How Lost Sleep Kills Your Fat Loss Plans

Whether you are a college student, night shift worker or you are a parent with small children you may struggle to get regular sleep yet you want quick weight loss.  The sleep recommendation provided by the National Sleep Foundation recommends 8 hours per night.  According to the CDC and a National Health Interview Survey shows that 30% of Americans who are 30-64 years of age sleep less than 6 hours per night.

There is a prevalence of chronic sleep loss in America and it is troubling because for those looking to lose weight or who are following a healthy weight loss diet plan their attempts may be wasted.  Research is showing that long term sleep loss is related to an increase in obesity and diabetes.

This research is even showing that partial sleep deprivation can manipulate key hormones that impact weight loss and weight gain.  Lack of sleep can also affect insulin sensitivity, your appetite control and the amount of energy you expend when at rest.  When these key hormones are affected it can predispose you to weight gain and obesity by causing insulin resistance.  

How Lost Sleep Kills Your Fat Loss Plans

Did you know that getting enough sleep helps you maintain your weight? According to Prevention,

People who logged 7 to 9 hours a night had an average BMI of 24.8 –  almost 2 points lower than the average BMI of those who slept less, University of Washington researchers found. Too little sleep may throw off hormones that regulate appetite.

Lack of sleep can also mess up critical balances of hormones that control anabolism and catabolism.

Did you know that regularly getting inadequate sleep can lead to more battles with the cold bug? According to Prevention magazine,

People who get less than 7 hours per night are 3 times likelier to catch colds, according to a JAMA study. Reason: Sleep boosts immunity; too little impairs it.

So next time you think 6 hours of sleep is enough, think again. Your sniffles might just go away!

I got this tip from Doberman Dan, author of Hyper Muscle Growth. This is a killer tip for boosting your muscle gains through the roof! It's something all of us successful hardgainers have done, but we often fail to mention it because it's so innocent and obvious that we forget to mention it in our newsletters, tips, blogs, and sites.
 

Dramatically Increase Your Calories for 3 Days

You will never achieve a positive nitrogen balance with a low calorie diet. It takes raw materials – carbs, protein and fats – to build new muscle mass and support recovery. Increasing your calories by 50% (from 3,0000 to 4,500 per day, for instance) for three days can spur growth while adding little if any bodyfat. The key is to limit the increased calories to a designated three day period; you'll be able to stimulate growth by improving muscle sensitivity to insulin and by providing more carbs for glycogen storage.

If you are in an overtrained state – and if you're not gaining any new muscle mass, this is probably the case – the additional calories will promote anabolism before fat storage is able to kick in. That's why you want to limit the 50% increase to a three day period. After that time, return to your typical intake of daily calories; you'll have stimulated new growth without adding unwanted fat.

Get more of these super tips that work especially well for hardgainers by clicking the link below –

Hyper Muscle Growth

I wanted to let you know that I've published a new 16-week muscle-building and fat-shredding course called the Stair Step Training System (SSTS). It's a course that's delivered via the web over the course of 4 months and covers all you need to know to build the body you want by combining training, diet, and rest & recovery (the 3 Pillars).

It works for beginners, intermediates, and advanced trainers alike; it uses a simple yet very effective method that's been tested over many years. SSTS is really the system that pro bodybuilders and professional athletes follow for building muscle, strength, and speed, as well as stripping body fat and improving athletic performance.

You can check it out here.

Meditation: Give It a Rest
Guest Post by Margaret Fletcher

(Bill's note: Margaret is a long-time friend of mine who is an ace at getting massive amounts of work done in the most efficient and effective ways I've ever seen. She is a true expert in her field and you would be well-served to spend some time at her site studying her methods.)

My friend Bill asked me to put some ideas together for all of you in his community, from the perspective of my way of life. I’m a meditation teacher. Nice to meet you!

Knowing very little about you all, I’ve spent some time contemplating what I might be able to offer that would be of use to you. I imagine a population of people who have high discipline and focus on a specific goal, that of optimizing the physical body.

