Before you decide on what makes muscles grow, you'd better sleep on it

You work out with muscle-building weights three to four hours a day. You add weights, you increase reps, and you even increase sets. You eat like a horse, choosing wholesome and healthy food at every meal hoping to lose fat and turn it all into muscle. You look in the mirror every day and the same person always looks back at you. No change, except maybe you look a little more tired than the day before. Hey, what gives here?

One of the most overlooked aspects in muscle building is muscle resting. Even seasoned veterans, who know the importance of getting in their full workouts each week, often forget that resting muscles is equally as important as stressing muscles. And muscle rest doesn’t just come from allowing the body to be inactive— it comes from giving the body proper sleep.
Sleep is the time when the body repairs and rebuilds. Every living thing has downtime, a time to replenish, recharge and rejuvenate. Sleep brings about an increased rate of anabolism (the creating of new cells), and a decreased rate of catabolism (the breaking down of old cells). What this means to you is “more muscle.”

Maybe you have heard this around the gym, "You don't grow in the gym, you grow out of the gym." Sleep is not just muscle recovery time, but it's when your muscles repair themselves from the breakdown of the workout— and grow.

The average athlete gets between seven and eight hours of sleep at night. But, in fact, sleep requirements differ widely. If you wake up after only five or six hours of sleep, it may be as much sleep as your body needs. Most people tend to overestimate the amount of sleep they need, and underestimate the amount of sleep they got.

Some other sleep theories also describe sleep time as a dynamic time of healing and growth for organisms. Sleep research clinics have observed sleep-time behavior and electrical brainwaves. Sleep patterns show how the brain’s activity changes during a night’s sleep. Periods of REM (rapid eye movement), when dreams occur, alternate with sessions of slow-wave deep sleep, when growth hormone levels increase, changes in immune function take place and most muscle cell growth occurs.

For all of those reasons, you can see that getting enough sleep is mandatory to your goals of muscle building and fat loss. A lack of sleep can really impede your progress. A few potential problems associated with sleep deprivation are weight gain, aching muscles, faster aging, and slowed reaction time.

Short bouts of sleepless nights probably won't interfere with your gains, but long-term sleep problems will. Here are some tips: first, try to sleep only when you feel sleepy. If you take naps, nap no more than 20 minutes and not too close to bedtime. Always get up and go to bed at the same time on both weekdays and  weekends. Establish a sleep routine and stick with it. These tips won’t guarantee that you’ll be the next Mr. America, but at least you’ll sleep like a baby.