Sleep: The Most Underrated Tool for Fat Loss & Health

Foreign. What's going on, everybody? And welcome back to the Built With Science podcast. You're here with your host, as always, of course, me, myself and I, that is Max Coleman, AKA Coleman et al. And sitting directly in front of me, only a thousand miles away, is the one and only Daniel Plotkin, AKA didn't have time to think of a nickname, Plotkin, AKA Danny Boy. And today we're going to talk about something that we've actually talked quite a bit about on the podcast, but never so directly, and, and that is sleep. We're going to talk about why sleep is so important. We're going to talk about why it's important in the context of body composition, muscle growth and fat loss. And then we're going to give you some practical takeaways on how you can actually improve your sleep. And unlike other podcasts we've done in the past, we're going to try our damn best to keep this around 10 to 30 minutes, hopefully somewhere within that range. And if you like these shorter episodes, please feel free to reach out to us and let us know. And if you missed the old long form episodes, let us know as well. Right. We want your input here. Okay, so let's first talk about why sleep is so important for health in general. Why is sleep important at baseline? Danny Boy, let's hear it.

Yeah, so it just seems like something that's so evolutionarily incorrect for us to do, which is just be completely incapacitated for a good chunk of the day, but animals continue to do it, probably is pretty important. And there's obviously a whole bunch of physiological stuff that goes on in terms of repair and allowing all of those, you know, bad congregated proteins to get broken up or cycled, all those, all that juicy stuff that's physiologically relevant, but just from a super high level standpoint, you, it's obvious that it's super important if we've continued to prioritize it evolutionarily and then from direct evidence, you can see that there's just tons of good outcomes that happen when you get appropriate amounts of sleep. So less heart disease, less cancer, less neurological disease, and pretty much you name makes it better if you get adequate sleep. And very few areas that I can think of are not negatively impacted by substantial decrements in sleep. And if you spend a whole lot of time not sleeping, you can actually just go absolutely crazy. So, yeah, sleep is important.

Yeah, I mean, not, not to mention, like, not you kind of pointed this. But we have swaths of epidemiological research, basically Showing that reducing the amount of sleep that you get leads to just about everything bad that you can possibly think increase. And even within the context of muscle growth, which will be a nice little segue into what we're actually talking about today, which is especially within adolescence, you see getting less than 8, at least according to one survey study, Getting less than 8 hours of sleep led to like a 1.7 times increase in the likelihood of incurring an injury over the course of the period that they were analyzing there. You also see with respect to body composition, increased ghrelin concentrations in inadequate sleep, you see an increased rate of cravings and stuff like that. And not to mention, we, outside of just the theoretical and not exactly direct studies looking at sleep and muscle growth and body composition, Right? Not to mention we also have performance studies where they don't deprive individuals of sleep, but they just teach them how to sleep more or teach them about ways of improving sleep hygiene and sleep quality and stuff like that. And increasing sleep tends to lead to better performance outcomes. Things like, funny enough, shooting accuracy within basketball players, of course, sprint times, jump heights, all that kind of good stuff. Right. However, let's talk about the stuff that we actually care about here at Built With Science, which is how sleep can actually impact gains and let's say losses as well. The gains that we care about, I. E. Muscle and the losses that we care about, I. E. Fat. So why don't you go ahead and walk us through those little bits of research that we have looking at those directly.

Yeah, so we don't have a ton of studies on this. And unfortunately the. The majority of studies are not in the context of training, so not in the context of lifting weights. But we do have a few studies that are still very relevant. And the reason why we don't have a whole lot of studies on this should be somewhat obvious. It's not super ethical to sleep deprived people, especially for longer periods of time, because of all the things we mentioned in the beginning of the podcast, it's not very healthy for you, but we do have evidence on this. Obviously it's an important topic to study, so it is studied. They probably get paid very well. So one piece of evidence that I want to go over that's probably the most starkly in favor of getting adequate sleep is I'm going to butcher this name. So of course, if you are from whichever country this fellow is from, let us know. Ned Del Sheva and colleagues, 2010 ran a study across the design. So the same participants did both conditions eight hours versus five hours of sleep for two weeks and they were in a chloride deficit. And long story short, they, the group that or the condition that slept for five hours retained more fat mass, so they lost less fat and they lost more muscle mass. So if you want to be fatter and less muscular, then get five hours of sleep consistently. And if we want to put exact numbers on it, the group that or the condition that slept five hours gained one little or lost 1.4kg in the eight hour group and lost only 0.6kg in the five hour group. And then when it came to lean mass, the group that slept for eight hours lost 1.5 kg while the group that slept for five hours or the condition that slept for five hours lost 2.4 kg. So lost a lot more muscle, gained a lot more fat. So pretty starkly in favor of, of sleeping adequately or sleeping eight hours versus five hours.