My own exploration intercepts quite well with that, but I come at things from a different angle. What I’m interested in is optimizing life. That may sound like a ridiculously general goal, and I sense that it is unusually general. Nevertheless, it’s my highest value, it covers everything I do, and I spend the same amount of attention and effort to achieve this goal that I imagine some of you do. And part of this effort, it is very clear to me, must be to engage intimately with the physical body in order to determine how to live optimally in this vehicle we travel around in. So with that said, I think I actually could say a few useful things.

To start, meditation practice is about getting very clear about what’s happening. When you can do this well, you can then take the wisest action available in a given situation. Really knowing what’s happening can include knowing better the conditions around you, and also knowing your own reactions to those conditions, knowing how your body and gut and mind respond and react to various stimuli. Knowing these things, and recognizing what works and what really doesn’t, this is the key to a meditation practice that’s helping you be the person you want to be.

You are surely an expert at this kind of knowing in some places in your life. For example, you may know exactly what happens to a particular muscle when you perform a particular exercise X times per day, and also know what happens when you drop that exercise.  You have perhaps been through the cycle of waxing and waning discipline, and seen what that does to achieving what you’re looking for in your body-building practice. What you may not know about are the subtle and not-so-subtle things that are interfering or supporting your practice. If you could sort out all the bits that interfere and avoid those, and identify all the bits that support and do more of those, can you consider the places you could take your practice and yourself?

Meditation practice can open the field of your disciplined effort to include all aspects of your being. Bill tells me that the three pillars of practice for body optimization are diet, exercise and recovery. The practices of meditation can play an important role in each of these areas. Let’s look at recovery this time. Recovery happens when you give everything a well-deserved rest, yes?

Americans are chronically under-rested. I say this as an expert from the field of meditation. Whenever I am with people who are undertaking a prolonged period of meditation, one of the phenomena people most often report about is falling asleep during meditation. And it doesn’t matter whether “prolonged” is 20 minutes for a beginning meditator, or 5 days for someone first undertaking a silent retreat. People are tired. This comes as a big surprise to such people, but it comes as no surprise to me. Our culture does not value high quality rest time. Ask yourself the following questions, and see how many you can honestly say yes to:

• Do you know to take regular breaks from focused work, and do you actually take them?
• Do you awaken in the morning spontaneously, rather than by an alarm dragging you from sleep?
• Do you avoid multi-tasking and distracting yourself during traditionally restful activities, such as enjoying a meal or conversation with friends?
• When you relax your mind and body, can you fully let go of mental activity and physical tension?

I’m betting you had at least a couple of “no’s” in there.

Most people don’t actually know how to rest properly and often. Instead, we generally go full-tilt all day, cramming in too many activities, over-working, eating at our desks, even efforting hard to “have fun” during off-time. Then at the end of all that we fall into bed, and continue to sleep in the same break-neck way we’ve spent the rest of our day.

This may feel like it’s well known to you. Sure, I know, I should rest more, and get better quality rest. Everybody knows that. What’s that got to do with meditation?

Remember, meditation is to get really clear about what’s happening, so clear in fact that to do anything other than take the best possible care of yourself becomes impossible. So, for the rest element, when you start to meditate, you become aware and then more aware and eventually deeply aware of whether you’re rested or not, when you’re rested and when not, what feels restful and what feels harmful to restfulness. You become an expert at your own states of restfulness, or not, and you subsequently and naturally become an expert at resting.

This does not mean you become lazy, by the way. If you become expert at resting, you become an equal expert at effective, high-energy action when that’s called for. See how this works?

There’s lots more I could say about this topic. I could give you a list of things I do for myself now that I am attuned to my own energy levels throughout the day, and from day to day. But I don’t want to turn this into a to-do list of actions from my own particular circumstances. Each of us has different things that feel restful versus energy-draining. You need to find out what yours are, and then act on them. This is not exactly news to you. But if you haven’t found the means to actually act on this knowledge, maybe it’s only speculation or assumption rather than knowledge that you’re working from.

