No its not protein or water. Its not even steroids. Its good sleep.
If you are serious about gaining strength and size, you are going to have to sleep well. Muscle is built, and strength increased only when you sleep, not when you workout.; And no matter how much protein you eat and how well structured your program is, if you are not sleeping, you are not growing.
First of all, the duration of your sleep must be enough to get rid of the sleepless hyper feeling you get when you have under slept. The second is the quality of sleep you are getting.
I myself am working very hard in order to figure out how to optimize sleep. I have a few ideas I wanted to put down.
1. Different parts of the sleep cycle heal different things. It is important to focus your mind and create an environment within which the phase you want to optimize, is given the most importance in that night's sleep. As a general rule of thumb, the phase in which you dream a lot, helps recover the endocrine and immune system. The Fully relaxed and empty phase heals the musculo-skeletal system. The nervous system recovers most during REM sleep. Its possible with intention to optimize your sleep. If you feel your endocrine system is thrashed, trying to think about dreaming a lot. You will wake up next day feeling juiced. Try to relax your body completely when your muscles are sore. Think of active sleep when you want your nerves to recover. I am still trying to understand all this.
2. If you are an insomniac who wants to gain strength, stop taking sleeping pills and go through immediate intensive Psycho therapy. Artificially induced sleep does not give the same benefit of balanced sleep cycles and hence has no anabolic value.
3. A lot of improvement can be made in the quality and duration of your sleep, simply by visualizing proper sleep. It helps establish what the body needs to do, and helps your mind get there.
4. Train in your sleep. Dream about exercise, see yourself achieving your goals. It gives your mind a very powerful indication of what to do to achieve your objectives. If you dream that you are doing one arm chin ups, you will be able to control and feel the motion in your dream. This way you will know what it should feel like and you will be able to correct your mistakes much faster this way. Plus your mind body connection will improve tremendously.
Sleep is also critically important for exercise performance. Short of exercise, its the most important thing you can do for improving your strength and size.
It seems like you know what "lucid dreaming" is about. I also train in my dreams.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing to see someone else doing it; I've been feeling so alone. :)
:-) Actually lucid dreaming becomes a much easier task when you have a solid "mind training" base. I personally have spent as much time training my mind as my body. In my experience, the fundamentals of mind power are three fold- 1. Creating the Empty mind. My favorite method for this is the Zazen meditation practiced by zen disciples. This empty mind is essential for 3 things in training- focus on the movements and muscle a.k.a the total mind body connection; figuring out our weaknesses; and visualization. 2. Total awareness. My favorite for this is the standing meditation (Wu Chi) practiced by both Tai Chi and Zhang Zhuang disciples. 3. Total Relaxation. This enhances your mind body connection in a way that full tension cannot, you must master relaxing every muscle and organ. I hope this helps, very little has been written on the subject. :-) I will write a post about it later.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to that, and also I haven't found the promised entry on bridges. Maybe I just missed it :-)
ReplyDeleteNo, I just never got around to writing it. There a lot of stuff about it in the post about flexibility training. See if it helps you, I will write one on bridges and one on grip work this week. :-)
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