Yeah, I don't know if you touched on the fact that these are the same groups of people. Like, I don't know if you said crossover design and maybe I missed it, but these are, they had like a two week washout period. So they came into this. It's a, these are. So these studies we don't get a lot of in our field, unfortunately, because they're very expensive, they're very time consuming for both the researchers and the participants. But these individuals come into a lab and they don't leave for 14 days. They stay within the research facility, they sleep there, all of their meals are handed to them. They are. And not only that, but I think if I remember correctly, they weighed the amount of food that if they didn't finish the meal, they weighed the food that they did not finish to know exactly how many calories these individuals were consuming. And it's even worse than what Danny Boy was outlining because it's five and a half hours of sleep, not five. So even like that extra 30 minutes, like it doesn't sound like much, but five and a half hours is still, that's not an unreasonable amount of sleep deprivation is what I'm getting at. Like there are a lot of people out there who do get five and a half to six hours of sleep every night. And clearly that can have a big impact on weight loss and stuff like that. It's also important to note that these individuals weren't training. So just because they weren't training doesn't mean that these findings are worthless to us. Uh, but we would expect the same trend, meaning if you're training, we probably would expect a little Bit more fat loss and a little bit more lean tissue retention in both groups, but the directionality would still be the same. Meaning that at least theoretically, the group that was sleeping five and a half hours would still lose more fat or, sorry, still lose more lean tissue than they would had they been sleeping for eight and a half. But it's just a couple of important things to mention on which segues, well, perfectly into another study by another. Another researcher whose name we probably can't pronounce.

Yes. So again, butchering the name Jabek 2020. And this was a really sort of ecologically valid design where they had both groups do the same full body resistance training program for 10 weeks. And one group was just given education on sleep hygiene, how to go about getting adequate sleep, and the other group was just not taught anything about sleep hygiene. They just did the resistance training program for 10 weeks. And as you were pointing out, obviously in the context of resistance training, you wouldn't expect muscle losses, but they did gain less lean tissue. And this wasn't statistically significant, but it did directionally look like it was pointing in to the fact that more muscle was gained in the sleep hygiene group, with 1.7kg of muscle gained in the sleep hygiene group and only 1.3kg of muscle gained in the non sleep hygiene group. But when it came to fat mass lost, it was a pretty stark difference. So 1.8kg lost in the sleep hygiene group, while only 0.8kg were lost in the non sleep hygiene group. So just teaching people how to sleep well had a pretty stark benefit on fat loss and some benefit on lean mass gain. So I think that's not the strongest piece of evidence because of the fact that, you know, it's sleep hygiene alone and they didn't do any sort of fancy measures of actual sleep quality or anything like that. But it is a very good ecologically valid study where if you just teach people, you know, relatively simple things about how to get better sleep and how to get consistent sleep, you could actually make a very meaningful difference in their.

Body composition without having to change much at all. So, like one, obviously teaching the importance of sleep, which, you know, you and I are trying to do as we speak, but also then going into how you can actually improve your sleep, which maybe we should touch on that as well. Golly, this has been the most perfectly segued podcast that we've ever done. I think. No hard, abrupt. Okay, now we're talking about this, but let's talk about the way. So now that we have acknowledged the importance of sleep, which to be fair, I think this is getting better within the lifting community. I think that a lot of people are aware of the importance of sleep with respect to obviously to health. I think that everyone maybe, you know, I'm in my ivory tower of, of academia and I just assume people know the, the importance of sleep, but it seems to be something that is pretty universally agreed on within the community, which is great. It's. It's nice to see some uniform ality with respect to the effect of X on, on health. Because like, I don't know, I'm just trying not to go on a tangent so we can keep the podcast short. Nevermind. But anyway, let's talk about how we can actually improve sleep quality and sleep hygiene. And we'll just go. To be clear, we're not really going to go through this list in any hierarchical, hierarchical, hierarchical, hierarchical. Thank you. Order, meaning we're not going to start with the most important, end with the least important or anything like that. That being said, we will start with the most important, but anything after that probably won't have a big impact like the order after that. It's not, not super important.

So by the way guys, if you're like me and want to maximize the time and effort you spend in the gym and with your diet, then you need to use a plan backed by the latest science. We have got an army of over 100 who are getting into the best shape of their lives using our science based training and nutrition methods. To join today, just head over to builtwithscience.com and take my quiz to find the best program for you and your body.

