BODY POSITIONING FOR SLEEP RECOVERY

Sleeping by Sean King July 5, 2011, Gibraltar UK https://flic.kr/p/agL8D2

JULIA MALACOFF’S, “RANKING THE BEST AND WORST SLEEP POSITIONS” for Under Armor’s My FitnessPal.com blog, sorts out what some sleep experts think are good and not so good body positions for comfortable sleep.  Because muscle synthesis occurs overnight when sufficient protein is available in training athletes, a good dose of recovery sleep is important for improving performance. 
 
Malacoff consults medical sleep experts to provide a scientific perspective on why arranging your body during sleep may affect its quality. 
 
The least common and ‘worst’ seems to be stomach sleeping because of the strain it puts on the neck and back. Better and common is back sleeping, an oft recommended position because it results in the least likelihood of body twists.  Side-sleeping, also a common position, is possibly the most comfortable, especially on the left.  
 
One of the most important vanity reasons not to sleep on the stomach and to flip in your back is to minimize wrinkle facial formation!  I always wondered if gravity also aggravated the prominence of under-eye darkness and ‘bags’. It’s one of the reasons I have altered my usual position to the left side from face-down on my stomach.
 
For more insights on sleep position check out the full article. The graphics are simple but make the story a quick and interesting read. Both sleep quantity and quality are important to maintaining physical health and avoiding illness and injury. “Healthy adults are notoriously poor at self-assessing the magnitude of the impact of sleep loss”, indicates a research article abtract on this topic.  If a change is position can improve either, it’s worth investigating. 
 
RUN & MOVE HAPPY!
 
https://blog.myfitnesspal.com/ranking-the-best-and-worst-sleep-positions
 
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25926415
 
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/sms.12703
 
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5188418/