Sleep and Fitness in Sri Lanka: How Late-Night Binge Watching Is Killing Your Gains

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You exercise four days per week. You eat clean. Put in your protein. But the fruit of your work lies dead. Your arms are not increasing. The fat around your waist is not going away. And you rise and rise again, despite all your tiredness, before the day has even started.

It may not be the workout you have. It may not be what you eat, but maybe what you are doing from 10 PM to 1 AM every night.

Thousands of Sri Lankans are silently losing their athletic outcomes due to the effects of late-night binge-watching. And hardly anybody is talking about it.

Why Sleep Is the most important part of your Fitness Routine

The majority of people believe that fitness occurs in the gym. It does not. It is during sleep that fitness occurs.

Boosting muscle is not what you do when exercising. You are destroying it. When you exercise, small tears are produced in your muscles. During the time that you sleep, your body mends those tears, a little bigger and stronger than it had been. Such a process is referred to as muscular protein synthesis. And it nearly all occurs in deep slumber.

In the case that you do not sleep well enough, your muscles do not get the opportunity to rest. The next day, you go back to the gym and have a body that is not completely mended since the previous day. This makes your progress slow drastically over weeks and months.

Two of the most vital hormones to fitness are also regulated by sleep. Deep sleep is when growth hormone is secreted in high quantities. At the same time, this hormone is used to burn fat and build muscle. The stress hormone, cortisol, is meant to be reset at night when you sleep. In case of inadequate sleep, cortisol remains high. And excessive cortisol tells your body to store fat, in particular, around your belly.

The Sri Lankan Sleep Issue that No one Owns

There is a severe issue of screen addiction at night in Sri Lanka. It cuts across all age groups, income generation, and all cities.

Almost always, the pattern is identical. Work ends at 6 PM. Dinner is at 8 PM. Next is the sofa, the phone, and another dose of whatever the drama of the day is on Netflix or YouTube. Midnight arrives. Then 1 AM. The following alarm is at 6 AM.

Five hours of sleep is not enough for anyone,  particularly not for someone who is in training.

The programs are crafted in such a way that you have no reason to quit. Each episode concludes with a cliffhanger. Each algorithm is well aware of what to suggest next. The blue light emitting through your screen is keeping your brain in an artificially awakened state, and it prevents melatonin, or the hormone that makes your body know it is time to sleep.

The result? It’s the middle of the night, and you are tired, yet wired. When you eventually switch off the phone, you are not able to fall asleep easily. And even in the morning when the alarm rings, you think that you were asleep very slightly. You hardly did, you see.

How 5 hours of sleep really affects your body

This is what occurs in your body when you regularly sleep less than six hours:

There is much less growth hormone produced in your body. This will result in reduced fat burning and decelerated muscle repair. Your level of testosterone will diminish; studies indicate that one week of low sleep can decrease testosterone levels in young men by 15 percent. Your hunger hormones are out of order. Ghrelin, the hunger hormone, is increased. Leptin, the hormone that signals to stop eating, is reduced. This is the reason why you feel like a sweet bite of sugar and carbs in the morning after having a night’s sleep. Your reaction time and coordination are worse, which makes your exercises less efficient, and your chances of injury increase.

All this does not occur in a single bad night, but the gradual build-up of bad sleep in weeks and months. The majority of Sri Lankan gym-goers are in this state unknowingly.

Hands-on Remedies that work in a Sri Lankan Way of Life

You need not quit watching programs altogether. There must be a limit.

Choose a stop time and use it. At 6 AM, your alarm should be off at 10:30 PM. It will allow you time to relax and have 7-8 hours of real sleep. Such a single change will result in noticeable fitness gains in two to three weeks.

Turn off the screen after 8 pm. Even better, enable the night mode on your phone. This lessens the amount of blue light and it will be less difficult to get your brain to naturally begin production of melatonin.

It is preferable to keep your bedroom cool. One of the greatest hindrances to deep sleep in Sri Lanka is the heat. When the fan or the air conditioning is adjusted to 24 degrees, there is a big difference in the quality of sleep.

It is advisable not to have a heavy meal within two hours before going to sleep. Late curry and rice suppers are body disruptors as your digestive system is running at its busiest when you should be relaxing. This disturbs your deepest sleep phases.

When you exercise in the evenings, complete your exercise at least 90 minutes before going to sleep. Workouts increase your body temperature and adrenaline. Both complicate sleeping fast.

The Bottom Line

Colombo has the best workout programme to have. Every day you can eat perfectly well. However, when you sleep five hours a day, you are sleeping most of your output away.

Sleep is not lazy. The most important work that your body performs occurs during sleep. Work hard to safeguard it, just like the case with your training sessions, since without it, your training sessions are hardly anything.

Quit abandoning sleep. It is the single habit that causes all other fitness habits to really work against you.