United States – A new study has revealed that taking exercise in the evening will not interfere with a person’s sleep.
Vigorous exercise is generally advised against in the hours leading to sleep since it disrupts sleep patterns
by raising core body temperature and heart rate, researchers pointed out, as reported by HealthDay.
Exercises Before Bed Could Add Half an Hour of Sleep
But short resistance exercise ‘activity breaks’ at one, two, or three hourly intervals of the day can actually enhance the quality of a person’s sleep as compared to a sedentary mode on a couch, as revealed in the journal BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine.
Based on the findings, simple three-minute ‘activity breaks’ that include chair squats, calf raises, and standing knee raises with straight leg hip extensions, if done at 30-minute intervals in the four hours prior to sleep, contributed almost half an hour of sleep to a person.
“These findings are in line with other studies that suggest that evening exercise does not affect the quality of sleep despite existing sleep guidelines discouraging such practices,” stated Gale, an independent doctoral student and sedentary behavior analyst from the University of Otago, New Zealand.
Study Details and Impact on Sedentary Lifestyles
To conduct the study, the researchers only took a sample of 30 participants aged between 18 and 40 years. Each interviewed participant mentioned that they spend more than five hours a day in a sedentary position at work and, in the evening, about two hours.
All of the participants went through two different stages of the experiment in a controlled laboratory, during which they were separated for at least six days.
In one session, they stayed in the chair for four hours before sleep. In the other arm, they did 3 minutes of resistance exercises every 30 minutes.
Analyses of the results indicate that activity breaks increased overall sleep by 27 minutes for each of the participants.
The resistance exercises also did not make the subjects experience any more sleep disturbances or awakenings than if they lay in bed all night, as the data showed.
“Regularly interrupting prolonged sitting with short bouts of activity breaks is a promising intervention that may improve cardiometabolic health through multiple mechanisms,” researchers said in a journal news release.
Scientists assumed the above-mentioned short periods of resistance exercise would enhance sleep because the metabolic rate increased slightly and blood glucose levels reduced.
“Adults accrue the longest periods of sedentary time and consume almost half their daily energy intake during the evening, added to which insulin sensitivity is lower at this time,” the researchers noted, as reported by HealthDay.
The forms of resistance used in the study are easy to perform, do not need any apparatus, and can be completed in front of the television, the authors stated. This makes it possible for them to become a normal part of an average person’s bedtime regimen.