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Study indicates best time to exercise to improve sleep

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4 months ago

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Study indicates best time to exercise to improve sleep

Working out first thing can help set a positive tone for the day, but if you’re not a morning person, a pre-work sweat sesh can feel impossible. Instead, you probably tend to hit the gym or roll out your mat in the evenings – and that’s ok. Any movement is good movement, but if improving your sleep is on your mind right now, previous research has suggested that you might want to avoid intense workouts too close to bedtime.

In 2018, Sports Medicine determined that vigorous exercise ending within an hour of hitting the hay was linked with lower total sleep time and a longer time to fall asleep. But not all exercise is created equal. While exercise that causes a spike in your heart-rate and core body temperature pre-bed – like HIIT, CrossFit and running – may mean you don’t get as much shut-eye, a new study found that three minutes of bodyweight exercise, every half an hour for four hours, may invoke a sounder sleep.

The study was performed on 30 people between the ages of 18 and 40. Wearing a fitness watch to track their activity and sleep patterns for seven days, each participant completed two four-hour sessions on the same day of the week, separated by at least six days.

In the first session, participants were sedentary (sitting) for four hours straight, directly before going to bed. In the second session, participants performed three minutes of simple bodyweight movements (three x 20-second rounds of chair squats, calf raises and standing knee raises with straight leg extension, with 40 seconds rest in between) every 30 minutes over the four hours prior to going to sleep.

The results showed that after the second session, every participant slept for an extra 27 minutes on average.

‘Our study showed that interrupting evening sitting time, by getting up every 30 minutes to do 3 minutes of exercise, improved sleep duration,’ Jen Gale, a sedentary behaviour researcher and one of the authors of the study published in BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine says. ‘The key is to perform these activity breaks, as a means of breaking up the time you may spend sitting in the evening before you go to bed.

‘You could probably get a similar effect from marching on the spot, dancing around the living room, or incorporating any type of activity that works for you and your household.’

Evening exercise snacking it is.

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Bridie is Fitness Editor at Women’s Health UK. She spends her days sweating over new workouts, fitness launches and the best home gym kit so you have all that you need to get fit done. Her work has been published in Stylist, Glamour, Cosmopolitan and more. She’s also a part-time yoga teacher with a habit of nodding off mid savasana (not when she’s teaching, promise).

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