Basically number one is prioritizing sleep, which obviously sounds silly and like kind of like a wow, why did we listen for 12 minutes just to hear them say prioritize sleep. But this kind of means like try your best because seemingly one of the most important things for sleep quality is going to sleep and waking up at similar times. And the thing that sucks about that is that that's of all the things that we're going to say probably the hardest thing to do from like an actual real world standpoint because at like you want to stay up later on the weekends watching UFC fights or as opposed to having to go to bed earlier on the weekdays. But avoiding doing things like that probably is the best thing that you can do for your sleep health. Another incredible thing you can do. And this one kind of, unfortunately this one is not one I have to spend a lot of time on because most of the people listening to the Built with Science podcast probably already exercise. But getting regular exercise can also have a big impact on sleep quality. And the cool thing about this is that it's kind of a positive feedback loop of more sleep equals better exercise performance, and more exercise equals better sleep. And then they just kind of feed into each other really well. Right. Obviously, this. This is what I mean by the things that are easier. Right. You guys are probably already exercising. It's very simple to turn the temperature in your room down. So having a cold, dark and quiet room can have a really big impact on the quality of sleep that you're getting. I'm getting tired of hearing my own voice. Any boy. Would you like to talk about some other ways in which you can improve your sleep quality?

Yep. So I think, yeah, cool place. Obviously, there's some decent evidence on that showing that higher temperatures lower sleep quality, even if the sleep duration is the same. So, definitely, I think that one's an important one to underline. But these, I think some of them are going to get more into the territory of experiment with them.

Right.

But don't necessarily go too crazy in terms of prioritizing them over other really important factors like the ones we mentioned. Sleep consistency, cool, dark place, I think are two really important ones. But these can be a game changer for a lot of people, so it's not something to dismiss entirely. So one that I really like is just having a separate room for working, or at least not working on the bed that I sleep on. So oftentimes, just separating mentally the area where you're going to unwind or sleep from where you work can have a very meaningful impact on just being able to shut off. Especially for people that tend to, you know, think or overthink and just run through their to do list and all the things that they're stressed about having that silo where they can just know this is where I shut off, can be really important. So I think just experimenting with that at least, and trying to separate those two, especially if you're having any trouble, I think is a good idea. Getting sunlight in the morning, so getting just light in general, but sunlight typically, like daylight, is even more important than a lot of indoor light because of just the intensity of the light is important for just maintaining an appropriate circadian rhythm. So this is one that I've felt the difference on where I go out of my way to take a walk in the morning. And I think there is a decent amount of evidence that the light suppresses melatonin and allows you to sort of stop that Sort of early lethargic, sleep onset type of feeling. So I think that one arguably is more important than what I'll mention now, which is limiting blue light later in the day. I think that there is some evidence, most of it is neutral to positive for limiting blue light, but there is some over emphasizing of that with glasses and all kinds of gadgets that force you to be too anal about it when really it's more about just not being, not going crazy and just like going well out of your way to, you know, going to one of those bathrooms with crazy little fluorescent lights.

Yeah, I think that. So there are ways that you can do this where it's not like. Yeah, I for one, the, it's funny, you're talking about the light thing. And the first thing I think of is like the Hubermans and the other like health gurus out there saying that sunlight exposure is the single most important thing you could possibly do for not only your sleep quality, but your health in general. And no doubt that that is definitely an overplayed thing. That's the, this is the thing that sucks about charlatans is the little grains of truth that they speckle into their mostly sayings. Right? It's not me picking on Huberman or anything, but just people in like health gurus in general. Right. So clearly light exposure is very important or is important. But the degree to which it's important on your health and on your sleep is not nearly to the extent that people are saying. But that doesn't mean that we should just write it off completely. Right? And there are ways. And yes, there are a lot of silly people out there who it's, they have an alarm on their phone for 6pm they put their blue light glasses on and stuff like that. If that's something that you want to do, be my guest. There's, there's not a whole lot of convincing evidence that blue light is super bad for sleep in general. And there's even less evidence that wearing blue light reflective glasses can improve sleep quality and stuff like that. Right? So if it's something that doesn't bother you, it doesn't make you feel like you're being hyper anal about something, then yeah, do it. It's not going to hurt you. There's a lot of programs you can get on your phone and on your computers, like Flux for instance, that just automatically turn blue light off at a certain time in the day. And those things can be really helpful or you know, they can help without really making it feel like there's another thing for you to have to consider or worry about. But again, after the prioritizing consistent bedtime and consistent waking cycle and exercising regularly, the rest of these things just aren't of a massive importance by any means. Sorry Danny boy, I didn't mean to. To take over there.

