Do me a favor and take look around.
Which one of these pieces of equipment is the most effective at helping you to build
muscle?
Well I'm going to save you some time.
It's not in this gym.
As a matter of fact it's not in any gym.
But the good news is, most likely you have it.
I'll tell you exactly why that is and what you can do about it today.
What's up guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM
Don't look for that magic piece of equipment.
Right, if you're not building muscle or the muscle that you want to, and you're trying
to figure out maybe it's something you're not doing in the gym.
Or maybe it's something that you're not doing or eating right.
Most likely guys that piece of equipment you should be focusing on is your bed.
Because your bed is where you're going to sleep and sleep is where you're going to build
muscle.
Now I did a video over the weekend that definitely stirred some things up here.
About the whole myth of bulking and cutting.
Guys, if you haven't seen that video, you have to.
I think it if requisite viewing here.
Because it really illustrated the point that you absolutely, 100% can build muscle and
burn fat at the same time,
if you respect the aspects of calorie deprivation ok.
If you are fat and need to burn fat, if you're not you don't need to really worry about that
part.
But a hypocaloric state combined with a positive nitrogen balance.
Now we talked about, with positive nitrogen balance some things will interact and impact
that.
Overtraining, we're going to cover overtraining later this week in a video dedicated strictly
to that.
But I thought, the second thing we talked about was inadequate sleep.
And I wanted to cover, a whole video here on sleep and how it actually impacts your
ability to build muscle.
The last part was about inadequate protein intake.
I will discuss a little bit of that because it ties right into our sleep.
So, what is it about our sleep that's so important?
Well, I took some time to sort of draw up my little whiteboard here again.
I got the T shirt on, I got the whiteboard, it's all getting serious today.
But I think it's going to help you guys to see what I'm talking about.
This right here is illustrating our sleep cycles.
Ok, we normally sleep complete.
We go to sleep here, ok and we go into our deeper sleep and get to the bottom of deep
sleep.
This is usually the majority of our time here in our sleep is spent, you know going into
our deep sleep, our REM sleep.
Well once we hit it we spend around 10 minutes or so in there and we come out of it.
Each completion from going in and then back out to a light sleep is around 90 minutes
or 1 and 1/2 hours.
We continue to repeat those cycles all the way through the night.
Now, this is going to be important because we're going to talk about the rested benefits
of sleep.
For right now we want to talk about the hormonal benefits.
What is the big deal about sleep in terms of hormonal response in terms of building
muscle.
Well, it's during this time here guys, our deep sleep, that we release the most growth
hormone that we're going to, during the day.
Now even if you don't have a big understanding of hormones, you have to pretty much know,
just based on it's name, the growth hormone is going to be good for you guys that want
to grow.
Now our biggest release of growth hormone happens in our first sleep cycle, the first
REM of a sleep cycle.
As these sleep cycles go on, you start to see that the REM time gets a little bit longer
and a little bit longer.
Unfortunately we don't keep pumping out growth hormone in larger quantities during that time.
So it's really, really, really important that we go into deep sleep at some point in the
night, so we can take advantage of that first growth hormone release.
The biggest one of the night.
Why is that so interesting and so important?
Because, if you watch that video, again, that I talked about guys, I've said how important
presleep protein is.
You want to have the constituents of muscle building in place during the time when growth
hormone is going to be working to help you to become more anabolic.
Ok, you don't want to be calorie deprived at night or completely barren of any food,
especially high quality protein, when you go to bed.
We talked about casein being a great slower acting protein.
But I think one of the biggest missing pieces, in this presleep nutrition picture here, is
the lack of a fast acting protein.
That's where the whey comes in.
That's where I think ATHLEAN-RX gets it right.
Where a lot of other supplements are getting it wrong.
We combine both whey and protein, because you want something fast acting available at
that spot.
That's where the whey will come in.
Now on these other periods where we have these subsequent sleep cycles, this casein works
great here because it's slower acting.
So you have that 1 - 2 combo in reconstruction that you don't have in a lot of the other
supplements.
