Your Apple Watch says you got 5 hours again. Although you know it’s not accurate, you definitely feel it. You wonder if the effects of caffeine are just a fallacy because it’s not doing anything to you today.
You’re frustrated because you know you need sleep and you were pumped to get after it at the gym today but you’re not sure if you’ll have the pizazz to do your workout you had planned.
You still want to move but your energy is whack and the thought of lifting heavy or breathing hard crushes your soul a bit but you feel like you have to do it anyway because that’s what the plan says.
Nope.
A good training plan will move with you—you don’t have to move with it.
There’s more options than just:
sucking it up and doing it anyway
OR
not at all.
Life. It happens. Of course we’d all love to be getting 9 hours of sleep every night, crushing our nutrition and hydration like it’s our day job and feeling zen even in the most stressful moments so we can feel awesome in the gym every session, but that’s not the reality.
The reality is this: having a baseline understanding for where you’re at each day and how you can make your training fit you – not you it— is essential for success.
You just need a way to figure out what is right for you on days when things feel hard so you can still workout knowing you’re taking care of yourself but still getting in movement.
Here's some facts for ya!
If you’re training 3–5 times a week you need more sleep than inactive people. And if you’re doing high intensity training you need even more. ‘Since the role of sleep is to restore the body’s energy supply, it’s intuitive that the more high-intensity [the exercise], the more sleep you require,’ says Dr. Robert Graham, M.D., M.P.H., co-founder of FRESH Med at Physiologic NYC.
Sleep helps restore your immune and endocrine systems, which is essential for creating and spreading key hormones for repair as well as brain function.
Studies show that it’s not so much the physiological effects of lack of sleep on your performance in the gym but more to do with the perceived effort. A bad night’s sleep can make a 6/10 feel like a 10/10.
Lack of sleep can also inhibit your motivation to even get to the gym, which can contribute to a tough cycle: no gym, all-or-nothing thinking, feelings of guilt, not exercising, poor food choices, on-again-off-again cycle.
Your recovery is probably not optimal, making the next session harder to handle. When your body doesn’t recover (muscle glycogen) you’re going to be running out of steam faaaast (glycogen is one of the body’s main source of energy—especially for high intensity exercise).
I created a guide for you so you know exactly how to adjust your workout to meet you where you’re at with your sleep, stress and nutrition and still progress every single time you’re in the gym.
Grab the free.99 Your Body Baseline guide here.
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