If you said, "Okay, I'm going to miss four hours of sleep every night, and on raw anabolic machinery from testosterone, I'm going to make up with it." You're talking about shooting 800 milligrams of testosterone per week, which probuilders do, and it destroys their health and their sanity and everything else about them. And that's just to get back to normal. So when I say sleep is as powerful or more powerful than steroids, I mean every word of that. Getting not enough sleep means you're on anti-steroids. You're on negative steroids. That's really, really bad. Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for RP Strength. Let's talk about sleep and muscle gain, but not in esoteric terms, not in theoretical terms, but in practical terms of how much muscle gain opportunity you lose based on how many hours of sleep you are cutting out. This shit is going to hit hard. Stay tuned cuz the news is like really good if you sleep pretty well and really really bad if you miss sleep. Worse than you think potentially. Worse than I thought, that's for goddamn sure. Science first. How does enough sleep, 7 to n hours, based on your preferences and how you feel, turbocharge your muscle growth situation? In a few different ways. 1 2 3 4 five ways at least. Here we go. First is pulsatile growth hormone release. something like 70% of your overall 24-hour growth hormone gets released in the first half of your nightly sleep. And if you miss that or screw it up or go to bed too late, it really screws you over with growth hormone secretion. Then you secrete less. Growth hormone is potently lipolytic, so it burns fat like crazy. It stimulates IGF-1. It causes more amino acid uptake, more satellite cell proliferation and activation, and more mTor signaling, which means more muscle growth. You skip on growth hormone. Mechanistically, it is not difficult to understand why you're going to be growing a lot less muscle. We'll talk about how much less in just a bit. Another one is a testosterone reset. It turns out your plasma testosterone peaks during the last third of a normal night. Scott, that's when you wake used to wake up with the boners you used to have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I used to have them, man. Had them though. They were huge. Yes. And um if you do an allnighter, it looks like you can cut your testosterone secretion levels by about 25%. That's a lot. Lower testosterone means less capacity to turn the messaging of, hey, you should grow muscle into actual muscle growth. it uh turns the androgen receptor on less and it really just causes less muscle growth and less fatigue reduction and everything down the line. Speaking of fatigue, the lowest cortisol you typically have in your 24-hour cycle is between 2 and 4 in the morning when you're asleep. If you're not asleep, your cortisol doesn't get that low. And so if you miss sleep, not only during but the day after, your cortisol is substantially higher than it normally would be. High cortisol shifts protein balance into catabolic from anabolic. Bad news. And it also favors visceral fat storage, which means making your gut bigger. That is a really, really bad sign. We want none of this. We want cortisol nice and low. And uh under sleeping absolutely raises your cortisol. There is nighttime is really beneficial for direct myofaphibrillar which means the actual stuff in your cell in your muscle cells that makes the proteins contract and makes the muscles contract and gets you all jacked. That growth is is often happening in the 7 to9 hours while you are asleep. And if you miss sleep, you miss part of that window and the growth isn't as good. And so a lot of uh what we can say about training is really true to say that you train during the day and a lot of your growth happens at night. You sleep less, you grow less. It really is very straightforward. Here's the thing. Deep sleep also restores nervous system activation ability, excitation ability, and generally proper function. So that if you don't get enough sleep, your nervous system is underprepared and then the next day your training quality is going to be lower. Like what do you guys feel like you train when you undersleep by three or four hours? It's just lower quality training. You can't summit as much mechanical tension. You can't summit as many metabolites. You have lower growth stimulus in that day afterwards if you're even for one night missing sleep. So this is a big deal. Sleep is a huge huge huge deal to muscle growth. And let's talk about how too little sleep me in numbers kind of uh reduces your growth down to size. So direct measurement of muscle protein synthesis tends to flatline. If you have one totally sleepless night, your postprandial, which means after you eat a high protein meal the next day, they measure your muscle protein synthesis. it is 18% lower than it normally otherwise would be. Uh and that continues if you continue