Muscle Soreness and Recovery Tips - Relieve Muscles FAST!

Some basic and simple tips on recovery tips and how to deal with the dreaded muscle DOMS.



What do you do to recover? leave a comment below and let me know.

💪🏼 Carrots The Super Food 💪🏼

I am sure that I was not alone, growing up I was told that eating my carrots would make me see in the dark. So as a child I didn't need much encouragement to eat them all, with ideas conjuring in my mind of having night vision abilities. While I don't know if this made my night vision any better, I am glad that I ate them now understanding the real benefits of these crunchy orange super veg.

Forget about vitamin A pills. Carrots provide vitamin A and a host of other impressive health benefits including beautiful skin, cancer prevention and anti aging. Learn how to reap the benefits from this crunchy power food.

Nutrition - Replacing Supplements 

"The brighter the hue, the better the carrot"

1 cup of chopped, raw carrots contains:

• 52 calories
• 1 g protein
• 12 g carbs
• 3.6 g fiber
• 0 g fat

Carrots pack a punch when it comes to nutrition rich in vitamins and minerals. Carrots contain 19 of the 21 essential amino acids, so munch on one pre and post workout to replace the expensive BCAA supplements! Naturally occurring Omega 3 & 6, as well as having good levels of Calcium and Magnesium which will replace your pre sleep recovery needs. 

High levels of both Beta-Carotene & Alpha-Carotene. Both alpha carotene and beta carotene are important for the prevention of vitamin A deficiency, which could lead to blindness. These carotenes serve as powerful antioxidants. They also appear to boost the immune system, and help the body fight against foreign agents such as bacteria and viruses. Thats without mentioning the other vitamins D through K. 

How To Eat Carrots

The nutrients in carrots are tightly encased in protein sacs that have to be broken by heat (cooking) or mechanical action (grinding, juicing, proper chewing).

Cooking the carrots in fat or oils, pureeing or juicing them increases the availability of carotenoids by 600 percent.

Fats also help the absorption of carotenoids into the blood by 1,000 percent, as carotenoids are fat soluble, so pour a little olive oil on top!

Not already sold? 11 more Reasons why you should be eating carrots

1.  Improves vision

There’s some truth in the old wisdom that carrots are good for your eyes. Carrots are rich in beta-carotene, which is converted into vitamin A in the liver. Vitamin A is transformed in the retina, to rhodopsin, a purple pigment necessary for night vision.

Beta-carotene has also been shown to protect against macular degeneration and senile cataracts. A study found that people who eat large amounts of beta-carotene had a 40 percent lower risk of macular degeneration than those who consumed little.

2.  Helps prevent cancer

Studies have shown carrots reduce the risk of lung cancer, breast cancer and colon cancer.

Falcarinol is a natural pesticide produced by the carrot that protects its roots from fungal diseases. Carrots are one of the only common sources of this compound. A study showed 1/3 lower cancer risk by carrot-eating rats.

3.  Slows down ageing 

The high level of beta-carotene in carrots acts as an antioxidant to cell damage done to the body through regular metabolism. It help slows down the ageing of cells.

4.  Promotes healthier skin 

Vitamin A and antioxidants protect the skin from sun damage. Deficiencies of vitamin A cause dryness to the skin, hair and nails. Vitamin A prevents premature wrinkling, acne, dry skin, pigmentation, blemishes and uneven skin tone.

5.  Helps prevent infection 

Carrots are known by herbalists to prevent infection. They can be used on cuts—shredded raw or boiled and mashed.

6.  Promotes healthier skin (from the outside) 

Carrots are used as an inexpensive and very convenient facial mask. Just mix grated carrot with a bit of honey.

7.  Prevents heart disease

Studies show that diets high in carotenoids are associated with a lower risk of heart disease. Carrots have not only beta-carotene but also alpha-carotene and lutein.

The regular consumption of carrots also reduces cholesterol levels because the soluble fibers in carrots bind with bile acids.

8.  Cleanses the body 

Vitamin A assists the liver in flushing out the toxins from the body. It reduces the bile and fat in the liver. The fiber present in carrots helps clean out the colon and hasten waste movement.

9.  Protects teeth and gums

It’s all in the crunch! Carrots clean your teeth and mouth. They scrape off plaque and food particles just like toothbrushes or toothpaste. Carrots stimulate gums and trigger a lot of saliva, which, being alkaline, balances out the acid-forming, cavity-forming bacteria. The minerals in carrots prevent tooth damage.

