Sleep

Sleep. You all love sleep, right? Do know how good it is for you? It's really good. Sleeping right is about as important as eating right is! And eating right is more important than exercise! Exercise is pretty darn important... so eating and sleep are super important!

Anyway, back to sleep...zzzzzzz...

Correct sleep is really important: it helps to replace your hormones to the correct levels, restores energy (duh), repairs muscles (which also means builds muscles), rests the brain, and a ton of other stuff I'm not knowable in!

What's the basic idea of a healthy amount of sleep? 7-9 hours. That's a generalization. Everyone needs their own amount of sleep. Don't say 6 hours is good enough... because it likely is not. Actually the best way to sleep is to not use an alarm. That way, you wake up naturally. You have these sleep cycles lasting 45-90 minutes (I've heard a bunch of variations), and if you interrupt one of those cycles it can make you more tired, lose some of your results from your previous workout, cause you to eat more (because you need more energy), thus gain fat and probably a bunch of not-so-good stuff.

For you teens you might be thinking: "Awesome! I now can sleep in, and say it's for my good health!"

You could... but actually it's best just to 'go to bed earlier'. Yup. That's right. It's best for your health to go to bed before or around 10pm! Sorry folks!

If you're an athlete, trying to gain muscle mass, or trying to lose weight, you should try and get into the habit of going to bed early and not using your alarm! I personally just read about this, so I'm still trying to get into the habit of going to bed earlier, but it's hard when the rest of your family wants to stay up.