Getting regular and good quality sleep is essential for fat loss, hypertrophy (building muscle) and to enable your body to recovery from the daily stresses of life (work, exercise, arguing with partners!, etc…)
If you don’t get enough of the right kinds of sleep (deep sleep, REM, dreaming states etc), your ability to achieve your goals will be seriously impaired. A quick search on Google Scholar would bring up literally hundreds of studies on sleep - but we all know sleep is good for us, right?
A few weeks ago, my girlfriend (who is much more of a geek than she cares to let on) found this iPhone app that you might find useful.
As the developers say: The Sleep Cycle alarm clock is a bio-alarm clock that analyzes your sleep patterns and wakes you when you are in the lightest sleep phase. It works by monitoring your movement throughout the night, as you wake, turnover, or twitch in states of dreaming.
Which is great, but one of the other features I really like is the ability to monitor your sleep over a longer course of time - every night you get a graph of your sleep phases and how many hours you actually sleep.
I have been playing with it for a little while and I have just started asking some clients to start emailing their charts through.
Well worth the £0.59p!