10.  Prevents stroke

From all the above benefits it’s no surprise that in a Harvard University study, people who ate five or more carrots a week were less likely to suffer a stroke than those who ate only one carrot a month or less.

11. Sleep

In the Pennsylvania University study they found that consumption of the nutrient alpha-carotene was most closely associated with better sleep. Diets low in this nutrient were linked with trouble falling asleep. Gram for gram, carrots are the most potent sources of alpha carotene, behind canned pumpkin.

Canned carrots, carrot juice, raw baby carrots, frozen carrots and raw regular carrots are all excellent sources of this powerful carotenoid. Carrots also pack several other sleep promoting nutrients like potassium and vitamin B6, as well as vitamin A and biotin.

Why Sleep Is the No. 1 Most Important Thing for a Better Body

Even with the very best diet and fitness routine, if sleep is off, you're wrecked. 

Here's why!

Imagine two women you know: One is your model of fitness success (She clearly knows how to slim down correctly and has the body to show for it), and the other is what you fear. This friend has her heart in the right place, but no matter how hard she works, she still struggles with the process and doesn’t have the body she wants. The troubling part is that when you talk to both, they share a common approach:

1. They eat meals that focus on lean protein and vegetables.
2. They exercise at least three times per week, focusing on both weights and cardio.
3. They know which foods are truly healthy and which they need to limit—and they do.

And yet one friend—the one who continues to struggle—can’t maintain her focus. She has trouble controlling her hunger, always craves sweets, and, despite her biggest efforts in the gym, she doesn’t seem to achieve the same results as someone else following the same program.

The problem might seem obvious at first. After all, one woman strays from her diet more than the other. And if exercise “isn’t working,” it probably means she just doesn’t really know how to train.

Maybe it’s genetics. Maybe she’s lazy or lacks willpower. Or maybe, diet or exercise isn’t the real problem.

Sleep Controls Your Diet

The debate about the best way to achieve a healthy weight always revolves around eating and movement. If you want to look better, the most common suggestion is “eat less and move more.” But it’s not that simple, or even accurate. Sometimes you want to eat less and move more, but it seems impossible to do so. And there might be a good reason: Between living your life, working, and exercising, you’re forgetting to sleep enough. Or maybe, more importantly, you don’t realise that sleep is the key to being rewarded for your diet and fitness efforts. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 35 percent of people are sleep deprived. And when you consider that the statistic for obesity is nearly identical, it’s easy to connect the dots and discover that the connection is not a coincidence.

Not sleeping enough—less than seven hours of sleep per night—can reduce and undo the benefits of dieting, according to research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. In the study, dieters were put on different sleep schedules. When their bodies received adequate rest, half of the weight they lost was from fat. However when they cut back on sleep, the amount of fat lost was cut in half—even though they were on the same diet. What’s more, they felt significantly hungrier, were less satisfied after meals, and lacked energy to exercise. Overall, those on a sleep-deprived diet experienced a 55 percent reduction in fat loss compared to their well-rested counterparts.

Poor Sleep Changes Your Fat Cells

Think about the last time you had a bad night of sleep. How did you feel when you woke up? Exhausted. Dazed. Confused. Maybe even a little grumpy? It’s not just your brain and body that feel that way—your fat cells do too. When your body is sleep deprived, it suffers from “metabolic grogginess.” The term was coined by University of Chicago researchers who analysed what happened after just four days of poor sleep—something that commonly happens during a busy week. One late night at work leads to two late nights at home, and next thing you know, you’re in sleep debt.

But it’s just four nights, so how bad could it be? You might be able to cope just fine. After all, coffee does wonders. But the hormones that control your fat cells don’t feel the same way.

Within just four days of sleep deprivation, your body’s ability to properly use insulin (the master storage hormone) becomes completely disrupted. In fact, the University of Chicago researchers found that insulin sensitivity dropped by more than 30 percent.

Here's why that's bad: When your insulin is functioning well, fat cells remove fatty acids and lipids from your blood stream and prevent storage. When you become more insulin resistant, fats (lipids) circulate in your blood and pump out more insulin. Eventually this excess insulin ends up storing fat in all the wrong places, such as tissues like your liver. And this is exactly how you become fat and suffer from diseases like diabetes.

Lack of Rest Makes You Crave Food

Many people believe that hunger is related to willpower and learning to control the call of your stomach, but that's incorrect. Hunger is controlled by two hormones: leptin and ghrelin.

