Sleep: We crave it, we chase it, we mourn its loss, and we welcome it. Regular exercise helps. Even short bouts of exercise a few times a week have been shown to improve the quality of our sleep.
However, vigorous exercise close to bedtime is generally not recommended, as it stimulates the body at a time when it should be resting. Research has shown that exercising within an hour of bedtime can make it take longer to fall asleep and can significantly reduce the quality of your sleep.
But that doesn’t mean spending your evenings curled up on the couch or curled up in front of a screen is the way to go – it’s all about finding a balance, and new research suggests that simply getting in a few minutes of movement each night may be enough.
A small study by researchers at the University of Otago in New Zealand suggests that a short bout of exercise in the evening (three minutes of simple bodyweight exercises every 30 minutes) can help you get 30 minutes more sleep, on average.
“We know that for many of us, the longest periods of uninterrupted sitting occur in the evenings, while awake at home,” explains Jennifer Gale, a postgraduate sedentary behaviour researcher at the University of Otago, who led the study.
“However, many sleep guidelines say that people shouldn’t engage in long or high-intensity exercise in the hours before bed, so we wanted to see what would happen if people engaged in repeated, very brief, light exercise at night.”
Half of the 28 volunteers sat uninterrupted for four hours before going to bed one night, and then a week later did three minutes of weight training every 30 minutes for four hours before going to bed. The other group reversed the order, but either way, it was a typical weekday evening.
Participants wore wristwatch accelerometers to track their movements and performed exercises including chair squats, calf raises, and standing knee raises with straight legs and hip extensions. The exercises were intentionally simple so that anyone could do them at home, without equipment or a lot of space. Each exercise consisted of three rounds of 20-second movements.
Participants ate the same foods every night and even replicated the timing of their bathroom visits from the first night the following night, controlling for those factors.
On average, people slept about 30 minutes longer after incorporating these brief bouts of exercise into their evenings than if they sat still. But jumping up and moving around had no effect on how often they woke up during the night or on the quality of their sleep.
“These results add to a growing body of evidence showing that, contrary to current sleep recommendations, nighttime exercise does not impair sleep quality,” Gale and colleagues conclude.
This was a small study involving mostly young women with an average age of 25, so the results would need to be replicated in a larger, more diverse group before it could say how effective this light evening exercise might be for other people.
But the researchers hope that these simple exercises, or similar ones, may provide a routine that people can stick to and that they’re less disruptive to sleep than cramming a run or bike ride before bed.
“We know from other studies that walking around the house, marching in place or even dancing in your living room probably has similar benefits,” said Meredith Peddie, a sports scientist and nutrition researcher at the University of Otago.
“The most important thing is to get out of your chair and move around regularly.”
The study was published in BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine.
