The other day I came across a prominent strength training site that published a guest author's opinion that cholesterol is not implicated in heart disease, that this is essentially a worldwide conspiracy to sell more drugs, and, that lowering cholesterol will reduce your testosterone and therefore your strength and muscle-building potential. You can even see special muscle-building diets designed around high cholesterol foods that are supposed to make you stronger. Don't believe it.

The internet is a mine-field of disinformation. There is no doubt about the role of high cholesterol in heart disease. Professors Brown and Goldstein won a Nobel Prize in 1985 for describing how this works.

Cholesterol is produced in the body and has an important role to play. One function is as a building block for hormones like testosterone, the male hormone, which women also need, and which helps promote strength and muscle and sex drive. The body makes as much as it needs. Cholesterol can come from your diet as well when you eat animal foods. And, saturated fats and trans fats in the diet can cause the cholesterol regulation system to get the wrong signals and so you get a buildup of cholesterol in the arteries, which can cause heart attacks.

Does lowering cholesterol reduce your testosterone significantly? Your body produces all the cholesterol it needs and, at moderate levels of consumption, incorporates dietary cholesterol into the process. Testosterone levels fluctuate with training, mood, and probably with diet to some extent. Hard training, insufficient sleep, poor eating patterns, too much alcohol, stress -- many things affect testosterone in ways that produce fluctuating levels of this hormone. Lowering cholesterol to protect yourself from heart attacks and disease has no significant effect on testosterone production or your ability to weight train or build muscle and strength.

Don't believe the cholesterol skeptics. They are dangerous.

Good sleep is perhaps one of the most underestimated tools in the bodybuilding and strength training arsenal. And by good sleep I mean "deep sleep," which is a form of sleep in which you are more likely to be undisturbed by noises and events around you. This can be compared to REM sleep or "rapid eye movement" sleep, which is a lighter sleep phase.

In deep sleep, human growth hormone does its best work. It repairs damaged tissue, aids in muscle growth and generally promotes the "repair and rebuild" function of muscle building that weight trainers rely on for results.

In fact, a decline in deep sleep as we age has been suggested as a contributing factor to muscle wasting (sarcopenia) in the elderly.

If you want to get the best out of all that hard work you put in at the gym, then you must plan to get sufficient quality sleep. How much of deep sleep, REM sleep and total sleep is optimum, is still a matter of conjecture across gender and age. Yet as you must know from experience, refreshing sleep has its own rewards when you wake -- and it is unmistakable.