passage of airway here. What we need to do
is make sure that this pillow is allowing that neck to stay in a neutral position. Instead of
keeping the pillow under our head like that? I like to utilize the back part of the bed
and tuck the pillow in, as you can see here. And what that does is it creates almost a little bit
of a downward slope toward the back side of the pillow, but it creates a higher lip on the
front side of the pillow. That lip on the front is going to actually fill that kyphotic area of your
cervical spine nicely, but it allows the head to stay back, which keeps that breathing passage open
and makes breathing a hell of a lot easier. We know that the shoulders are also one final
consideration, and how you position your arms when you lay here is important. Of course,
you could lay here with your arms at your side. We call that the resting pose or the corpse pose.
That's okay with me. But if anything, if you do have the ability to get your arms up over your
head just to sort of open up your shoulders a little bit more and get some external rotation,
that's certainly an option, too. Either way, guys, my favorite position for anybody when
they're sleeping at night to maximize your ability to get restful sleep, which is going to lead to
better gains in the gym because of it, it's going to be right here on your back all the time.
And so just like that, you can rest easy tonight knowing that you have the right sleeping position
to make sure that you're maximizing your recovery and therefore getting better gains in the gym, as
I said, without the pains. What are you doing? I'm looking at the next videos. See?
Guys, remember, it's not just what you do in the gym that matters is what you do outside of the gym
as well. If you're looking for a comprehensive training plan, we have them all available for
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