The secrets to a healthy lifestyle aren’t hard to figure out. You can ask any expert, and their answers are the same: a balanced diet, exercise, and sleep. But people often forget that healthy eating, fitness, and rest depend on each other. Most stressors often affect your sleeping patterns. However, with a proper exercise regimen, you can achieve plenty of rest your body needs to recover. Learn the relationship between exercise and sleep in this story.
Understanding the Relationship Between Exercise and Sleep
Daily tasks take a toll on your body in one form or another, and sleep gives you time to recover and conserve one’s energy. In addition, it repairs and builds up muscles and cells you use for any activity you do during the day. Getting enough quality sleep also helps your body in producing growth hormones. While they help us grow during childhood, these hormones work in building and repairing lean muscles adults tear during their day-to-day activities. In a way, the secretion and production of growth hormone is critical for a full-body recovery.
Adults need at least seven hours of sleep to qualify for quality rest, but a CDC survey in 2021 states that more than one-third of adults in the US experience short sleep, or less than seven hours of sleep every day. With many people experiencing sleep deprivation daily, the number of individuals losing in their fitness journeys gets higher, too.
One of the notable causes of bad sleeping habits is stress, and one of the top stress-relievers people can get behind is exercise. Many experts have studied the relationship between exercise and sleep, and a study shows that these factors share a bidirectional relationship. Working out reduces your sleep onset, making you awake less during the night. While a good night’s sleep cannot do the same for encouraging you to exercise more, it does help your performance during the day.
“Both poor/insufficient sleep and physical inactivity are significant public health priorities. Interest in the bidirectional relationship between exercise and sleep has surged in recent years, presumably due to increased recognition of the value of sleep and the modifiability of both sleep and exercise behaviors.” Dr. Christopher E. Kline, Associate Professor, Department of Health and Human Development, University of Pittsburgh
Exercises for Better Sleep
There are exercises you can use to succeed in your fitness journey and achieve better sleeping habits. Exercising not only helps you improve your physical condition, but it also does wonders for your mood, cognitive function, and emotional well-being.
Recent studies recommend physical activity for adults is exercises of moderate-to-vigorous intensity for at least 150 minutes per week. The suggested training regimen can offer a better quality of life, lessens the risk of ailments, and improves brain function.
While focusing on exercises with moderate-to-vigorous intensity can help your general well-being, specific workouts also focus on making you sleep better. Here are some of them.
Aerobic Exercises
Aerobic or cardio workouts are must-have exercises in every fitness journey. They have moderate-to-vigorous intensity activities that increase your heart rate, which helps you to sweat. They improve sleep quality by reducing your sleep onset and excessive daytime sleepiness.
In addition, aerobic training decreases the severity of sleep-disordered breathing conditions like sleep apnea. By doing aerobic exercises, you wear out your muscles and heart, which helps limit them from seeking more activity at night and provides you with longer, uninterrupted sleep.
Some aerobic exercises you can consider are swimming, biking, jogging, and brisk walking.
Resistance Exercises
Resistance exercises or strength training are everyone’s go-to routines for building and strengthening different muscle groups in the body. Some resistance training routines have sit-ups, push-ups, resistance bands, and free weights.
Regular resistance training help improve sleep by lowering anxiety and depression symptoms often triggered by daily stressors or certain traumatic events. In addition, a recent study showed these exercises also reduce the risks of developing health conditions, like CVD and diabetes, with associations with poor or insufficient sleep.
“RE sessions at certain times of the day may assist in sleep goals such as shortening time to fall asleep or decreasing the amount of time spent awake during the night.” – Scott R. Collier, Professor, Ph.D. Cardiovascular Exercise Science, Graduate Faculty, Appalachian State University
Yoga and Stretching Exercises
In recent years, many studies have shown that Yoga can improve one’s sleeping habits. The practice involves different stretching exercises and forms that relax the muscles. Due to that, they cause significant physical and mental exertion, which helps lessen sleep disturbances and latency and improve sleep efficiency.
Yoga also improves a person’s mindfulness and increases melatonin levels. In addition, meditation and breathing exercises lower nocturnal blood pressure and are great ways to de-stress.
Timing Your Exercises Also Matter
Many people find exercising near their bedtime keeps them awake throughout the night, and that can affect their sleep cycle over time. While most individuals disregard the schedule of their training routines, timing when you do it is critical to improve your sleeping habits.
Some exercises, like aerobic training, help the body release endorphins, creating activity levels in the brain to keep you awake. Although not everyone experiences this, it’s best to schedule them at least two hours before going to bed. Doing this will give time for your endorphins to wash out and your brain to wind down.
In addition, exercising raises your core body temperature. When your body temperature elevates, it signals your body clock to stay awake. The lower your core body temperature falls, the easier it is to sleep.
Getting Your Sleep Cycle Back on Track
Sleeping is the body’s way to recover, rejuvenate, and repair itself naturally. Without proper sleeping habits, your other efforts to stay fit and healthy go down the drain. It’s best to understand the bidirectional relationship between exercise and sleep. Knowing how they affect each other can help you create a training regimen that benefits your physical and sleeping conditions.
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