The Link between Sleep and Exercise
All month long we’re diving into our Pillars of Health and how sleep is linked to each of the other pillars. This week, we’re exploring the relationship between sleep and exercise.
Chances are if you aren’t sleeping enough, it’s awfully hard to drag yourself to the gym regularly on the little energy you have left. Conversely, if you’re someone who does manage to make their exercise routine a priority you might be sabotaging your efforts by not giving yourself enough time to sleep. Turns out, this is all backed by science.
How sleep affects your workouts
Sleep affects the reason you exercise
We all exercise for different reasons: cardio health, increase muscle, improve endurance, lose weight, etc. But as it turns out, sleep deprivation has a direct impact on each of these to the extent where it might be completely negating your exercise regime.
A better sleep = a better workout
A lack of sleep makes you fatigue much faster during your workouts, making it hard to work out to your full capacity. A study also found that treadmill endurance decreased significantly after only one night of sleep deprivation. Sleep loss is also linked to physiological responses that inhibit your performance, such as sore muscles and higher risk of injury.
Sleep contributes to muscle recovery
Sleep loss decreases protein synthesis pathways, hindering muscle recovery after exercise. It also decreases your testosterone levels, which aids in the rebuilding of muscles after working out. It also seriously impairs the ability for your muscles to recover after injury, which is bad news to go along with the higher risk of injury previously mentioned.
How exercise affects your sleep
Exercise makes you more sleepy
A poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation found that exercisers are more likely to report higher sleep qualities and less sleepiness. A study also took individuals with a routine of less than 6.5 hours of sleep a night and gave them a moderate-intensity workout routine to follow for 6 weeks, and their sleep increased by an average of 75 minutes per night. This increased sleepiness is in large part due to the hormone adenosine, which is produced in higher quantities during exercise.
Working out maintains your circadian rhythm
Our circadian rhythm controls a lot of processes in our bodies, and is impacted by many of our habits. Similar to how your eating schedule can impact your circadian rhythm (which we touched on last week), exercise also has a huge impact. When your circadian rhythm is off, your body doesn’t know when to sleep, causing your sleep quality to decline.
It sounds like sleep and exercise is another chicken-and-egg problem: not getting enough sleep makes it difficult to work out, or negates your efforts, and a lack of regular exercise decreases your quality of sleep. This also poses another problem you may be thinking about: To work out, I need to either get up earlier or go to bed later, there’s just not enough time in the day. So many of us are overworked, swamped with balancing work, family, and friends, spending too much time commuting and too much time sitting at work. Unfortunately, there isn’t a great solution — if you want to make your health a priority, you need to make time for it. Try starting with 15 minutes a day of High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) to maximize your workout benefits in the least amount of time, and make sure you’re following good sleep hygiene to get the most out of the hours you manage to spend in bed. Next week, in our last addition to this series, we’ll be exploring the links between sleep and our mental health, so stay tuned!
