By Dr Sybille Buchwald-Werner, Pharmacist & PhD in pharmaceutical chemistry
Training hard but not seeing the results you want? Rest and recovery are critical factors in any successful training program. It’s often overlooked but both are just as essential as the right exercise program and the right diet when it comes to improving your performance and reaching your goals.
The body repairs and strengthens itself in the time between workouts. Inadequate rest can weaken even the strongest athletes.
Recovery between the training sessions is essential to give the body enough time to reap the benefits of training, for muscle growth, and to be ready for the next training session without soreness. Recovery allows the body to replenish energy stores and repair damaged tissue. Soreness is a result of oxidative stress and inflammatory processes triggered by exhaustive exercise.
For optimal recovery, the right amount and quality of sleep are often overlooked.
Sleep is important to all of us, and especially to athletes or anyone training to improve their body composition. It is the combination of exercise, recovery, and adaptation that takes the athlete to a higher level of fitness. During sleep, energy demand is lowered, allowing the body to use the available energy to efficiently build muscles and to execute muscular recovery and regeneration. During sleep, the body produces human growth hormone (HGH) which is essential for the promotion of muscle growth, maintenance, and repair of muscles fibres and improvement of fat metabolism. Too much stress, resulting in elevated cortisol levels during the night, can block the release of the human growth hormone, negatively effecting muscle recovery and growth.
Consistently getting inadequate sleep can lead to increased cortisol levels (a stress hormone), decreased HGH used in tissue repair, and decreased glycogen synthesis.
Those suffering from sleep deprivation will experience a number of negative physiological and mental effects, including injuries, reduced immune defence, weight gain, mood disturbance, increased anxiety, lack of concentration, and disturbed brain-muscle connection leading to low motoric control. In short, less sleep may cause fatigue, low muscle strength, and poor mental focus during training. All factors that put training goals at risk. Athletes often experience difficulties falling asleep after late evening training sessions. Despite physical exhaustion, the body is still stimulated by training and they feel mentally awake with thoughts running through their heads. Physical training also stresses the body, increasing cortisol levels, and consequently hindering our ability to fall asleep easily. Furthermore, athletes are high-performers, living in a fast-paced environment, always thinking about how to be faster, better, and how to get ahead. It is often difficult for them to slow down, unwind, and relax.
There is only one solution to this dilemma, cortisol needs to be balanced to promote restorative sleep. Controlling cortisol levels helps us to fall asleep and supports healthy sleep in multiple ways.
Bluenesse®, a clinically proven ingredient in HydroxyBurn® Sleep Rx, helps to cope with stress by reducing cortisol levels. Intake of Bluenesse® prior to sleep will support calmness and the ability to fall asleep. During sleep, reduced cortisol levels by Bluenesse® enables the release of the human growth hormone (HGH) which is essential for muscle repair and muscle growth-related to training adaptation. This activity is disturbed by inflammation and free radicals produced during exhausting exercise. The reduction of cortisol and release of the human growth hormone are only two factors in enabling sufficient recovery. Equally important is the activation of the body’s antioxidative defence system to provide anti-inflammatory support. Both can be delivered by Recoverben®, another clinically proven ingredient in HydroxyBurn®Sleep Rx. Recoverben® improves the activity of the glutathione peroxidase (GPx), an enzyme active in the body’s antioxidative defence system. GPx helps to deplete free radicals during the night so that they cannot catabolise muscles tissue or cause fatigue. Furthermore, Recoverben® counteracts inflammation by inhibiting COX-2 (cyclooxygenases) providing sustained muscle recovery and paving the way for training adaptations – muscle growth and enhanced performance.
The effectiveness of Recoverben® was confirmed by a clinical study in athletes, whereby Recoverben® reduced exercise-related muscle strength loss by 50% and provided full recovery after 48 hours.HydroxyBurn® Sleep Rx supports quality of sleep and body recovery with clinically proven dosages of both Bluenesse® and Recoverben®, providing a calm, restful sleep while improving metabolic processes, and both physical and mental recovery. HydroxyBurn® Sleep Rx calms the mind and soothes the nerves, so athletes sleep better via lower levels of anxiety, reduced muscle pain, and improved recovery time.
✓ Bluenesse® is an innovative, exclusive lemon balm extract, Melissa officinalis (L.) which helps you to fall asleep and supports metabolic processing for mental and physical recovery during sleep.
✓ Bluenesse® is clinically proven to reduce cortisol levels - a stress factor that hinders us to unwind and to go easily falling asleep.
✓ Bluenesse® balances cortisol level, which plays an important role in blood sugar (glucose) levels, supports healthy sleep.
✓ Bluenesse® guarantees highest, consistent, and defined quality, and has been tested for banned substances by LGC's world-class sports anti-doping laboratory. It is scientifically proven, IP protected, and safe.
✓ Recoverben® is an innovative, exclusive lemon verbena extract, Aloysia citriodora, which improves muscle strengths and recovery after exercise and thereby supports physical performance, motivation for sports and may prevent overtraining.
✓ Recoverben® guarantees highest, consistent, and defined quality. It is scientifically proven, safe, free of any additives and has been tested for banned substances by LGC's world-class sports anti-doping laboratory.
Find clinical levels of Bluenesse® in BSc HydroxyBurn®Sleep.