Leptin is a hormone that is produced in your fat cells. The less leptin you produce, the more your stomach feels empty. The more ghrelin you produce, the more you stimulate hunger while also reducing the amount of calories you burn (your metabolism) and increasing the amount fat you store. In other words, you need to control leptin and ghrelin to successfully lose weight, but sleep deprivation makes that nearly impossible. Research published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinoloy and Metabolism found that sleeping less than six hours triggers the area of your brain that increases your need for food while also depressing leptin and stimulating ghrelin.

If that’s not enough, the scientists discovered exactly how sleep loss creates an internal battle that makes it nearly impossible to lose weight. When you don’t sleep enough, your cortisol levels rise. This is the stress hormone that is frequently associated with fat gain. Cortisol also activates reward centers in your brain that make you want food. At the same time, the loss of sleep causes your body to produce more ghrelin. A combination of high ghrelin and cortisol shut down the areas of your brain that leave you feeling satisfied after a meal, meaning you feel hungry all the time—even if you just ate a big meal.

And it gets worse.

Lack of sleep also pushes you in the direction of the foods you know you shouldn’t eat. A study published in Nature Communications found that just one night of sleep deprivation was enough to impair activity in your frontal lobe, which controls complex decision-making.

Ever had a conversation like this?

“I really shouldn’t have that extra piece of cake… then again, one slice won’t really hurt, right?”

Turns out, sleep deprivation is a little like being drunk. You just don’t have the mental clarity to make good complex decisions, specifically with regards to the foods you eat—or foods you want to avoid. This isn’t helped by the fact that when you’re overtired, you also have increased activity in the amygdala, the reward region of your brain. This is why sleep deprivation destroys all diets; think of the amygdala as mind control—it makes you crave high-calorie foods. Normally you might be able to fight off this desire, but because your insular cortex (another portion of your brain) is weakened due to sleep deprivation, you have trouble fighting the urge and are more likely to indulge in all the wrong foods.

And if all that wasn’t enough, research published in Psychoneuroendocrinology found that sleep deprivation makes you select greater portion sizes of all foods, further increasing the likelihood of weight gain.

The bottom line: Not enough sleep means you’re always hungry, reaching for bigger portions, and desiring every type of food that is bad for you—and you don’t have the proper brain functioning to tell yourself, “No!”

Sleep Sabotages Gym Time

Unfortunately the disastrous impact spreads beyond diet and into your workouts. No matter what your fitness goals are, having some muscle on your body is important. Muscle is the enemy of fat—it helps you burn fat and stay young. But sleep (or lack thereof) is the enemy of muscle. Scientists from Brazil found that sleep debt decreases protein synthesis (your body’s ability to make muscle), causes muscle loss, and can lead to a higher incidence of injuries.

Just as important, lack of sleep makes it harder for your body to recover from exercise by slowing down the production of growth hormone—your natural source of anti ageing and fat burning that also facilitates recovery. This happens in two different ways:

1. Poor sleep means less slow wave sleep, which is when the most growth hormone is released.

2. As previously mentioned, a poor night of rest increases the stress hormone cortisol, which slows down the production of growth hormone. That means that the already reduced production of growth hormone due to lack of slow wave sleep is further reduced by more cortisol in your system. It’s a vicious cycle.

If you're someone who doesn't particularly enjoy exercise, not prioritizing sleep is like getting a physical examine with your father-in-law as the investigating physician: It will make something you don’t particularly enjoy almost unbearable. When you’re suffering from slept debt, everything you do feels more challenging, specifically your workouts.

The Better Health Secret: Prioritise Sleep

The connection between sleep and weight gain is hard to ignore. Research published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that women who are sleep deprived are a third more likely to gain 33 pounds over the next 16 years than those who receive just seven hours of sleep per night. And with all of the connections to obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart failure, and cognitive failure, the need to sleep goes far beyond just looking better and seeing results from your diet and exercise efforts.

While there’s no hard number that applies to all people, a good rule of thumb is to receive between seven and nine hours of sleep per night, and to make sure that one poor night of sleep isn’t followed up with a few more. It might not seem like much, but it could make all the difference and mean more than any other health decision you make.

Adam Bornstein
http://www.shape.com/lifestyle/mind-and-body/why-sleep-no-1-most-important-thing-better-body

Stress Is Ruining Your Fitness

Training really comes down to one thing: stress management. In the gym you add stress to try to push your body to a new level. Outside the gym, you do everything you can to alleviate the stress imposed in the gym.

