Is sleeping like 9 hours common for heavy exercisers, especially weight trainers?

If you are training that hard, you may want to consider whether it's sustainable. It's normal for the body to demand more sleep when under a heavy training load. But if you start needing 9.5 hours, and still feeling sluggish during the day, every day, then it's probably not sustainable.

It will help if you cut out junk food, dessert, any useless unhealthy munchies. Get plenty of protein, fruits/veggies, healthy carbs, and a reasonable amount of healthy fats.

Maybe see a nutritionist to make sure you're on track?

I get extremely exhausted after a heavy weight training session, to the point where I have to sleep for like 2 hours afterwards and chill out for the rest of they day.

Thanks, not sure I’m training that hard and I don’t feel sluggish during the day, just needing to sleep a lot at night, but here’s my typical week anyway:

- 4 days heavy weight training (1 to 1.5 hours per session),

- 2 days running (one long run + one workout, totaling 15-20 miles including warmup/cooldown),

- 3-4 indoor 20-min HIIT workouts on bike or rower.

I used to burn much more calories when I was running more often and only running, so it seems likely because of weight training. I stuff my face as much as I can and my muscle mass gain would suggest I can not be calorically deficited.

Cross country skiers train among the most hours of any sport, often in the 1000 hr per year range and do a lot of weight training. Anecdotally, I’ve read stories of many sleeping a ton. Petter Northug sleeping around 12 hrs a day is the extreme that I’ve heard.

What body is wanting is obviously real, so sleep more or do less work.

8.5 hrs average and often 9 hrs isn’t even extreme. It’s well within normal, especially if unconstrained by trying to do too much in your life.

OP here: in case anyone else is wondering about this problem, what I discovered was that for me it was the extra calories I was stuffing down my face to bulk that was likely responsible. I’m now in a small cutting phase with a small calorie deficit (that comes naturally to me just by eating only by hunger like I used to before), and I find myself waking up after 7-8 hours like before.

During cutting, I’m also not trying to gain strength and doing lighter weights but also doing more reps, so that’s another confounding variable, but as someone who has plenty of experience working out a lot, my intuition is that it was the food much more than the exercise that was knocking me out cold.