Is your bed the most important piece of gym equipment?

Maybe. 

Let me explain.

Everytime you lift a weight, run a mile, do a yoga pose, or whatever other movement modality you choose, things happen inside your body. Muscles contract, joints move, chemical reactions occur. Blah blah blah. Necessary things, but fairly boring and not important to know for most gym-goers. But when you’re doing the lunge or the squat or the sprint, any adaptations (“gains”) you incur from the movement aren’t happening right away. A few hours after your workout, your body will start to experience what’s known as the “alarm” phase, which just means you feel fatigued/sore/stiff. After the alarm phase, which can last hours to days depending on what you did, the body enters the resistance phase, which translates into taking the muscular and biochemical adaptations and adapting the body accordingly. This is why when you follow a typical progressive overload plan (increasing the weight/intensity gradually each week), the amount of weight or reps you can do will generally increase over time. 

Notice how the resistant phase doesn’t happen at the gym? Probably the farthest thing from the gym if anything. It’s when you’re resting, sleeping preferably. Sleep is arguably the greatest thing you can do outside of the gym (besides getting adequate protein, that’s for another article) to maximize any growth you’re trying to see. There is a direct relationship between the amount of sleep you get and your performance in the gym (once you go below six hours things start to decline pretty fast), but when it comes to recovery and maximizing your previous gym time, the more you sleep the more growth hormone is released (the substance that’s banned almost worldwide by doping agencies because of how effective it is at improving performance).

So do your training, lift your weights, ride your bike, etc. But then as one of my favorite trainers Ben Bruno likes to say, make sure you do your couch planks. Even your bed planks. It’s probably the most important exercise we could all do more of.