When you achieve the right balance, you get what is called super-compensation, or training adaptation. When it’s wrong, you get over-reaching, which could make you too fatigued to train hard enough to stimulate change. If you go even further down the wrong track, you end up with over-training, which can lead to a near total system shut down.

Stress Is Stress 

Most people only look at the training performed in the gym or on the track when assessing levels of fatigue. However, the body doesn’t differentiate between mental, emotional, or physical stress. As far as the systems of the body are concerned, stress is stress.

That time your boss dropped a big pile of work on your desk that had to be done before you left the office was just as traumatic for your body as a max effort squat day. So the last thing you should be doing if you’ve just had one of those days is head to the gym and max out. This seems counter-intuitive. When you have a bad day, it’s natural to want to take out that aggression in the gym and let off some steam. But when you do, you’ve essentially had what amounts to two max effort sessions in the same day, as far as your body is concerned.

From Joel Jamieson’s, Certified Conditioning Coach manual. 

Stress In The Gym

Before we get to the actual stress-management solutions you can accomplish at home, let’s discuss some of the problems with most gym training models. Like it or not, anaerobic training produces the same type of energy seen in our fight-or-flight responses. It has to, because we need it to help us run away from predators for survival. But all that energy being produced so quickly has a damaging effect on your body. It is highly inflammatory, just like your stress-filled days at the office.

This is where movement quality comes into the picture. Movement quality has both a physical and a mental component. The energy systems and connective tissue are the bodily components, but they are driven by the autonomic nervous system and motor control, which are managed by the brain. The role of the nervous system is to perceive threat through the use of all of your senses and is linked to motor output functions (such as speed and power), and these functions are linked to your motor control.

The sympathetic nervous system drives extension-based postures and activities, such as running and jumping, as well as most lifts. In other words, it is your fight-or-flight posture and supports higher force activities. However, as motor control is based on threat perception, an over use of both this system and these postures results in negative changes in motor control. These changes to motor control lead to higher levels of fatigue. Those higher levels of fatigue lead to less movement variability – you become more robotic – and that leads to more injuries. In other words, spending too much time in your fight-or-flight postures performing high-force activities leads to greater likelihood of injury. What can you do to fix all this?

Protect Your Body From Threat 

The body perceives new activities as a threat. This applies whether it is a new load, new exercise, or a new distance – they will all be viewed the same way by the body. That drives you straight into your fight-or-flight system and instantly turns what is meant to be an educational session into something that is perceived by the body to be a maximum effort. So we need to slowly introduce new stressors to training. This is precisely why you shouldn’t learn the barbell snatch on day one in a gym. There are just too many things that are new if you’re not familiar with barbells and weightlifting.

As movement quality improves at each level, the first step is to add load. Once that step has stagnated then you can seek to add complexity – perhaps going from a hang power snatch to a power snatch. Once that has settled you can seek to add fatigue by adding volume before starting in on the next progression. The basic format is to add intensity, then complexity, before adding capacity.

Balance Your Stress Level

But don’t forget, new movements cause stress. To counteract all that stress you need training methods that soothe the body and allow your system to reset. For example, a day where you learn new moves should finish with an easy aerobic cool down to return the body to a suitable resting state that is responsive to training. Just as your warm up should prepare you for stress, your cool down should ready you to absorb the stress. And that is best done with a settled mind and body.

But all that could change if you chose the wrong recovery format. I’ve known beach volleyballers who weren’t great swimmers choose to go swimming for recovery the day after a tournament. Unfortunately, their bodies didn’t agree that it would be easy, so what should have been an easy session smashed them further. Walking in cool water might be a great choice for you, but unless you’re actually a good swimmer there’s not much chance that swimming will be a good recovery session.

Remember, if your body perceives a threat then it will react as if under threat with that same fight-or flight-response. Next thing you know, you’ve turned your recovery session into another hard session and your system will be depressed even more.

What Activities Are Best?

Some activities lend themselves better to recovery than others. Here are three I recommend:

Flexion-Based Postures: 

The parasympathetic nervous system features flexion-based postures. Activities like cycling and rowing make for far better choices than running, as it is extension based. Have you ever wondered why yoga has such a settling effect on the body? All that time spent in downward dog, a flexion-based posture, has a deep-seated link to promoting calmness within the body and mind.

