Timing Exercise for Better Sleep

Exercises are amazing for a myriad of health reasons. Sleep is one of them- if you time your exercises right. Doing the wrong ones at the wrong hour can actually make your sleep worse!

How Exercise Helps With Sleep

Exercises do more than just grow muscles or burn fat. Exercises get the blood flowing and the cells activated. The “feel good” hormones, serotonin and dopamine, get a healthy boost with daily exercise. In fact, peer-reviewed studies showed how dopamine increases via exercise keep the neuroplasticity in the brain, helping prevent disorders like Parkinson’s Disease.

Vigorous exercises can also relieve muscle tension and help dissipate cortisol, the fight-or-flight hormone that keeps us alert, helps us regulate metabolism and acts as an anti-inflammatory. It is naturally produced to maintain these functions. On a meta level, having to focus on exercising can give your brain a break from any thoughts that cause high stress, which definitely can keep you awake at night.

The Wrong Time To Exercise

Is there a wrong time to exercise? It largely depends on how much exercise you get, your body’s typical response, and your bedroom setting.

I often ran into this problem when I served in the military. It wasn’t vigorous exercises that were raising my core body temperature just before bed, but lots of physical labor under difficult conditions, and then expecting to catch a few hours of sleep ASAP before going back to the work site. It was hard to get to sleep! But for the days where there was a big enough break between the labor and the snooze, I slept like a rock.

In addition to helping lower stress, vigorous exercises will also raise your body’s core temperature. That can make it difficult to get into Phase 2 of the sleep cycle, where the core temperature drops and signals the body that it’s time to begin regrowth and repair.

If you have a cool bedroom set up (68 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit is optimal for sleep) and you can get your body cooled down before slipping under the sheets, you should be ok, especially if exercise is already the norm for you.

Otherwise, doing a heavy HIIT routine and expecting to pass out into restorative sleep right afterwards wouldn’t be expected.

The Best Exercises Before Bed

There are some exercises that you can do before bed that will help you reduce stress without raising your body temperature. Deep yoga stretches can rid you of any acute aches and pains that might even wake you up in the middle of the night. The slowed, controlled breathing will already help you calm your mind. A brisk walk or a slow jog in the evening air can also be very relaxing and good for getting your body ready for bed. It’s generally much quieter outside at night, and the natural coolness can help get that core temperature down.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation is also a form of physical exercise, albeit a minute one.

It’s one I add to my client’s guided meditations. If you don’t get a lot of exercise to begin with, engaging in PMR while in bed can help produce the same tension-relieving results. You concentrate on tensing up a muscle group, ideally starting with the head area. After a few seconds, you relax that tension, and then move onto the next lower muscle group until you reach your feet. If you’re still awake by then, you can work your way back up. The blood flow increases, the tension decreases, and you become more relaxed before deep sleep.

Regardless, any exercise is better than no exercise. Make it part of your routine if you have trouble going to sleep at night.