to get less sleep over time. It's it's capped off substantially. Just is nothing to do with when you slept. It's the whole day after. Every time you eat protein to grow, your muscle grows less than it would by something like 20% if you miss a whole night of sleep or even if you miss multiple nights of sleep in a row. um and and get uh around four hours in in uh in sleeping time. So, bad deal directly for growth. There's also a catabolic hormone swing. Cortisol goes up by something like 20%, testosterone down by like 25%. Your growth hormone is blunted as we talked about um in a really big deal. And then chronic low sleep actually upregulates the genes in your muscle cells that tend to atrophy your muscles cuz you your muscles typically don't want to be like unmititigated massive. If that was the case, we wouldn't have to train. They would just be like that. And so uh my genes like myostatin actually have a higher expression when you lose a lot of sleep. And that means myostatin blocks muscle growth. You actually get less muscle growth from that mechanism. So, not only is muscle protein synthesis lower, but all the other stuff that makes muscle protein synthesis high that day and the days after, like satellite cell activation, proliferation, that takes a hit as well. And of course, training quality takes a hit also. And so, what I decided to do was I was like, okay, these are like big numbers or whatever, but let's say we had a plan. It's a real stupid plan, but it's going to let us envision how bad these numbers really are. We're gonna say if I miss sleep, I'm just going to inject extra steroids to make up for it. Yeah, that's right. You heard me. I do this every day. I haven't got the last time I slept years, right? I've never seen you sleep. Every time I get tired, I just shoot more steroids, JK. But if we were going to shoot more testosterone, take extra supplemental testosterone for every hour of sleep that we missed, how much testosterone based on how much muscle it grows, would we need to take for every night that we missed a certain amount of sleep? I ran the numbers here. Let me tell you what I found. If you undersleep for an hour and you want your muscle growth to go back up to baseline with shitloads of negative side effects, you can inject an extra 25 mg of testosterone, which is like micro dose territory. No big deal. Okay. If you miss two hours of sleep in order to get back what you uh would have otherwise lost for muscle growth stimulus, you need another 50 milligrams of testosterone. That's what testosterone clinics that specialize in very low testosterone roughly give per week to people. For the record, you need to shoot this the day after you lost that sleep. Holy shit. A week's worth of testosterone for only 2 hours of sleep loss in one night. By the way, you can imagine if you keep losing sleep night after night, how much gear is going to offset that 3 hours, you need to shoot 90 milligrams of testosterone, which is getting into like very super TRT, very high level of testosterone secretion proxy. That's a lot. And here's the crazy shit. 4 hours of sleep lost, you have to shoot 115 milligrams. That's full athlete TRT for one week in 1 day's worth of testosterone. If you scaled that, if you said, "Okay, I'm going to miss 4 hours of sleep every night, and on raw anabolic machinery from testosterone, I'm going to make up with it." You're talking about shooting 800 mg of testosterone per week, which probers do, and it destroys their health and their sanity and everything else about them. And that's just to get back to normal. So when we say sleep loss really hurts muscle gains, we're talking about sleep loss competing with probodybuilder anabolic dosages. Before you say anything, dosages scale, sleep does not. So when I say sleep is as powerful or more powerful than steroids, I mean every word of that until you get to 7 to 9 hours. But unfortunately, sleep is not super additive. If you sleep 12 hours or 14 hours, it's not the equivalent of being on trend. However, if you sleep a lot less than 7 to 9 hours, you have to make up for it with a crapload of steroids to get the same effect. That is a humongous deal. Here's the last real hammer on this nail. Replacing for testosterone the anabolic effects of one whole night of no sleep a full all nighter. Scott, what all nighter mean to you? It means like you're an undergrad again. You're quote unquote studying for a test. There's that one bitch that's in your group that's kind of cute. She's wearing a little polo. She keeps giggling. You're like you're getting funnier. Aderall, you're like cool and funny at the same time. like it's getting to be like dusk and she's like, "Oh my god, like after this test we should like make terrible decisions together." Like that's why people do all nighters. I think it's just to get pussy, but they're stupid for every other reason. And so if you say, "Okay, I'm