It's all good. I think actually the next one. So we were talking about relative importance. I think caffeine too close to bed is actually something that could have a meaningful impact on sleep quality and even sleep on set. So trying to, I mean honestly based on the available evidence, it's even earlier than I thought. So probably even early afternoon ish, you know, 11 or so as the last.

Eight hours before bed seems to be the common heuristic. Is that kind of where you're.

Yeah.

Is that when you fall in as well?

Okay, yeah, maybe even more based on some of the. But yeah, eight or nine hours seems to be around where people tend to fall and obviously you can play with this yourself and see how it affects you. But I think something that's not on people's radar often is just how long the half life is.

So that's exactly what I was going to get. The, the inter. Individual variation between people in the half life of caffeine. Like you could be someone that drinks a, a one cup of coffee at 8:00am and the half life of that caffeine can be many, many, many hours. So that by the time you're going to bed you still have like a decent bit of caffeine in your system. So there will be a lot of self experimentation that has to go in with the whole caffeine thing I feel like. And maybe that's just an incorrect understanding of the whole game.

But yeah, I know that there's some genes that were implicated and then later on didn't have as much of an impact as once thought. But I think just as a general rule it's probably a good idea to play around with it and try to be earlier because there's not a distinct downside if you can tolerate it just from, you know, not wanting to off yourself kind of deal later in the day without. Without caffeine in Roblox.

It's an important qualifier there. Not to mention the amount of money you'll save not buying six Celsiuses a day, which has become a quite the financial toll on. On me personally.

Yeah. So with all that being said, try your best to limit caffeine later in the day, but results may vary. So if you're worried about an hour or two, don't be too, too worried about it. I typically stop right around the sort of 1pm mark for myself and I think I'm, I'm doing all right. But there are some, there is some evidence and there are some proponents that suggest that going earlier may matter. So this is just something to experiment with. But definitely don't, you know, slam 300 milligrams of pre workout at like 8pm.

And when you get off work at 5pm because that is, that is like a garment thing is that people will like right before they get off work, slam some pre, go to the gym and then at 9pm they still have 150 milligrams of caffeine circulating their system, what have you.

Yeah, exactly.

Speaking of limitations, are there other things that we should limit prior to bed?

That was a great segue. Yes. I would say alcohol is probably the next most abused close to bed. So often people work out later take a copious amounts of pre workout. By the same token, often people unwind with alcohol and they believe that it helps with their sleep because it does actually increase sleep onset but it reduces the quality of sleep pretty substantially. So even though you feel like oh, you know, have a couple of glasses of wine before bed and then that'll be great for, you know, me falling asleep, it actually does substantially negatively impact the quality of your sleep. So if you can avoid it and it doesn't net increase your quality of life so much to have that alcohol later in the day, I would definitely just consider that as strategy.

And if alcohol does dramatically and substantially improve your, you know, feelings of self and happiness, seek help outside of what we're capable of giving. Within the Bill with Science podcast of.

Course, you just always see in the comment section of something like this where it's like I have my two glasses of wine per night and it's literally the best part of my day. And you dummies that are telling us to ruin my happiness.

Yeah, exactly.

So I put that little caveat there so that way nobody I want to be liked as an individual. So you know, I just caveat everything so that So I think that the.

The best you know, to get your to have your cake and eat it too with this respective if you need to have that alcohol before bed, just take Xanax with it and that should improve not only sleep onset but the quality of sleep that you're getting as well. I would just make sure that you're at least drinking three bottles of wine if you're going to have any amount of Xanax because you need a substantial amount of both before they actually start working well with one another. This is satire, not advice. Absolutely important that I mentioned that. I'm so sorry. One thing that we didn't have on the list of things to limit large meals before bed. It's probably not a good idea either. Now, I'm not. I'm not not telling you that you have to cut off eating entirely before, after 8pm or whatever it may be, but eating large meals, especially large meals with spice. Like, if. If you're. If you like spicier foods, it's definitely worth limiting that with respect to, like how. With. Within a couple of hours of going to bed, uh, just because that can increase pretty substantially. Increase the, like midnight waking. I don't remember. I don't remember what they call it in, in the literature, but basically you're gonna wake up. Sleep disturbances will increase if you. If you. And whether that's due to acid reflux or. Or just simply discomfort of the gut, like, probably best to avoid large meals before bed. Not a huge importance, but definitely something worth mentioning.