That's why it's so important to start off your sleep with the right nutrition.
But now when we get in here, we see that the more sleep cycles that we add up, the more
the growth hormone will have of a release and the more anabolic we can be.
Ok, this is we get more blood flow to the muscles, we get more recuperation.
It's all positive.
But there's another tricky aspect to sleep that I think a lot of guys sometimes overlook
or they inadvertently know or feel different but they don't know how to describe what they're
feeling.
These sleep cycles are when we feel the most rested.
Right, you go into deep sleep, you come out of it, you go into deep sleep, you come out
of it.
Did you ever notice how sometimes you can sleep 4 hours or 3 hours and feel great?
And sometimes you can sleep longer than that, you can sleep 8 hours and not feel so good.
That's related to the fact that our sleep cycles are designed to have us wake up at
the peak of one of the cycles.
So as you can see here, if we woke up at an hour and a half of sleep.
or three hours of total sleep, or 4 1/2 hours of sleep, or 6 hours of sleep over here.
We would have completed a sleep cycle.
One of the things that we don't want to do, is try to be woken up in the middle of a sleep
cycle.
If someone wakes you up in the middle of a deep sleep, you're not going to feel very
rested at all.
Ok, you're going to feel actually discombobulated.
And you could have less concentration during the day.
You could be more irritable.
You can feel weaker because you just don't feel that rested.
So when we talk about how sleep builds muscle, Yes, there's a hormonal action to it but there's
also this restfulness.
So what you want to do is, you want to try to find out what your natural sleep cycle
is.
For most of us it's around 90 minutes periods.
So you want to try to go to bed and wake up at some point where it would be at the top
of a natural sleep cycle.
So somewhere, you're not going to want to sleep 3 hours, you're not going to want to
sleep 4 1/2 hours.
But somewhere around 6 hours of sleep, if you're one of those guys that like to sleep
a little bit less.
7 1/2 hours would be another 90 minutes on top of that, 9 hours would be another 90 minutes
on top of that.
So you can experiment a little bit but you're going to find that when you wake up at the
top of one of these sleep cycles, you're going to feel way more rested.
You're going to be able to attack your workouts with the intensity that's needed to deliver
results.
And a sneak preview for the video that's coming up, on overtraining.
The intensity that's needed to keep your workout short.
Yes, I've said it the other day, you absolutely, 100% can get the adequate workout in, in 40
minutes.
And not have to workout much longer than that and avoid overtraining and avoid all that
nonsense guys, that most guys that aren't using drugs, simply can't really avoid.
Ok, especially if you're training hard enough.
So, all that being said, the two benefits of sleep.
Make sure you're going to sleep, you're optimizing your presleep nutrition.
Again, ATHLEAN-RX, we really work and concentrate on that because this is one of the things
I think that is extremely, extremely important.
Right up there with adequate daytime nutrition and workout intensity.
Then you want to make sure that you're optimizing your deep sleep periods, ok.
And that you're certainly going into your first deep sleep so you can get the biggest
release of growth hormone.
And then finally you want to make sure that you're trying to wake up at the top of a sleep
cycle.
So experiment with these times, maybe 6 hours sleep, maybe 7 1/2, maybe 9, it depends on
what you need as an individual.
I hope this sort of makes sense and ties this all together but the bottom line is this,
Sleep.
Sleep is where you grow.
When you're in the gym, this is where you stimulate muscle growth.
But the most important piece of equipment you're going to have if you want to try to
build muscle, is to get yourself in that bed.
To stay in that bed and allow your body to rest and recuperate and rebuild and recover
from the hard work that you've put in at the gym.
If you haven't already guys and you're looking for a program that's going to give you the
hard work, that's going to give you all the components to build muscle.
This is the easy part then.
All you've got to do is just let your head hit the pillow.
But in the meantime, you've got to get the program.
Head over to ATHLEANX.COM, grab our 90 day training program.
See what it's like to train like an athlete.
But more importantly, to train hard, to train intense, to not overtrain and to spark that
growth so that you can actually allow that to happen when you're here at night catching
your zzzzz's.