Sleep! The building blocks of all gains

So, I know what you're all thinking, everyone envisions us as the best workout music on the planet... but we also want you to be able to see more gainz! We love posting about exercise music and we love posting about food but every now and then we need to take a step a back and write a post that legitimately helps you. Today's post is about sleep. This is super important for recovery.

So first let's cover the stages of sleep.

Stage 1: Transition Period between being awake and sleep. This stage usually lasts about 5 - 10 minutes.

Stage 2: Body temperature drops and heart rate begins to slow down. Your brain begins to produce sleep spindles, this stage lasts roughly 20 minutes.

Stage 3: Also known as NREM. (non-rapid eye movement) Muscles relax, blood pressure and breathing rate drop, this is where deep sleep occurs.

Stage 4: REM Sleep (Rapid Eye Movement) Basically you look like a possessed zombie. Brain becomes more active, body becomes relaxed and immobilized, dreams occur, and your eyes move rapidly like some sort of possessed demon child. You should spend roughly about 20% of your sleep in this stage.

Once the body is done with Stage 4 sleep, it goes back to stage 2 and starts the cycle over again. Typically the body needs to go through this process four or five times throughout the night.

The way that this breaks down is:

REM Sleep allows your brain to consume more oxygen that supports restoring the things that you've learned through the day to long term memory. This could include new facts you've learned in school or work or even new skills you practiced like shooting a basketball, stick handling a hockey puck etc.

NREM Sleep or deep sleep this phase is essential for muscle recovery and restoring the body.

So both are important... and if you're not getting enough of the right one, than you are going to want to change that so you can become the very best that you need to become.

Alright enough about sleep... you probably shouldn't be looking at a computer screen right before bed... if you're going to bed right now go take 20 minutes and let the body fall asleep naturally.

We actually don't sleep at Murph Workout Radio... We are always producing more and more of your favorite fitness music. Just non-stop cranking away the tunes to provide you the very best workout music.