The Importance Of Sleeping After Workouts

16th April 2021 | Sleep & Customer Satisfaction
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Exercise and diet are vital to living a healthy life, but there are factors outside the kitchen and gym that can be just as significant. The quality of your sleep is also crucial to maintaining a healthy mind and body.

Here, TEMPUR® explores the link between sleep and fitness, explaining the importance of sleeping after exercise and answering common questions, including whether you should exercise before bed.

How Important is Sleeping After Workouts?

While there is still much to learn about the purpose of sleep, it is known that people require sleep for rest, recovery and growth. If you don’t attain the right amount of sleep, your body won’t be able to perform at its best. So, whether your goal in exercise is to get fitter, build muscle mass or benefit your mental health, you are unlikely to achieve these aims without a great night’s rest.

The effects of sleep deprivation on athletic performance have been studied in depth and include:

  • Slower muscle recovery
  • Reduced energy
  • Increased perception of exertion
  • Increased stress hormones, such as cortisol

How Does Sleep Help Muscle Recovery?

Sleep is broadly split into two stages: Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and non-REM sleep. During non-REM sleep, your brain releases growth hormone. This is necessary because exercising, particularly if using weights, creates small tears in your muscles. Growth hormone stimulates your body to repair these tears, strengthening and growing your muscles as it does so.

Inadequate sleep can halt the body’s production of the growth hormone and cause your muscles to recover more slowly. This can also impair the increase in muscle strength that follows a workout, meaning sleep is vital for anyone trying to improve their fitness[1].

The Importance of Your Mattress for Recovery

During sleep your muscles are at their most relaxed. This allows the tension in them to ease and any pain following a workout to be reduced. However, while this relaxation is beneficial, it also means you need to ensure your body is properly supported as you sleep, with a high quality mattress.

TEMPUR® mattresses are of the highest quality because they are designed using advanced sleep materials, originally developed to support astronauts in space. This means they’re perfect for aiding your recovery following an intense workout.

Can Exercise Help Me Sleep?

The right amount of sleep is different for everyone. However, if you’re finding it difficult to fall asleep or you are waking up not feeling well-rested, exercising is one of the best ways to boost your sleep quality. As little as 30 minutes per day of aerobic exercise, such as jogging or swimming, can boost the quality of your sleep[2].

The exact reason exercise aids sleep is not clear, but it has been found to help stabilise moods and reduce anxiety, which may help. Further, working out uses excess energy and tires your body, increasing the need for you to rest.

Should You Exercise Before Bed?

Working out too close to bedtime has traditionally been advised against, as exercise is known for boosting energy levels and it has been thought that this might make sleeping more difficult. Exercising in the daytime has therefore been advised previously, as a way of burning excess energy, long before bedtime.

This thinking has been challenged recently, with researchers finding that exercising in the evening doesn’t hinder sleep. Studies have even found that people who exercised in the evening fell asleep quicker than those who didn’t and attained higher sleep quality[3].

The only exception to this were people who did high intensity exercise, such as interval training, less than an hour before bed – they did fall asleep more slowly and had a more disrupted rest. Sleeping after workouts is therefore fine, providing you’re not pumping up your energy levels immediately before bed.

Do you find exercise helps you sleep better? Have you found the TEMPUR® guide to sleep and exercise useful? Then share with your friends using the buttons below…

References

[1] https://www.sleep.org/how-sleep-adds-muscle/

[2] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/exercising-for-better-sleep

[3] https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/does-exercising-at-night-affect-sleep

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