Can't sleep? Tired all the time? Read this and solve your problems.

There’s a word getting thrown around more and more in the fitness world recently. It’s been trending up and down on google for the last year or two.

What is it?

Sleep.

The single most important tool for gym junkies to ensure you get results, gains, increased endurance, better libido, better health, better sleep, better skin, better everything!

Yet no one pays any attention to it.

Do you get 8 hours of sleep every night? If the answer was no, which for most people it is, you don’t have any business training 5x a week.

This brings us to boldstep 1bold, which is…wait for it….8 hours of sleep!

I don’t know a single adult who doesn’t love sleep. For a lot of people, it’s easy to get their 8 hours a night…then they have kids, and more responsibility at work, and the hours just seem to shrink.

yawn

So there’s two parts to this. If you absolutely cannot get 8 hours a night, which I’ll bet you can if you actually try; then you’ll need to A – decrease exercise or B – have multiple naps.

If you’re not already exercising, and you would like to get into the gym due to how unhappy you are with your appearance/inner feeling, then I can guarantee you’ll be more motivated on 8 hours of sleep a night.

Step 2 is a regular bed time.

We all make our kids go to sleep at the same time each night. Most parents do it to ensure they have a restful sleep and because they understand the need for kids to get a full nights sleep.

Adults, for some reason, fall out of that discipline for themselves. One of the biggest causes of mild insomnia, in my eyes, is the lack of discipline that people have for putting themselves to bed.

If you stay up until 2am to watch the soccer regularly, you can bet that will affect your sleep. If you go out each weekend and get drunk (the alcohol will ensure you sleep terribly) you’ll throw out your sleep pattern for the next few days.

This is all about discipline, which is important coming into step 3.

Step 3 is making sure your bedroom is a bedroom.

"Wait...but my bedroom is a bedroom...duh?”

I say it because if there is a TV in your bedroom, it’s a TV room. If you have a desk with your computer on it that you do work on before bed, it’s an office/study.

This isn’t just because I want you to focus on sleeping, its because of the harmful blue light emitted from the screens of laptops, computers, TV’s, Ipads, and any other backlit device. In fact, Harvard Health has found at night, light throws the body’s biological clock—the circadian rhythm—out of whack. Sleep suffers. Worse, research shows that it may contribute to the causation of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. [1]

You see your brain can register there is light in the room despite you having your eyes closed (pretty smart our old brains!). This affects your ability to sleep into the restorative sleep we all need to recover from a long stressful day.

Add onto this blue light can affect your sleep if watched up to an hour before sleep, so there goes watching TV shows to put yourself to sleep at night.

I have two recommendations for fixing this.

1 - No electronics an hour before bed, learn to love reading, it’s better for you.
2 - If you must watch electronics, get f.lux for your laptop and the equivalent for your phone. F.lux is a bluelight blocker. It will make your laptop look red on the screen, but you get used to it and you will fall asleep quicker.

Step 4 is supplements.

There are plenty of gym supplements on the markets designed to help people sleep. I’ve tried a few of them in the past.

The best one to ensure a restful sleep with supplements is the combination of magnesium, zinc, and vitamin B6. You’ll find it under the name of ZMA.

This combination is completely natural, and helps your brain and nervous system to calm, ensuring a nice restful mind as you sleep of to sleep.

If you need something a bit stronger, as you actually struggle with sleep, I can recommend melatonin. I wouldn’t recommend taking it for a long period of time, as there is not a lot of research about the drug, but when it is combined with 5-HTP which you can buy from a chemist, it is very effective.

Put it all together!

If you work on these three steps you can ensure you will be on the road to happy, restful sleep. I see to many people struggle throughout the day due to poor sleeping habits. If you’re an exercise enthusiast, this runs true even more so.

[1] http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark-side

*NOTE - for verification of this post - I also own resilience fitness on wordpress - https://resiliencefit.wordpress.com/2016/12/08/im-now-on-steemit/