If you're doing body building and lifting weights, sleep is extremely important if not one of the most important along with nutrition. If you're training hard, eating well and not getting adequate amount of sleep every night, you're hampering your body building efforts. Sleep is where your body recovers from your workouts and where your muscles grow. You don't get bigger muscles when you're training or when you're eating but when you're resting. So always remember this.

Not paying proper attention to sleep will definitely impede your body building progress. Also, lack of sleep will put your body in poor form and as a result, your training suffers. You won't be as performant. You get exhausted quite fast. Your endurance and stamina go down. You will lift lighter weights, doing fewer sets than recommended, unable to reach the number of repeats per set. So to sum it all, your performance will be negatively affected as a whole.

Not only does lack of sleep affects your training but it will lower your appetite too since your body is tired and in bad shape and your immune system weaker. Just a few days of inadequate amount of sleep might not be too serious but if it's for a prolonged period, then your body will start reaping the negative effects.

If you're training hard regularly and consistently and eating the right kinds of food but not getting significant gains, then most probably, you're not getting adequate amount of rest and sleep for proper growth and muscle gains. Pay attention to these 3 which are Sleep, Training, Nutrition and you should achieve your body building goals.

About the author

Jean Lam is the webmaster of Body Building Resource which provides articles on weight training, nutrition and fitness, body building book and DVDs.