Breathing: 

The quickest, cheapest, and easiest way to influence the parasympathetic system is to focus on respiratory function. Methods such as FMS have had highly successful results from exercises as simple as crocodile breathing. I have had clients who have found huge improvements for shoulder pain after five minutes of targeted breathing practice, combined with education about how to recognize and manage signs of stress.

Meditation: 

My good friend Chris Holder has done some interesting studies on using guided meditation to reduce stress among his Division 1 athletes. He and his colleagues found that following a daily guided meditation made up for poor sleep and dietary habits often seen in college athletes burning the candle at both ends. In my experience, the best time to perform this is before bed so that sleep quality is enhanced. Omvana is a free app that guides you through a twenty-minute series designed to relax the body and mind.

Train and Recover Smart

Once you’ve got your recovery figured out, the final step is monitoring training intensity and frequency. Most people can’t handle more than two or three hard sessions per week, and the days between should be filled with active recovery to stimulate the system, not further deplete or stress it.

The goal of training is to improve the body, not test its limits. Focus on adding guided meditation and focused breathing work, as well as aerobic recoveries and cool downs, and you will be surprised at how much better your body feels.

By Andrew Read

http://breakingmuscle.co.uk/uk/learn/stress-is-ruining-your-fitness

Johnny's Recovery - NO KNIFE

The Power of the right type of training system. Not only will it make you stronger but also rehabilitate any injury. In this case Johnny's injury, if asking a doctor would or resorted to immediate surgery to fix it! 

Let me know your thoughts and feelings on this video, it really inspires me to be better! 

Shoulder Injuries & The Importance of Shoulder Health

Injuries are a part of life, as frustrating as they might be, often forcing you to change your routine and schedule its important to learn from them. Often they come from training beyond the limits of your current capacity. This however also tells you that your moving in the right direction. Provided that its not a common reoccurrence that you see with many sports. Its a fine line that you alone can make a judgement call on.

"What doesn't break you, makes you stronger" Today after two days of hoping with bated breath that the mysterious shoulder pain, that appeared in the evening after a good workout session earlier that day failed to subdue and stop aggravating me. There was no obvious moments within the training where it hurt or I became pained, so I was confident it would settle itself. During the night however I genuinely thought that my shoulder may have become dislocated. Waking with excruciating pains through the Deltoid, Lats, Scapula and down the arm. Giving me a weakness in normal arm movement, meaning I couldn't even lift my own arm without pain and the assistance of my other hand. At about 4 am struggling to sleep I began googling how to self reset dislocated shoulders, somehow during this process I managed to fall asleep with with the comfort of my arm hanging over the edge of the bed. Being the xmas holiday period, it took me about 7 or 8 phone calls to find a Chiropractor that was working and available this morning. As some of you might be aware I'm not a fan of conventional mainstream medication and medical practices. Most doctors or hospitals would of prescribed rest and pain relief tablets which doesn't help much, rather just mask the problem and hope that it gets better. When a doctor tells you to quit lifting and to get on NSAIDS (Non Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs), you should consider finding a new doctor. Consider that over 16,500 people die/year in the US from reactions from those simple over the counter drugs. (British Medical Journal, June, 1999.) Short-term use of Advil, Aleve, Nuprin, Motrin, Asprin (white willow bark) and other NSAIDS (less than three weeks) are usually safe, but continued use will destroy your protective lining of your stomach and your heart. Ref. http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/drryan9.htm

With that in mind think think about how to maintain good shoulder health, if a standard doctor diagnoses 2 weeks of pain relief and rest your over 2/3's of the way through the safe zone. Find a utilise specialists to aid your recovery. The Chiropractor was great. After a consultation which is standard practice when visiting a Chiropractor, he began assessing my structure and before even addressing the shoulder released the surrounding tensions in my back and neck. Allowing him access to massage and work the deep tissue around the Deltoid muscles, having diagnosed this as the dominant pain centre. So with todays session out of the way it feels slightly better but I have to ice it to reduce the tissue inflammation before returning tomorrow for more work on the shoulder. So Ice pack and deepfreeze cream putting a frozen edge on me all day. Within my areas of training (gymnastic strength training and movement training) there is a lot of emphasis on doing as much as you can to maintain good shoulder health. To me it is now super apparent why. I know its touched on in many training methodologies but I don't think people fully understand how important the shoulders are. They are the most complex joint in the body to rehabilitate. Due to it having more mobility and speed than any other joint. Moving 5370 degrees per second (dps), approximately 80% faster than the knee with a top speed of 2000 (dps).

