Exercise near bedtime can improve sleep duration, a new study says Short, simple breaks of resistance exercise improved sleep by nearly a half hour The exercise also didn’t cause more waking in the night or other sleep disturbances WEDNESDAY, July 17, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Exercise near bedtime won’t necessarily wreck a person’s sleep, a new study says. Intense exercise is typically discouraged as bedtime approaches, since such activity can disturb sleep by increasing body temperature and heart rate, researchers said. But short resistance exercise "activity breaks" at regular intervals can actually improve a person’s sleep, compared to winding down on a couch, researchers reported in the journal BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine .
Simple, three-minute “activity breaks” involving chair squats, calf raises and standing knee raises with straight leg hip extensions added nearly an extra half-hour to a person’s sleep, when performed at 30-minute intervals in the four hours before sleep, results show. “These results add to a growing body of evidence that indicates evening exercise does not disrupt sleep quality, despite current sleep recommendations to the contrary,” concluded the research team led by Jennifer Gale , a doctoral candidate and sedentary behavior researcher with the University of Otago in New Zealand. For the study, researchers recruited 30 people ages 18 to 40.
All participants said they typically have more than five hours of sedentary time at w.
