Today Brock and Debbie discuss the importance of sleep for fitness and weight control. Both agree that there isn't nearly enough attention paid to sleeping as an important component of a healthy lifestyle.

Sleep is a very important part of training, fitness, weight management, and life in general. Unfortunately, it tends to be the first thing we sacrifice to achieve other goals. As part of our go-go lifestyle, we’ll always cut into our sleep time in order to get more time to do whatever is our top priority.

An important aspect of sleep that is often forgotten is the importance of sleep for weight management.  Sleep affects the levels of hormones in your body, and those are the hormones that control when you feel hungry or full. See the WebMD article about hunger hormones and sleep here. For an article on the way that sleep affects metabolism, go here.

Sleep is also important for a wide variety of other reasons. The brain has a number of different kinds of brainwaves that are active, and only through sleep are some of the most beneficial types of activity activated. See a basic overview of brainwaves here.

In the end, Brock points out that one of the most important things about improving your sleeping is that when you find yourself lying awake, don’t get stressed about sleeping. Being stressed is certain to keep you awake. So while sleeping is definitely something worth thinking about, avoid letting it give you stress since that will almost certainly lead to even less sleep.