When it comes to improving health and performance, most people focus on training harder, eating cleaner, or trying the latest supplement. But there’s a quieter, more powerful foundation that often gets overlooked: recovery. Two of the most telling, and underappreciated, indicators of how your body is functioning behind the scenes are sleep quality and resting metabolic rate (RMR).

Why Sleep Is More Than Just Rest

Sleep isn’t passive downtime. It’s a highly active recovery state where your body repairs tissue, recalibrates hormones, clears out metabolic waste, and consolidates memory. Without enough high-quality sleep, even the best training plan will underdeliver.

Research shows that poor or inconsistent sleep impacts everything from immune function to energy metabolism. It elevates cortisol, decreases insulin sensitivity, impairs cognitive performance, and slows muscle recovery. If you’re waking up groggy despite spending enough time in bed, it’s a signal that your recovery systems may be falling behind.

RMR: A Window into Your Metabolism

Resting metabolic rate is the number of calories your body burns at rest to carry out essential functions like breathing, hormone production, and temperature regulation. It’s one of the clearest indicators of your metabolic health, and often the first to show stress from overtraining, undereating, or low recovery.

At Different Health, we measure RMR to identify these issues early. A suppressed RMR can mean the body is stuck in energy conservation mode, which not only reduces performance capacity but also makes it harder to lose fat, gain muscle, and feel energized.

What We Measure and Why

We track several key metrics during our executive assessments:

• Sleep duration – Are you getting enough hours on a consistent basis?
• Sleep consistency – Are you going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time each day?
• Sleep efficiency – How much of your time in bed is spent in restorative sleep?
• RMR trends – Are your energy needs appropriate for your activity level and recovery demands?

These metrics help us paint a more complete picture of how your body is handling your current routine. They often reveal hidden stressors or imbalances that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Why This Matters

When your sleep and metabolism are aligned, everything else improves: energy, mood, focus, training adaptations, and long-term health outcomes. These two markers help you understand how well your body is coping with your daily workload and where additional support may be needed. Most importantly, they allow for personalized, actionable changes rather than guesswork.

How to Improve Your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR)

RMR is not fixed. It can fluctuate based on training, nutrition, stress, and lifestyle habits. The good news? With the right approach, you can boost your baseline metabolism and improve how your body handles energy, without resorting to extreme diets or overtraining.

1. Build and Maintain Muscle Mass

Muscle is metabolically active tissue. Increasing lean mass through resistance training is one of the most effective ways to raise RMR. A 2022 study found that strength training increased RMR and improved energy availability in active individuals, even without changes in body weight¹.

• Tip: Aim for 2-4 strength sessions per week focused on progressive overload.

2. Avoid Chronic Caloric Deficits

While short-term energy restriction may support fat loss, prolonged or extreme dieting can suppress RMR by signaling to the body that it needs to conserve energy. Recent data shows that low energy availability, even in recreational athletes, can lead to metabolic suppression and hormone disruption².

• Tip: Make sure you’re fueling enough for your activity levels and prioritize nutrient dense foods, especially protein. 

3. Improve Sleep Quality

As noted earlier, sleep is a metabolic regulator. A 2023 review highlighted that just one week of sleep restriction can lower RMR and increase markers of metabolic dysregulation³.

• Tip: Prioritize consistent sleep/wake times, minimize late-night screen exposure, and create a sleep-friendly environment.

4. Reduce Chronic Stress

Elevated cortisol is linked to reduced thyroid hormone activity and a downregulated metabolism. A 2021 study confirmed that individuals under chronic stress exhibited lower RMR and impaired metabolic flexibility⁴.

• Tip: Incorporate breathwork, light movement, or time outdoors to regulate your nervous system.

5. Stay Active Between Workouts

Non-exercise activity, like walking, standing, and fidgeting, makes up a large part of daily energy burn. A 2022 study found that individuals with higher non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) had significantly higher RMRs, regardless of structured exercise⁵.

• Tip: Break up sedentary time with frequent movement. Even small changes add up.

Key Takeaways

If you’re doing all the “right” things, but still feeling sluggish, it’s time to look at your recovery. Recovery isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation for how you think, feel, and perform. Get the objective data to guide smarter decisions. 

Prioritize sleep. Build your performance on a solid recovery foundation. When you feel better, you perform better. And when you measure what matters, progress becomes inevitable.

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Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Sources:

1. Kurose, S. et al. (2022). Effects of resistance training on resting metabolic rate and energy balance. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 122(3), 547–556. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-021-04802-w
   
2. Heikura, I. A. et al. (2021). Low energy availability is difficult to assess but outcomes have large impact on health, performance, and wellbeing. International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 31(3), 211–222. https://doi.org/10.1123/ijsnem.2020-0293
   
3. Al Khatib, H. K. et al. (2023). Sleep loss and its effect on metabolism and weight. Nature Reviews Endocrinology, 19(1), 20–35. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41574-022-00699-1
   
4. Stults-Kolehmainen, M. A. et al. (2021). The impact of stress on metabolism and behavior: An integrated review. Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 60, 100878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yfrne.2020.100878
5. Passmore, R. et al. (2022). NEAT and energy expenditure in everyday life. Obesity Reviews, 23(6), e13438. https://doi.org/10.1111/obr.13438