Importance of sleep and exercise!

Hey everyone! So, I'm a college student and LOVE weightlifting/body building. I workout MINIMUM 5 days a week and usually turns out to be 7 days a week. I've created this post to stress the importance of nutrition, sleep, and stress on the body while going to school.

I've gone from a very obese 230 pounds about 4 years ago to a now trim 185 pounds. I've done A LOT of trial and error and have learned pretty well how things work. During the 1-2 month breaks from school, I usually go crazy at the gym. When I get back to school, it's time to take care of business and bodybuilding isn't part of the education business for me. So here's a few tips for the average college student that love working out and weightlifting!

Light exercise:

If you workout 1-3 days a week, there isn't much need to watch your diet and sleep down to the point. Even if you're lifting HARD 3 days a week, you still wouldn't have to stress getting enough sleep or necessarily eating enough food. Chances are, everything will balance itself out over the week. Just make sure you have a well balanced diet and get an average amount of sleep (5-8 hours).

Moderate exercise:

(3-5 days/week)
This is where diet and sleep need to be a little bit more precise. If you're working out HARD, like 1 1/2 to 2 hours of heavy weights, then you NEED to make sure you're getting that sleep and enough protein in your body to heal your muscles. If you're not taking in enough calories and/or not getting enough sleep, this can start to put a mental stress on you as well as a physical stress. Your muscles won't heal as quickly because they heal the most during you REM sleep (deep sleep) and REM works in intervals, sleeping 5 hours might cut off an entire interval or two. Concentrating on school will become much harder if you're lacking any of these significant resources.

Heavy exercise:

(5-7 days/week)
If you're working out 5 to 7 days a week, it is VERY easy to wear yourself out. The more you work out, the more calories you burn. This means, the more you work out, the more you need to eat. Our body's need time and resources to heal and continue the strenuous activities. I'd recommend getting AT THE VERY LEAST 7 hours of sleep if. I've noticed through years of trial and error, if I workout this often and don't get enough sleep, concentrating on school and/or work the next day is much harder. Let's factor in food now. Without enough protein, you'll be doing more hard than good by workout out this often. I try to go off of the 1.2-2g of protein per pound of body weight number that you see on the internet so often. Make sure you get a good carbohydrate source before your workout (oatmeal, wheat bread, brown rice, etc) and a sufficient amount of healthy fats spread throughout the day. Without enough food in our body, we literally won't have the resources to concentrate and grasp complex concepts.

I'm transferring to a 4 year university next fall and figured I'd share these tips with everybody else. I don't want to see people making the same mistakes I made and go through weeks or months of being tired through out the day and not being able to pinpoint the cause. Hope this helped a little bit, I did this straight from the top of the head so it's not as good as it could be, just some advice from me to you! :)