Sleep is the most important component of health and fitness — even more than exercise or diet. Sleep is when your body rebuilds and grows. Without it, no amount of eating right or exercise will matter. In fact, if you don’t sleep and push your diet and exercise you’ll end up stressing your body out, producing cortisol and getting less healthy instead.
How much is enough? Everyone is different. For me the number has always been 7.5 hours, almost to the minute. But lately, with the three hours of cardio on the bike every day, I’ve had to bump that up with another 2 hours of recovery “nap” soon after I ride and eat a recovery meal. This is because I’m 55. I never had to do that when I was in my 30s.
This has meant that I’ve had to sacrifice other activities for now such as streaming and coding on my own stuff in order to properly recover. But it has definitely worked.
I feel like an insect sometimes that can see the metamorphosis happening. Eventually, when my 67 kilo self emerges from this 92 kilo blob I’ll be able to move back to maintenance mode and add back some of the other activities that I want to maintain, like coding and writing. For now, every free second of my life is dedicated to regaining my health, and I mean every second, even if so many of them are spent sleeping more than I would have expected.
I like sharing this, because the extra sleep was the single biggest thing I was missing on my initial path to fitness that I started at the beginning of the year. The next biggest thing was Zwift cycling which builds muscle and and my cardio with almost zero impact to my tendons and connective tissues (unlike running, which destroyed me at this weight, damaging things on even a simple run causing days of recovery required). Adding these puzzle pieces has made the rest seem easy to complete now.