You know what’s better than steroids? 7.5 or 9 hours of HIGH QUALITY sleep every night. Remember those words “high quality” because low-quality sleep is the exact opposite, no matter how many hours you get. When I discovered this difference in my late 30s, everything in life got 10% better. I set PRs. Lifelong joint pains disappeared. Hypertrophy came easy. Libido skyrocketed. Finally, my body had time to heal from all the damage I accrued each day, and that meant everything I did in the gym was a little more powerful. Learning to sleep for muscle growth is like taking the emergency brakes off your body.

Let me show you what I learned.

Sleep Quality is More Important Than Quantity

We’ve all heard of mystifying individuals (like Donald Trump) who operate on 4-5 hours of sleep per night. Researchers suggest they make up 1-3% of the population¹. Undoubtedly, they have a genetic advantage, but the context of that advantage isn’t always clear—the little sleep they do get is extremely high quality.

Sleep quality isn’t how “deep” you sleep. Some deep sleep (e.g. drug-induced) is extremely unhealthy. Instead, sleep quality refers to how well your body repairs damage accrued during the day.

If you can repair 100% of your body’s accrued damage in only 6 hours—or 4 sleep cycles—then your sleep quality is INCREDIBLY high. It’s efficient. It’s badass. You’re a demigod. You’re Wolverine.

Most people, however, unknowingly damage their bodies so much that they need at least 7.5 or 9 hours of sleep—5 or 6 sleep cycles—to return to homeostasis.

That “damage” can take different forms. High-inflammation diets, job stress, drug use, TikTok, crying babies, and yes, lifting heavy weights all take a toll that your body needs to repair while you sleep. 

So, if you train hard—and thus accrue more physical damage—chances are you need more high-quality, immune-boosting, testosterone-boosting, and brain-boosting sleep to return to homeostasis and create the ideal conditions for muscle growth.

How to Test Your Sleep Quality

Let’s get this straight: you don’t need sleep trackers.

Oura rings, WHOOPs, and all the other fancy sleep gadgets that biohackers drool over are cool—they deliver interesting data. But, they’re unnecessary. All you need to know is the answer to one question:

Did you yawn before sunset today?

If yes, your sleep last night was insufficient no matter how many hours you got. Yawning—tiredness—is a sign that there’s still damage somewhere in your body that your brain knows it needs to repair. It’s like a gentle nudge reminding you to rest.

Unfortunately, this sign—yawning—doesn’t tell you WHY your body isn’t fully repaired. Any of the items in the chart above could have prevented your full recovery from yesterday’s stresses, or yesterday’s training.

This should be intuitive.

When you sleep like crap, how do your training sessions usually feel the next day? Weak. Frazzled. An injury waiting to happen.

Sleeping for muscle growth means waking up fresh, energetic, and ready to train hard every day. You might yawn when you wake up. That’s normal. You might yawn at night when you’re sleepy, because the laws of nature require it². But if you’re yawning in between…it means one simple thing: your body wants more high-quality sleep.

How much DEEP sleep is ideal for muscle growth?

7.5 hours of high-quality sleep is a good minimum target. 9 hours is better.

Why don’t I say “8 hours” like every boomer, schoolteacher, and Reddit Reply Guy on the Internet?

Because when we think of “deep” sleep for muscle growth, we need to understand how sleep actually functions. Here’s a cheat sheet:

• Sleep occurs in roughly 90-minute cycles
• Each sleep cycle transitions through 4 stages
• Stage 3 (“deep sleep”) is most important—it lasts 20-40 minutes and it’s where muscle-building takes place
• The longer you stay in Stage 3, and the more times you cycle through it in a night, the stronger you’ll be the next day
• If something wakes you up in the middle of Stage 3, you can’t just enter back in—you start the sleep cycle over
• Small disruptions may not wake you up, but they can “kick you out” of Stage 3, shortening the total time your body has to make muscle-building repairs

To sleep for muscle growth, your goal is to maximize the amount of time you spend in Stage 3 deep sleep, or “slow-wave sleep³”. That means 5-6 sleep cycles, each without any disruptions that chip away at your gains.

How to maximize your sleep quality (and muscle recovery)

There are two kinds of sleep. First, there’s the kind that you and I want: it builds muscle and enhances your health. Then there’s the kind your skinny fat, pre-diabetic, IPA-drinking friends get every night: it barely keeps them alive and leads to chronic disease.

Adhering to the following three pillars will ensure you’re in the first camp.

1. Adequate Daily Sunlight

It may seem counterintuitive to think that sunlight is necessary for sleep, but it’s all about timing.

You’re a mammal on planet Earth. Every mammal on Earth exists in a delicate balance with the daily cycle of sunlight and darkness. If you fight against that cycle, serious problems arise.

Ever heard of “Seasonal Affective Disorder?”⁴ It’s a form of depression associated with reductions in daylight hours during winter. It affects 7 times more people in Alaska than in Florida, and causes all kinds of wacky sleep problems.

Staying indoors all day (classrooms, living rooms, offices) artificially reduces your daily sunlight exposure. This basically gives you Seasonal Affective Disorder—the winter blues—and stagnates your gains. You’re not acting like a healthy mammal on planet Earth. You’re acting like a typical computer programmer.