going to do an allnighter." That is the equivalent of 225 millig of injectable testosterone worth of muscle growth potentiation. You can't do that every day. Also, if you didn't sleep for every day, you'd be in a whole lot of other trouble, you guys. That is the equivalent of massive weekly doses of gear. Massive to replace your sleep on pure short-term anabolic drive. And so what does this mean? Obviously, it's a shit idea to try to take more steroids to compensate for your sleep because the steroids don't even compensate for the fat loss stuff. They don't compensate for the central nervous system stuff nearly as much as they do for muscle growth. and they don't compensate for the cortisol and your overall health is going to degrade and you're going to go straight to shit. But even on the muscle growth stuff, the huge take-home message from this situation is that if you simply get enough sleep, 7 to n hours as needed for you, what you would have to do to get the muscle growth oomph of that, if you were to say, "Okay, but what if I miss some sleep? How much? How many steroids do I have to take, for lack of a better term, in order to make up just an one day acute amount of muscle growth? The answer is a lot. A lot. A lot. For an hour, it's not that big of a deal. Which is why if someone's like, "Oh, I only slept six or seven hours last night. I usually get eight, seven or eight." No big deal. Fix it next night. But if you missed 4 hours of sleep and you kind of do that a few times a week cuz you're really bad about staying up too late watching Netflix or whatever it is you're doing or talking to some girl on the phone. Oh my god. Like we're like so like take like we're like so alike. Like I can't believe I'm like talking to you for like an hour. Like we just like everything we have is like so like in common. Scott, what's the longest you've ever talked to a girl? Straight up. One shot. 30 seconds. And that's long enough. Yeah. Well, also if the other things like it, I digress. Basically, here's the deal. Sleep is your cheapest, healthiest, safest, freest, most amazing anabolic drug. If you're going to take steroids, God bless you. I did. I'm not going to be a hypocrite and tell you not to do it. If you're young, don't do it. If you're stupid, don't do it. If you're using it wrong, don't do it outside of medical supervision, don't do it. And if you're cheating at sports, don't do it and tell me about it because I have nothing nice to say about that. If you're a responsible adult in a jurisdiction where steroids are legal to take and you're taking them with the guidance of a professional, then hey, hey, great. But if you're going to take gear, you might as well get enough sleep because you have to take way more gear to compensate for low sleep. And if you're not taking deer, if you're natural, then you got to realize that getting enough sleep, you're still natural, but you're making great gains. Getting not enough sleep means you're on anti-steroids. You're on negative steroids. That's really, really bad. Yeah, one ugly night, minimal fallout. Take schedule a D lo that day. You can train hard with enough caffeine after a night of shit sleep. So, if you know you're good for it, do it. Warm up longer. do higher rep ranges, lighter weights, maybe just stack more volume, do more machines because you know when you're disoriented and stuff, don't do crazy super heavy athletic shit. But then get lots of sleep the night after. No negotiation. But if you're doing chronic sleep debt, you're just creating a such a difficult environment for your body to maintain leanness, to maintain health, to maintain preparedness, to train hard, and number one to maintain its muscle size and sure shit grow any muscle. You like once you have multiple nights a week where you're undersleeping by three or four hours, the conversation turns to how much muscle can you keep versus how much muscle can you grow. We're beyond growing at that point in most cases. Don't take your caffeine too late and have a a routine where you go to bed by a certain time and wake up by a certain time so that you get awesome high quality sleep. That is a huge deal. So TLDDR, yes, get the RP Diet coach app. It's going to be awesome. Yes, get the RP hypertrophy app. They're going to be awesome. Links in the description. We don't have a sleep app. Here's a cool sleep app. Shut up and go to sleep. Because sleep for your growth isn't just some stuff old-timers say like you got to get your sleep and your veggies and grow lots of muscle. It's real and it fights with anabolic steroids at high doses for how much it screws you up if you don't get enough of it. I was going to have something else to say, but I got to go to sleep to get jacked. Have a blessed night. And remember, every time the dream world carries you away, it's carrying you away into being way bigger. Look at me. I'm asleep and I'm huge. See you guys next time.