Sleep Builds Muscle: The Insanely Easy Change to Make

Sleep builds muscle, not lifting weights. Lifting weights tears your muscles. That might sound contradictory to everything we always hear or think when it comes to gaining mass. Also, you might wonder, why not just sleep all day and wake up completely jacked instead of spending time under a barbell?

Here’s the quick summary:

• Recovery is important to actually build muscle
• Sleep kicks recovery into the highest gear
• Lack of sleep leads to muscle loss
• Sleep lets you collect on the gains you earned in training

Training tears your muscles

Recovery and training actually work together to help you gain muscle. They just play two very different roles.

To understand the importance of sleep, you have to understand what happens when you train. By stressing your muscles through weight training, you create small tears along the muscle fibers. These are called micro tears. Your body then works to patch up these tears and rebuild stronger fibers to adapt to the additional stress that it now knows is coming. This cycle tears your muscles and builds on top of them. Consistency in this cycle creates massive gains over time.

That last paragraph probably made you think- well, then aren’t we back to focusing on training? Training, Fuel, and Recovery need to work together at all times. If we don’t have all three pieces right as skinny people trying to gain mass, we’ll hit a wall. Sure, training creates the micro tears that are critical to rebuilding. Fuel in the form of high calorie and protein rich foods gives your body the building blocks to rebuild bigger and better. Recovery gives your body the time and rest to focus on rebuilding before facing the stress of training again.

Sleep boosts your recovery

Sleep in particular is the period during which recovery kicks into high gear, and your body is replenished to truly build muscle. So, getting 7-9 hours of sleep per night sets you up for maximum gains. You grow outside of the gym.

Take this a step further. If you have a habit of staying up late and cutting into your sleep, you are not just decreasing potential building muscle. You could also decrease your gains. The same way that adequate sleep boosts your growth, lack of sleep can make you lose muscle mass. Without sleep, your body can get into a mode where it actually breaks down your muscles and kills your gains. There is even evidence that just one night of lack of sleep can have negative effects on your muscles. So, don’t keep telling yourself that you’ll get your recovery right starting tomorrow. Every day counts.

I personally had to accept that sleep builds muscle

This was the last piece to the puzzle for me before I gained 34 pounds of muscle in 5 months. I never went to bed on time. I was a night owl who spent late nights on my phone or computer. There was never anything important to do at 1 am, but boredom, restlessness, or something else kept me from going to sleep. It wasn’t until gaining mass became my goal, and I understood the direct link between sleep and building muscle that I was able to put down the phone and go to bed. The next random Youtube video was not more important than collecting the gains that I earned in training that day.

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