"Prevention is the best cure" My shoulder will recover fast due to the time I spend ensuring their health, through training my shoulders in a capacity that ensures optimal health. However I felt it important to raise this today, given my current predicament surrounding the importance of shoulders.  I'd advise everyone to pay attention to training your shoulders through complete range of motion. Always ensure that you listen to your body. Focus on structure and form before adding weight to any exercise and be consistent with your training schedule.  For more information be sure to check back to the blog, where we have regular updates with; training, health, fitness, weight loss and so much more. With the aim of helping you become the best version of you that you can be.  Stay healthy Craig W. the Real Fitness Ninja http://therealfitnessninja.blogspot.co.uk

Shoulder Stretch to Fix Your Shoulders (GET DEEP!)

Ever suffered a shoulder injury? You will understand how important this is, if your suffering or have experienced shoulder pain leave a comment below.

Scientific Weight Loss Tips

What do you guys think? Simple and with over 5 million views tell me your opinions.

Sleep: The most overlooked cause of belly fat!

WE ALL want a flat stomach. No surprise there.

But since many are still relying on a countless number of sit-ups to get it, I’ll just make one thing clear: There are less painful and longer lasting ways to get the amazing middle we crave.

YOUR WAISTLINE

As much as you hate to hear it, there’s no silver bullet to fighting belly fat. You have to go back to the basics: Eat a balanced diet and make fitness part of your everyday life.

But while belly fat can still accumulate for those who exercise regularly and maintain a decent diet, what’s most often overlooked is the amount of shut-eye we get each night.

Scientists have known for years that sleep deprivation has all sorts of ramifications, especially on how fat cells function. Research indicates that too little slumber reduces your fat cells’ ability to respond properly to the hormone insulin, which is crucial for regulating energy storage and use.

In other words, our fat cells also need sleep to function properly otherwise they too, can get ‘metabolically’ groggy. Over time the disruption to insulin is responsible not only for an unsightly ‘muffin top’, but can also be a risk factor for type 2 diabetes, heart attacks and stroke.

Insulin also has a knock-on effect on appetite-controlling hormones: leptin and ghrelin. Leptin is responsible for telling your brain that it is satisfied or full. Ghrelin tells you when you are hungry.

When we don’t get enough sleep, our leptin levels drop and ghrelin levels rise — an effect that increases our appetite during the hours where we are awake, meaning we tend to eat more, but feel less satisfied.

But it’s rare you’ll reach for carrots when you’re tired. Instead, people crave high-sugar/high-fat foods for an energy hit to get them through the day. This brings us back to insulin, which determines whether food gets used right away for immediate energy, or stored as fat. Eat the wrong kind of foods, chances are it’s the latter.

Around 75 per cent of Australians struggle to get to, or stay asleep each night, according to the world’s largest sleep report unveiled this week. The report, commissioned by The Sealy Sleep Census, surveyed over 11,000 respondents across five countries, including 2,300 respondents living in Australia.

The study also found 25% of Australians take more than 30 minutes to get to sleep, and only one in four get eight hours a night.

“It is easy to trade sleep for another activity without recognising the consequences, however, what people need to realise, is that quality sleep is equally as important as nutrition and exercise. A lack of sleep has been linked to obesity, diabetes, heart issues and even increases the likelihood to catch a common cold,” said Doctor Amy Reynolds, sleep expert and researcher at CQ University.

The findings also suggest a strong association between high levels of insomnia and the nation’s addiction to technology in the bedroom, with 70% of us keeping our phones near the bed.

“A hormone called melatonin helps to prepare the body for sleep. Levels of melatonin rise in the evening before bed, but blue light from devices can throw this off as the light sends the wrong cue to the brain — so, when we are wanting to sleep we are giving our brains a signal that we are awake” adds Reynolds.

The Australian Sleep Health Foundation recommends that adults should get seven or more hours of sleep a night to avoid health risks.

THE TAKE AWAY

A well-rounded exercise regimen, nutrition and reducing stress are all important factors in reducing belly fat and improving general health, but you can’t ignore the role of sleep. The more you get, the more fat you burn — so you can put crunches last on your flat-belly list.

Kathleen Alleaume is a nutritionist, exercise physiologist and author. Follow her @therightbalance


http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/fitness/weight-loss/sleep-the-most-overlooked-cause-of-belly-fat/news-story/e218a48550ae0b63535f459fc57719b6