As researchers from Switzerland⁵ tell us:

Natural daylight at high intensities as experienced outside buildings has previously been shown to (1) advance the timing of sleep to earlier hours, (2) affect the duration of sleep, and (3) improve sleep quality.

Sounds like a win to me.

GOAL:

Aim to get as much natural sunlight as possible every day (without getting burned). A good minimum target is 20 minutes of direct sun exposure in the AM. It regulates your melatonin production, boosts immunity, and ensures that when nighttime arrives, your body is prepped for the kind of natural sleep that leads to muscle growth.

2. Sleep Hygiene

This catchy term gets overused on the Internet, but it refers to a set of nightly habits and behaviors that help you achieve “perfect” sleep (or close to it).

You don’t neglect your dental hygiene unless you want teeth like a meth-head. Likewise, neglecting sleep hygiene always leaves you looking skinny and haggard.

You can find a full sleep hygiene checklist here, but you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck from these four nightly habits:

Think of your bedroom—and the time before bed—as sacred. This is your temple. It’s inviolable. Don’t let lightbulbs and Tinder steal your gains.

GOAL:

In the hour before bed, turn off all ambient, overhead lights and put your phone on airplane mode. A little TV is okay as long as the overhead lights are off. No electronics in your bedroom. Change your sheets every 3-7 days, or at least consider putting a fresh T-shirt over your pillow every night.

3. Sleep Nutrition

Sleep is a magnificently complex process. All those bright neurobiologists at Harvard still have little idea how it works⁶. That’s okay. You don’t need to be a PhD to understand what any Bro Scientist already knows: getting jacked, tan, and handsome requires proper nutrition.

Just as your muscles require sufficient protein to grow, your brain needs certain basic nutrients—in adequate doses—to manufacture the neurochemicals that produce healthy sleep every night. Those basics are:

1. Magnesium
2. Zinc
3. Vitamin D
4. (And potentially) Microdosed Melatonin

Unfortunately, our modern “over-civilized” world—and our poisoned food supply—make it incredibly difficult to obtain these four ingredients in levels sufficient to manufacture healthy sleep every night.

Magnesium alone is a public health crisis: over half the American population has a deficiency⁷. What’s worse: people who train hard and sweat a lot require even more magnesium⁸.

Luckily, this is an easy problem to solve. Tips #1 and #2 above (sunlight and sleep hygiene) will take care of your melatonin and vitamin D. Then, eat two pounds of red meat every day to cover your magnesium and zinc, and avoid the phytates and other antinutrients in plant foods that actually block absorption of these key minerals⁹.

Or, you can just take a supplement.

That’s exactly why we created Hibernate. All of these sleep ingredients are highly bioavailable in supplement form, and taking them nightly has a clear and noticeable effect on sleep quality.

GOAL:

Take your simple daily sleep nutrition. You’ll eliminate the most common nutrient deficiencies. You’ll ensure your brain has all the essential ingredients it needs to manufacture healthy, natural sleep. You’ll create the hormonal conditions that lead to serious muscle growth.

And, you’ll wake up feeling amazing.

Can you build muscle with only 6 hours of sleep?

As I said above, there are certain people who can repair 100% of their body’s accrued damage in only 6 hours. They do so because of two factors:

1. Their sleep quality is INCREDIBLY high;
2. They’re exposed to less stress and fewer toxins that require “repairs” each night.

Basically, the more you damage your body each day, the more Stage-3 deep sleep you need. If your sleep is extremely high quality, you might repair that damage in only 6 hours or 4 sleep cycles. If your sleep is low quality, you’ll need more sleep cycles to get the job done.

Unfortunately, almost no one living in the modern world gets sleep of such quality that they can build serious muscle in only 6 hours a night. There are just too many lifestyle factors eating away at our gains.

So, technically someone could build muscle on only 6 hours of sleep a night, but I can’t think of anyone who’s done it successfully without eventually burning out and incurring serious health problems. There’s a reason, after all, why the highest of high-performing athletes like Lebron James, Roger Federer, and Usain Bolt all claim to get 10-12 hours of sleep each day¹⁰.

If you think you’re more genetically gifted than Lebron James and Usain Bolt, by all means, get your 6 hours of sleep.

I’ll stick with 9 myself.

Don’t Compare Yourself to Normies

You eat clean. You train hard. You keep your bodyfat percentage under 14%. You run. You jump. You lift heavy weights.

You and your overweight, Cheetos-eating, IPA-drinking friend are not the same.

There are an infinite number of ways we can destabilize our bodies, and all require different repair mechanisms. Every physical system has its own methods—metabolic (gut), cardiovascular (heart), musculoskeletal, nervous (brain), endocrine (hormones), etc.

Your chubby, wheezing friend may say he needs only 7 hours of sleep to “operate.” This is undoubtedly true. He damages his gut with garbage food and his brain with TikTok. He repairs it a bit with low-quality sleep. Then, even though he “operates,” he yawns all day and hasn’t had a full erection in six years. He is not healthy. His sleep is not high-quality.

