It’s a beautiful, sunny morning here in St. Louis, and I just got word that our boy, Hayden Buckley, won a 5-man playoff to earn his spot in this year’s US Open.Â
Whenever I see a text from him, it’s always an adventure. It could be that he needs some fitness advice. Tweaked something. Needs a new workout. Or he just made the friggin’ US Open!
Couldn’t be prouder of him.
So, for those of us not playing in Boston next week, let’s take a closer look at our recovery (no surprise that Hayden takes his recovery seriously), more specifically our sleep.
Yesterday, I introduced the 4 stages of sleep – Light, Deep, REM, and Awake. We dug into light sleep, so let’s transition to deep sleep and how it affects your recovery.
Deep Sleep is known as the “physically restorative” stage of sleep. It’s that time of the night when your muscles and tissues repair themselves. It’s also when your cells regenerate.
But here’s the kicker: Your body produces 95% of human growth hormones during this stage. A staggering number.
HGH (the legal kind) does a number of things. It fuels growth when we’re kids. And later in life helps maintain tissues and organs throughout our lives.
When we get to our middle age, our pituitary gland slowly reduces the amount of growth hormone it produces. And that leads to decreased bone and muscle mass.
It’s hotly debated that HGH is the key to slowing the aging process. But no rational professional will debate it’s importance as we get older.
Moral of the story: We need to get ourselves into Deep Sleep every night to give our body a chance to produce HGH. And help our bodies recover.
Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about the stage of sleep that helps us mentally recover.
You’ve got this,
Jeff Pelizzaro
PS – Let’s not forget what Dr. Walker tells us:
“Sleep is probably the greatest legal performance-enhancing drug that few are abusing enough.”
And the best way I know how to get into deep sleep is to exercise. For me, that means resistance training is my “Ambien”.
If you’re ready to rock your weightlifting so you can tap into that performance enhancing drug, then I would start your free 7-day Membership Trial.