Or I could tell you about the studies that have shown a marked increase in meditators’ versus non-meditators’ REM sleep. That’s the kind of sleep that cultivates the best kind of healing and restoration, the kind that bodybuilders need for that all-important recovery pillar. Again, interesting facts, but without direct experience of this it’s meaningless.

In my book, the only way to get the truth about all of this is to look deeply into your own experience. And the way to do that properly is to take up a highly disciplined, focused study. I call that meditation.

Margaret is a business owner, mother, mindfulness teacher and meditation floozy. Her interest is in awakening to the truth of what you are, whether that be through profoundest stillness or in the middle of peeling potatoes. You can find her writings about awakening to the all-out, full-blast, top-to-bottom richness of life at her blog, Stumbling Awake.

Most of us run around life like we're mice being chased by a big ass cat. We get up, shower, go to work, go here, eat there, scramble for a parking spot at the gym, go home, do the dishes, wash the laundry, watch TV, and then try to go to sleep.

And then can't fall asleep.

Or we do sleep, but we're more tired when we wake up than when we went to sleep the night before.

All of this nonsense is avoidable and it's killing your progress.

My good friend, Margaret, teaches people how to relax. She left the rat race of the corporate world and started doing what matters: Helping people.

She's agreed to do a guest post here. But she doesn't know what to write about, since we're all kind of gym rats and she's not. But there is one commonality between us and her: We all perform better when we rest, relax, and recover.

So, I have a question for you: What would you like Margaret to write about?

Use the Comments section (down there) to leave your question. She'll pick one and write about it.

Alert, or at least long-term, readers of this site will note that I typically advocate a 2-way split, working out 3 times a week. My routine in the past has always looked something like this:

• Legs & Arms
• Chest & Back & Delts

I’d work the first on Monday and Friday, the second on Wednesday. The following week, I’d do the opposite.

I’ve been working out pretty heavy lately, using more sets and lower reps. I’ve also added really heavy partials with high reps (at least 20 per set at the end of a body part’s workout).

It’s been my experience that I’ve often not trained with enough volume because I’m trying to hit 2 or 3 body parts per workout. I’ve devised a new workout routine that allows me the rest I need to recover, the freedom to work a specific body part a second time in a week, and the space to work out more intensely per workout because I’m working fewer body parts per workout.

Here’s my new work out routine:

• Chest & Back, Monday
• Legs, Tuesday
• Delts & Arms, Wednesday
• Rest on Thursday
• Specialize on Friday (hit a lagging body part or something I want to really stress)

This routine allows me to follow my diet more closely, too. As you may remember, I suggest that people follow a nutrition plan pretty heavy on supplements and high protein, moderate carbs, and relatively high fat (for building phases); with the heavy eating, I want to give my body a rest every 4th day. So, Monday through Wednesday, I eat my “normal” heavy diet. Thursday, I pretty much fast.

Friday, I can go nuts on the supplementation while I blast the body part I want to crush.

Saturday and Sunday are pretty normal, except that I eat lighter because I’m not doing any weight training on those days.

In the next post, I’ll tell you about my back-relief supplementation plan. It’s given me the most pain relief I’ve had in years. Literally.

Wrist injury

Last month, I went on an excellent road trip vacation with my family (my wife and two boys — a 3 1/2 and 2 year old) up through central Oregon and back down the west coast. Absolutely stunning scenery!

We loaded up (and I’m not exaggerating) the Pilot — 2 bikes, bike trailer, stroller, porta crib, and enough food and clothing to last most sane people 6 months!

But we’re insane.

We spent the first week at a cabin on a ranch outside Ashland, OR. There was a ton to do there for the boys, and I could ride my mountain bike on some pretty hilly and rugged terrain. It was hotter than you-know-what, and even the flats felt like mountains.

