Originally Posted by
Brodie Butland
I've gone on stretches of 3 hours of sleep a day. It always fucked up my training, even if I was only lifting one day a week. It was also harder to concentrate, and I could be a real sunofubitch without a steady stream of coffee and meat.
I think your problem is that you're only looking at training as the demand stimulus for sleep, whereas there are a whole host of other far more important things that also need to be recovered each day.
Here's an overly simplistic analogy, which Jordan may say is completely wrong and I'm an idiot for even thinking of it. Think of your sleep (or eating, even) like putting money in a bank account each day. Also each day, various parts of your body send you bills--your brain, your endocrinological glands, your muscles, your liver, your heart, etc. In fact, many parts of your body send you multiple bills for various functions they do (your brain is sort of like the student loans, the house payment, and the taxes...it's a really demanding creditor).
If you consistently sleep 8 hours a day, all of your bills get paid on time. But if you don't put enough money into your sleep account (say you sleep 4 hours), then you can't pay all your bills...so your body pays bills in order of importance. So things like the bill for your brain to work properly get paid first. Things like your endocrine system may be partially paid. As a practical matter, bills associated with recovering from heavy weight training tend to get paid last, because when it comes to keeping an organism alive, adaptation to lifting heavy shit is pretty low on the list of importance.
Now, what happens if you deposit only half of your money into your sleep account for four days in a row? Very little of your training bill is going to be paid, because a lot of more important shit needs to be paid first...and even a lot of the important shit is only getting partially paid. Whereas if you put close to a full deposit in your sleep account for those four days, your training bill is going to be largely paid off because there's enough money to do so.