Sometimes, due to my work/school schedule and from general anxiety issues, I'll only get maybe 2-3 hours of sleep on certain nights if I'm lucky, and sometimes these borderline "no sleep" stretches will last for two days (which was the case for me this past Friday and Saturday nights). I maybe slept for 3 hours on Friday night and no more than 2 hours on Saturday night. My most recent gym workout was Friday afternoon.
My question is, when someone isn't able to get more than a few hours of sleep over the course of 1-2 days following a workout, are they basically sacrificing all the potential muscle/strength gains they could've yielded from the workout? Or does the person's body play "catch-up" as soon as they're able to regularly get a full night's sleep again?
Thanks
Research implies we never catch up on lost sleep. Say you pull an all-nighter and lose 8 hours of sleep. For a moment, forget about the physiological damage at play and focus on this "sleep debt' you have accrued. In the following nights, unless you sleep 16 hours, you will not make up for that lost time. Even if you stretch it across several days, you would need to sleep 10+ hours a night and consistently sleep 7 hrs a night thereafter to prevent yourself from accruing more sleep debt. Can't happen without extreme intervention.
From the moment your eyes open for the day, adenosine levels start to rise. This is your brains signal that it's time to go to sleep. It's at around your bed time that it peaks, telling you, "no more. Time for sleep". When you go to sleep, adenosine levels decline with a baseline as it's goal. Depriving yourself of the proper amount of sleep-time (7 hrs on average), does not allow those levels to return to baseline. You are putting yourself in a viscous cycle of sleep-debt that you cannot pay off.
It is when you are in your non-REM and REM states that you make these neural connections that create memories. How is your short term memory? Do you find it difficult to remember simple things? If so, it is because you haven't yet made those neural connections, storing them in your long term memory. Your short-term cache of memories are over written if those neural connections are not made. You can only store so much in your cache of memories before something has to give. These connections can sometimes days or weeks. It's the repetition of sleep that allow your brain to make these neural connections, creating a more vivid memory.
Motor function falls within these windows as well. Yes, you are not allowing yourself on many levels to fully recover - brain, body, and mind. Find a way to improve your sleep. We know so much about the role sleep plays in our lives now. It is THE BEST WORKOUT you can do for yourself.
