I need more sleep. How much more? Enough to let me sleep without setting an alarm, probably 8 to 9 hours during heavy training. The extra sleep will help me recover from the heavy training I have been doing recently. Recovery is good, its better than training sometimes.

Everyone says sleep is good for recovery, but how? If you asked that question, pat yourself on the back; I know I just did. 8 to 9 hours of sleep helps me recover by providing a period of time where my body can focus on digestion of food and tissue repair. Because I’m not doing anything else, my body takes the time to digest what was probably a massive pre-sleep meal. In addition to this digestion, all kinds of hormones are relsead into my bloodstream to facilitate the recovery of my muscle and tendon tissue that was damaged during recent training sessions.

Perhaps the most underrated facet of sleep is its ability to facilitate emotional recovery. Ya, emotions, I know you and I don’t have them because we are big bad weightlifters, but emotional energy plays a large part in lifting near maximal weights. Hopefully I will be able to due a more in-depth post on this later; but the short story is that all of the near max and maximal lifting that you are doing requires a huge emotional effort, and you need to let your body recover from this psychological strain so that you can keep throwing up the big weights. Sleep helps your nervous system tissue recover from stress. Easing the body into a relaxed state can help your performance and keep you sane during hard training.

I like to train hard, so I need to dedicate myself to getting more sleep so that I can recover and train harder. It would be nice to find a way to add more hours to the day so that I won’t need to sacrifice somethings to get that sleep, but you can’t win all the time.

As it is starting to get colder in some parts of the country, I think it’s appropriate to talk about gym apparel again. Warmup pants are a necessity when the temperature goes down. Why? I always wear mine to protect my knees. A warm knee is a happy knee, a happy knee is a safe knee. As the temperature outside goes down, longer warmups are needed in order to be safe while lifting heavy weights. The warmer your knee is to begin with, the less likely you will be to hurt it when you forget that your warmup needs to be longer now that it’s cold outside.

What does wearing warmup pants do? It keeps your knee warm, of course. When the knee joint is kept warm it is more pliable and therefore less likely to tear under load. Pants, in addition to knee sleeves/wraps, are crucial in keeping your knees warm, safe, and happy. Even if the temeprature inside the gym is appropriate, even a short walk to the gym will probably be enough to make your knees cold enough to be injured. Don’t be that guy, wear your warmup pants and keep your knees safe. I usually keep my pants on for most of the workout just to insure that my knees stay safe and warm.