Sleep and Stress During Bikini Prep
This post is part of The Ultimate Bikini Prep Guide – check out the full guide for more!
And now we arrive at the silent killers of an otherwise glorious prepared – unresolved stress leading to sleep dysfunction which can then also dysregulate your digestive system so you’re MORE tired, MORE stressed, performing WORSE, and with STALLED progress.
If there’s one thing that ruins an otherwise fine prep, it’s stress.
So how do we manage it well? Let’s dive in.
Prep Already Shrinks Your Recovery Margin
As bodybuilders, our ‘comfort zone’ realistically is when we push boundaries, and learning when to back off is definitely something that’s considered more ‘advanced’. In the beginning you PUSH PUSH PUSH, get great results (because it’s still relatively new), and then the results slow and you often lose motivation/interest and peter out.
Advanced bodybuilders learn to focus on their recovery and pay attention to what their body really responds to – HARD ass work, then ample time to recover. But still, you’re playing close to the margins here of what your body can and can’t recover from.
And that’s in the off-season. In prep when calories drop and cardio increases, those margins become tighter still. If you aren’t well recovered in the off-season, that’s only going to get worse in prep.
The problem is that in prep, we’re ALL a little more diligent and ‘on it’, being less permissive of taking an extra day off or (of course) eating a little more here and there. Those are little things in the off-season that can help change “not enough recovery” into “enough, but barely”. In prep, we just tank.
Why Sleep Is a Performance Variable, Not a Lifestyle Preference
If you don’t sleep well, you won’t be a good bodybuilder – at least not for long. I’ve seen bodybuilders with sleep apnea who then start on a CPAP machine and suddenly they’re like an entirely new person – having their dysfunctional sleep fixed acts almost like a magic pill for gains.
Think about what you’re asking your body to do – get as lean as it possibly can get while preserving all the muscle you’ve built in the off-season. That is NOT what a body wants to do and it flies in the face of its normal biological processes of self-defense. So to do it well, you need to get all of your variables optimized. Sleep being the biggest one.
Sleep and fat loss efficiency
Studies have shown that even at the same caloric deficit, subject who get more and higher quality sleep will lose more body fat and retain more muscle. So the whole ‘calories in/calories out’ argument, while fundamentally still kinda true, is obviously not the entire picture and represents a gross oversimplification of prep as a whole.
Reduced sleep is going to spike ghrelin and reduce leptin, as discussed here:
Poor sleep also reduced insulin sensitivity which makes carbs more likely to be stored as fat instead of simply replenishing glycogen stores as they should.
Reduced sleep also elevates cortisol, another hormone we discuss in the above post that we’d like to try and keep lower.
You can see it works both ways – stress (cortisol) can impact sleep, and poor sleep can elevate cortisol, making it a circular effect.
Sleep and muscle retention
Most of your natural growth hormone production happens during sleep, so having reduced GH output is a poor indicator for keeping lean tissue in a deficit.
Also, just being tired makes your training feel more like garbage, and when you’re in a deficit and already not performing at exactly your best this opens you up to a greater risk of muscle loss.
Stress Compounds — It Doesn’t Stay in Its Lane
Your brain differentiates between different stress creating factors. It knows the difference between “my car needs new tires”, “my boss is an idiot” and “I’m in a deficit and I’m hungry”.
Your body at large and specifically your endocrine system and your metabolism, do not make that differentiation. ALL of that stuff goes into the same cortisol bucket.
Much of the physical stress of prep is unavoidable and frankly that stress is what CAUSES all the good change we want to see.
When other stressful elements pour water into that same bucket and it overflows, that’s when you have problems. So you need to do an excellent job in prep (and always, really) of managing and controlling those stress factors to the best of your ability.
Prep isn’t the problem, it’s everything else that’s largely less controllable and all feeds into the same biological mechanistic system in your body that’s the problem.
If there were a way to funnel or partition that stress into different areas, that’d be amazing. Maybe someday someone will make a pill for that. If they do, that’ll be the first supplement I might feel like endorsing.
Signs Your Load Is Exceeding Your Margin
Once again the prior post on hormonal changes will be super helpful here:
In general though, we’re looking at a few main signals:
Training performance: we want this to remain high. I’m not expecting constant PR’s throughout prep, but training that feels good and productive is the metric.
Sleep quality: if you find yourself unable to get through the night and not just to pee but with a busy head and just a general feeling of restlessness, this also points towards being underrecovered and overdoing it.
Resting heart rate: when you’re overdoing it, this will increase. An easy metric to track if you have a wearable fitness tracker, which I recommend everyone have for their prep (I prefer a ring over a watch).
Hunger and food noise higher than they should be: we know we’re likely to be hungry and wanting to watch Food Network all the time, but you’ll know if it’s unreasonable. If you find yourself thinking about food and following it up with saying “wtf is wrong with me?”, this is likely you.
Dips in motivation: this is always a classic sign of overtraining. Take a coupe days off.
How to Stabilize What’s Actually Controllable
The solution here is easy and counterintuitive. You feel like you need to push harder, but realistically you need to pull back and give your body a chance to frickin’ breathe a little bit.
Take a day or two off from lifting. Dial back the cardio minutes and/or intensity. Try and get an afternoon nap if you can (lacking sleep this isn’t a “fix” but it’s a band-aid).
Understand also that, yeah, you SHOULD be tired on prep. It’s just that the magnitude of that ‘tired’ feeling should match where you are. If you feel like death at 10 weeks out, we’ve got a problem.
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