UPDATE

When reporting your hours I recommend adding the times you went to bed and woke up so your post isn't too short and automod deletes it. Also make sure you're noting which day you're reporting your times for. For example:

DAY 1: 9 hours. Went to sleep at midnight and woke up at 9:00am.

August is almost here so now is as good a time as any to begin a 30 day challenge. This month we'll be focusing on rest and recovery, principally through getting quality sleep.

Ideally you should be aiming for 5 to 6 sleep cycles, which translates to roughly 7.5 to 9 hours of quality rest and recovery.

Remember, all that working out in the gym or playing sports is just the stimulus telling your body to adapt. It's during your sleep that the bulk of the adaptations actually occur, so if you're shortchanging your sleep, then you're also hamstringing your progress.

What I want from all of you is to on a daily basis sound off in this thread with how much sleep you got. Don't make excuses, just post your numbers starting August 1st. Do this the first chance you get. Every. Single. Day.

Why am I doing this? I'm doing this because of something I learned from behavioral psychology, which is that people tend to stick with a program when they're not only tracking progress, but submitting it for review and their results are evaluated. People tend to up the ante and stick with it when others are watching, and I WILL be holding your feet to the fire and sending off reminders if you haven't checked in.

Note: I've provided examples of how to check-in every day. Make one reply here committing yourself to the challenge and then every day make a reply to that thread. I should see 30 replies to each of your comments by the end of the month.

More info:

http://www.helpguide.org/articles/sleep/how-much-sleep-do-you-need.htm

Together, the stages of REM and non-REM sleep form a complete sleep cycle. Each cycle typically lasts about 90 minutes and repeats four to six times over the course of a night.

Here's a valuable tool I and many others have been using for years now to help our bodies wind down if we spend a lot of time in front of the computer:

https://justgetflux.com/

Another helpful tip is not having any caffeine after 4pm if you want to go to bed at a reasonable time.

And lastly, while hitting the gym is great, it's terrible for going to sleep. It normally takes me a good 4-6 hours after a good session at the gym before I even begin feeling tired/sleepy thanks to the havoc going on with my hormones and blood chemistry that working out creates.

And an excellent thread on the efficacy of sleep wrt working out:

/r/TheRedPill/comments/3r3fyb/if_you_dont_sleep_you_might_as_well_not_lift/