That’s the prelude

So I picked the hottest day of our stay to explore. I climbed a bunch of hills to get where I was going (which, essentially, was “nowhere”). Then the trail disappeared. After a little trek up some ridiculous terrain, I became “the decider.” Bad idea!

I turned around. As I approached warp speed, I started to brake, but obviously not enough! I made a slight turn of the wheel, the tire dug in, the bike virtually stopped, but I didn’t. After slamming hands first into the gravel, I made two somersaults and landed on my shoulder.

After I picked the gravel from my palms and knees, brushed off a bit, I hopped back up on the bike. A little blood, but remarkably not much pain.

Until two days later. My right wrist had taken the brunt of the crash and was pretty sore. That was a month and a half ago. It is still sore.

Especially after I had the shots yesterday to burst the ganglia that had presented itself. Plus, apparently, I had broken my hand, but it had already healed. Now I’ve got this red (soon-to-be-purple) bruise on the back side of my arm where the hand meets the wrist.

The doctor said the treatment given works about 50 percent of the time. Let’s hope. Otherwise, my alternatives are to “live with it” or have surgery to remove it. I guess it’s like a cyst. Not a big deal, but man am I tired of surgeries! 3 on the knee and an emergency appendectomy are enough for this cowboy!

So, to the subject of this post.

How to Deal with Minor Injuries

First and foremost, the treatment I am about to describe is not to be construed as medical advice. I am not a doctor, just a guy whose had his share of minor injuries and is sharing his successes and failures with you. We’re talking sprains and strains, slight pulls, and the like. Not bone breaks, muscle tears, incessant bleeding or other soft tissue damage that might require surgery. Seek medical attention right away!

Then, treat your injury right away with RICE:

• Rest
• Ice
• Compression
• Elevation

I hate medication as much as the next guy, but I recommend that you also take a pain reliever like Motrin. It will take the edge off and reduce swelling. Obviously, don’t take a medication that you know you’re allergic to or have had adverse side effects in the past.!

I’ve found success by also keeping the joint immobile for a day or two. I ice the injury for 10-15 minutes every hour for as long as I’m awake. Of course, you may have some timing issues if you’re at work or have to drive somewhere, but if you’re home, ice as frequently as possible.

Then, after 2 days or so, start light exercise. Get the joint moving. Do whatever you can without pain. If you experience pain, stop. Ice some more.

After 3-5 days, you should be at 80 percent or so.

Dealing with Injury while Exercising

My particular wrist pain is exacerbated mostly by anything where a weight is pressing against the palm of my hand. Things like bench presses, military presses, and the like. But interestingly, you never notice this until you’re hurt, but supporting weight in things like squats and calf presses KILL!

So I work around it. Rather than grip the bar for the duration in the squat, I wrap my arms around the bar so that my hands aren’t gripping the bar at all. For calf presses, I did donkey presses instead of standing presses.

Things like that.

You have to continue treatment for as long as the injury persists, keep the joint flexible and strong, but without causing any undue pain.

Time doesn’t heal, but it sure helps!

If you follow this advice, I am hopeful that you can keep the minor injuries that you’re going to get to a minimum and allow you to continue to workout with minimal lost time.

I just wrote an article called “Fastest Way to Build Muscle” over at Muscle-Build.com. You’ll want to check it out. It’s more “3 Pillars” stuff! You cannot get away from a proper balance of training, diet, and recovery. It’s impossible. Don’t even try it. You will undermine your own goals if you try to disprove this time-tested strategy.

If you aren’t making the gains you want, look to exercise, nutrition, and recovery, and I guarantee you’ll find the source of your poor results.

Building muscle is like any other project you might undertake in life: It’s a process that requires specific steps be taken, in the right quantities and at the right times. Plus, there needs to be time for recuperation. Muscles that are broken down by hard training must be given the nutrients and the rest intervals they need in order to not only repair themselves but to grow bigger and stronger.

There really is no other way.