Yep, that's a good point. And basically in relation to consistent sleep time, I think one thing that's really important to mention is not taking late naps. So often. When you nap late, you can't get to sleep at the same time that you would have otherwise got to sleep. So that could obviously affect one both just the regular time that you go to sleep, but also the quality and onset of sleep when you actually decide to get to bed. So if you do decide to nap, probably keep them pretty short and also a lot earlier in the day. I personally don't love to nap. I feel like it does get in the way of sleep. But there are some days, especially where I get less sleep, where I feel like, you know, an early nap might be able to help on like a weekend if, like, let's say Friday was a late night or something.

Especially if the nap doesn't last like multiple hours or anything like that. It's not like absolutely anything crazy. That could definitely disrupt how much you can sleep later that night.

Exactly. Yep.

And then. Wow. Jinx. Handsome. Finally, just like a quick gloss over one. I want to say that Danny Boy and I, when it comes to expertise outside of muscle growth, we're not your guys. So this is by no means medical advice or anything like that, but I just wanted to throw that out there. But finally, if you're doing all of these things, if you're prioritizing going to sleep and waking at similar times, you're exercising, you're sleeping in a cold, dark room, you're limiting caffeine intake and you're still having trouble with sleep. So you are someone who suffers from insomnia or other sleep related issues. Have those addressed. Get a sleep study done. See your doctor, your general physician, see if you can have that figured out right, because you can do all of the things correctly. But if your body doesn't want to go to sleep, there's not a whole lot you can do about that. And I don't, I don't really have much more to say about that outside of seek medical attention. But if you have anything you want to add to that. Danny Boyd, please.

Yeah, it's something that I wanted to mention because I feel like, especially in just a prideful sense, I think people don't want to seek medical help. But even more than medical help seeking, I think people almost feel like their quality of life will be reduced when they have medical devices during their sleep because either their partner will be not so happy with that or they just don't want to deal with how cumbersome it is. But if you're having symptoms of sleep apnea and you're waking up in the middle of the night having trouble breathing, that's not normal, of course. So people, especially when they make that leap, often see tremendous increases in quality of life and even gains, as we mentioned earlier. And that's obviously a direct correlate with quality of life.

So not to mention. Yeah, well that's the only measure of quality of life as far as I'm concerned. Not to mention CPAPs are a lot quieter and a lot less invasive than they once were. I know that oftentimes we have this idea of this like massive sleep mask, huge loud noises that are louder than snoring ever would be. But CPAPs have come a long way just in the last 10 years or so. So it's totally. If I know that it can be kind of an intimidating thing having a sleep mask on while you're sleeping. But it's not what it once was. And it's definitely something that would probably net improve life. Quality of your life. Quality of life as opposed to acting as a detriment. That's all I wanted to say for sure.

Yeah. So that's why I wanted to touch on it. Just so people aren't afraid to seek help if they need it and they are having symptoms. If obviously you're on that perma bulk life and here you're having trouble sleeping, there's no shame in obviously having a medical device, even until you. You get leaner or whatever, do you. You don't have to use it indefinitely as well. So something to throw out there. People shouldn't be ashamed of getting better sleep with some medical aid.

Beautifully said. All right, is there anything you want to say before we do a quick little outro?

I don't think so. Thank you.

Cool. If I do this outro in less than a minute and six seconds, we. We cut. We kept it under 30 minutes, which I'm proud of us any boy. So let's spend the next hour talking about how proud I am of our ability to keep the podcast short, as always. Well, let's do a quick little outro. So, obviously, sleep is incredibly important for health. We kind of touched on why. There's a bunch of various reasons for that. And then in conjunction with how important sleep is for health, there's also direct research showing just how important it is for not only athletic performance, but, but for the things that we really, really care about, which is body composition, getting jacked, staying lean, stuff like that. Right. And then finally, if you want to improve your sleep, the most important thing you can do is try to prioritize sleep in general. Trying to go to bed and wake up at similar times. Limit light in the evening, kind of increase light exposure in the mornings. Exercise regularly. Sleep in a cold, dark, cold room. If you need medical attention with respect to sleep, definitely seek it out. Definitely. If you're someone who does suffer from sleep issues, it's. It's going to have a huge, most likely to have a huge impact on. On your quality of life. All right, as always, thank you so much for listening to the Built With Science podcast. Please let us know if you like this new format of a shorter episode versus longer. If there's something that you want us to cover that we've yet to discuss, please feel free to reach out to us at Built With Science on Instagram. And as always, thank you so much for listening PE.