Elite Physique The New Science of Building a Better Body

Muscle Rules
49
How to Improve Your Sleep Quality
Some people have the available time to sleep eight or nine hours, but they toss
and turn most of the night. If you fall in that category, here are 10 strategies from
the University of California San Diego Center for Pulmonary and Sleep Medicine to
improve your sleep hygiene:
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Don’t go to bed until you are sleepy. If you aren’t sleepy, get out of bed and
do something else until you become sleepy.
Regular bedtime routines/rituals help you relax and prepare your body for bed
(reading, warm bath, etc.).
Try to get up at the same time every morning (including weekends and holidays).
Try to get a full night’s sleep every night, and avoid naps during day if possible
(if you must nap, limit to 1 h and avoid nap after 3 p.m.).
Use the bed for sleep and intimacy only; not for any other activities such as
TV, computer or phone use, etc.
Avoid caffeine if possible (if must use caffeine, avoid after lunch).
Avoid alcohol if possible (if must use alcohol, avoid right before bed).
Do not smoke cigarettes or use nicotine, ever.
Consider avoiding high-intensity exercise right before bed (extremely intense
exercise may raise cortisol, which impairs sleep).
Make sure bedroom is quiet, as dark as possible, and a little on the cool side
rather than warm (similar to a cave).
University of California San Diego Center for Pulmonary and Sleep Medicine
will significantly help (Hayashi, Motoyoshi, and Hori 2005; Waterhouse et al.
2007). The goal is to get those eight hours of sleep each day, even if it requires a
short nap after lunch.
Protein Intake
A list of rules for building muscle would not be complete without a discussion
about protein intake, as any bodybuilder can attest to. We delve deeper into the
fundamentals of nutrition in chapter 11, but for now, it’s important to cover one
rule that relates to protein. Because if you’re not getting enough of it, improvements
in body composition and performance will suffer (Campbell et al. 2018).
Let’s say you want to build a brick house. You will need plenty of bricks in a
variety of shapes and sizes to complete the task. This analogy works for building
muscle too. But instead of bricks, your muscles are constructed of 20 different
amino acids. One of those amino acids, categorized as a branched-chain amino
acid (BCAA), is leucine. It is particularly important for triggering protein synthesis,
the necessary step for building muscle (Moro et al. 2016).
At this point you might be tempted to run to your supplement store and buy
the biggest bottle of leucine pills they have. However, it would be a lesson in
futility. You also need two of the other branched-chain amino acids, valine and
isoleucine, to elicit a better response (Osmond et al. 2019). In fact, you need all
20 amino acids to provide your metabolism with the necessary building blocks