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Strong Women
Exercise for sleep: the best workouts for improved sleep (and how it works)
By Chloe Gray
11 months ago
3 min read
Want to sleep better? Here are the best forms of exercise to help you nod off easier.
The secret to getting a good night’s sleep has to be one of life’s great mysteries. Taking time to wind down, practise good sleep hygiene and fuel your body correctly will all help, but try too hard and you could make the issue ten times worse.
But if there’s one thing that can really make a difference to how well you sleep, it’s exercise. Not only can it make you feel more tired – increasing your sleep drive – but it can also lead to physiological changes which make falling asleep easier.
“Physical movement can help us produce the chemical adenosine, which promotes sleepiness and enables melatonin to work more effectively,” explains sleep expert Dr Nerina Ramlakhan, author of several books including Tired But Wired. “The build-up in the levels of adenosine is the catalyst to stop adrenaline, and other stimulating hormones, being produced and initiates the biochemical changes necessary for sleep.”
According to Nuffield Health’s latest Healthier Nation index, one of the current top three motivators for exercising more in the UK is wanting to sleep better – so it’s clear we’re all on the hunt for ways to improve our sleep through healthy habits.
But what are the best forms of exercise for improving sleep? And what should a sleep-friendly exercise routine look like? We asked the experts to share their thoughts.
The best type of exercise for sleep
Credit: Getty
Fear not: exercising for sleep doesn’t mean you should be throwing yourself into an intense HIIT session on your well-deserved rest day just so you can get to sleep at night. Actually, the best form of movement for snoozing might not be cardio at all.
In a 2022 study, published in the American Heart Association journal, researchers compared aerobic, resistance and combined workout routines to find which was the best to improve sleep.
They found sleep duration, efficiency and quality increased the most in the resistance only group. In particular, those who did resistance workouts slept on average for an extra 40 minutes a night, compared to an increase of around 23 minutes in the aerobic exercise group and 17 minutes in the combined exercise group.
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While the research underscores that any exercise is better than none for sleeping, the reason resistance training may be better is because the body releases hormones that signal damage to the tissues and encourage the body to get better sleep to properly recover.
With that in mind, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to kill yourself lifting weights to sleep more. “You don’t have to do huge amounts of intense activity to reap the benefits – just moving every hour or so throughout the day is beneficial,” says Dr Ramlakhan.
The best time of day to exercise for deep sleep
All of this doesn’t mean doing a session just before bed though. Haven’t you ever experienced post-training energy that makes it impossible to sleep? It all comes down to your blood pressure, according to Dr Ramlakhan.
“Naturally, your blood pressure should lower by up to 20% at night time. However, immediately after a workout your blood pressure can rise, which makes it hard to wind down. Exercising early in the day, on the other hand, helps to lower the levels of the stress hormones – adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol – which then has an anti-hypertensive (blood pressure lowering) effect,” explains Dr Ramlakhan.
“The production of endorphins during and post-exercise also produces a feel-good factor which can have the additional effect of lowering blood pressure to help us sleep.”
And let’s not forget that the sleep-exercise relationship works both ways: the magic from your workout actually happens when you sleep, as it’s during the night that muscles recover and rebuild stronger. In fact, studies show that a lack of sleep actually results in muscle loss.
Excuse us, we’re off to snooze.
Images: Getty
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