You are not the same.

This explains why you shouldn’t compare your sleep quantity to anyone else. You don’t know the quality of their sleep. You can only measure the quality of your own.

Do naps help muscle growth?

Absolutely.

There’s no conceivable reason why more sleep would hurt your gains. Endless amounts of research have shown that daytime naps benefit all other aspects of athletic performance, including fatigue, muscle soreness, and alertness¹¹.

You’d have to be an idiot to think that while all this good stuff is happening, napping would somehow sabotage your muscle growth. So, if you’re not getting 7.5 or 9 hours of high-quality sleep each night, adding a nap might be just the ticket to keep the muscle growing.

As legendary strength coach Dan John says in Mass Made Simple:

One of the most overlooked aspects of muscle-building programs is a four-letter word—STOP... Stop playing basketball. Stop jogging. Stop doing step aerobics class... Learn to walk slowly. Learn to lie down. Learn to nap.

One caveat: Don’t take long naps late in the day. Snoozing for 90 minutes in the afternoon is not good sleep hygiene and will only make it harder for you to get quality sleep at night.

What experts say about sleep for muscle growth

Neuroscientists. Bodybuilding legends. Raw powerlifting world-record holders. Everyone agrees—if you aren’t getting enough of this “high-quality” sleep, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Dr. Matthew Walker, Neuroscientist and author of Why We Sleep:

Sleep is probably the greatest legal performance enhancing drug that few athletes are abusing enough.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, some Austrian guy

You don’t grow in the gym. In fact, it’s the only time you’re not growing. You break down your muscles when you train, and the remainder of the day you build them back up. The key to this is getting plenty of quality rest. When I trained twice a day, I used to go home or to the beach and nap between workouts. I’d also always made sure I got at least eight hours of sleep each night and often more like nine or 10. I thought of sleep or even just rest as growing time, and, as the name suggests, that time is crucial to bodybuilding success.

Stan Efferding, world-record raw powerlifter and bodybuilding legend

[Sleep] is the foundation upon which everything else sits. If you're religiously taking your 5 gram thimble-sized scooper of creatine every day, and only sleeping 5 hours a night, you're a ****ing idiot.

How I Learned to Sleep for Muscle Growth (And an All-Around Better Life)

When I turned 35, I’d been a clinical insomniac over twenty years. Unless augmented with booze or Zopiclone, I almost never slept for more than 6 hours a night. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” I said, then woke up every day to hit the gym, train in the swimming pool, and drink multiple pots of black coffee.

It wasn’t so bad. I’ve always stayed lean. Women always liked my physique. I never got truly strong because I always had some minor, niggling injury that wouldn’t go away. But hey, I was better than your average NPC. I could squat a couple plates, and deadlift a couple plates…at least until the inevitable back tweak forced me to start all over. Sometimes, it seemed I spent more time on the Starr Rehab Protocol than I did on linear progression.

But when things start slowing down in my 30s—and injuries came more frequently—I decided to listen to those experts above and get serious about my sleep. After months of reading bro science, academic research, and evolutionary biology, I committed my life to these 6 habits:

1. One hour of darkness before bed
2. No phone or computer use for one hour before bed
3. A 30-minute walk in the sunlight every morning before work
4. I DIY-ed my own sleep nutrition formula (which became Hibernate)
5. No electronics in my bedroom
6. Blackout curtains on my windows

And the next year was incredible.

By the age of 37, I realized I’d gone one year without an injury for the first time in my adult life.

I improved my lifetime deadlift PR by 60lb…while reducing my bodyfat to 8%.

I slept 9 hours every single night, without pharmaceuticals or booze.

Where I previously thought my natty genetics would top out at 185lb, I slowly creeped up to a lean 195 without ever “bulking.” (In fact, I never really worried about my food at all beyond just eating meat + vegetables.)

I quit taking all supplements except for Hibernate (and the occasional multivitamin when I drink).

I had an intense mental clarity every day that allowed me to work harder and longer (and start a new business on the opposite side of the world while learning a new language).

And while I have had 1-2 minor injuries in the last few years, the thing that blows my mind the most is that my lifetime deadlift PR is now something I can hit any day of the week—no belt, no straps, no chalk, no hype music—for EMOM “cardio” sets.

At 40 years old, I’m stronger, healthier, and in some ways more athletic than I’ve ever been in my life. I attribute this entirely to high-quality sleep, and I want you to achieve the same thing.

Conclusion on Sleep for Muscle Growth

As Stan Efferding said above,  if you’re “only sleeping 5 hours a night, you're a ****ing idiot.”

Focus on your sleep quality. Get plenty of sunlight. Optimize your sleep hygiene. Consume your daily sleep nutrition. When you’ve checked those boxes, try to add more sleep cycles every night. Aim for a bare minimum of 7.5 hours, then aim for 9. Take naps if you need to.

Don’t live your life with the emergency brakes on. Get stronger. Get healthier. Don’t be a normie. Don’t fight against nature. Wake up every morning feeling like demigod.

Then, train harder.

Then, get the sleep you deserve.