This Simple Evening Routine Could Be the Key to Better Sleep: ScienceAlert

Sleep: We crave it, we seek it, we mourn the loss of it, and we accept it. Regular exercise can help; even short sessions a few times a week have been shown to improve sleep quality.

But it’s generally not recommended to exercise too hard close to bedtime, as it puts stress on our bodies at a time when we should be winding down. Research shows that people take longer to fall asleep and sleep poorly after exercising in the hour before bed.

That doesn’t mean spending the evening slumped on the couch or in front of a screen is a good idea, either. It’s about finding balance — and a new study suggests that just a few minutes of physical activity each evening might be enough.

A small study by researchers at the University of Otago in New Zealand suggests that interspersing our evenings with short bursts of exercise – just 3 minutes of simple bodyweight exercises every half hour – helps people sleep 30 minutes longer, on average.

“We know that for many of us, our longest period of uninterrupted sitting occurs at home in the evening,” says University of Otago sedentary behaviour researcher Jennifer Gale, a graduate student who led the study.

“However, many sleep guidelines tell us that we shouldn’t do long bursts or higher intensity exercise in the hours before sleep. So we wanted to know what would happen if you did very short bursts of light intensity activity repeatedly throughout the evening.”

Half of the 28 volunteers spent one evening sitting uninterrupted for 4 hours before bed. Another evening, a week later, they did 3 minutes of strength training every half hour for 4 hours before bed. The other group reversed the order, but in all cases it was a typical weeknight.

Participants wore accelerometers on their wristwatches to track their movements. The exercises consisted of chair squats, calf raises, and standing knee raises with straight-leg hip extensions. These exercises were kept simple so that participants could perform them at home, without equipment or space. Each exercise was performed for three sets of 20 seconds.

Participants ate the same food each night, and even the timing of their bathroom breaks on the first night was replicated the next night, to control for these factors.

On average, people slept about 30 minutes longer after incorporating these short bursts of exercise into their evening, compared with those who sat still. But getting up to move around had no effect on how often people woke up during the night, or how well they slept.

“These findings add to a growing body of evidence that evening exercise does not disrupt sleep quality, despite current sleep recommendations that indicate otherwise,” Gale and colleagues conclude.

Because this was a small study involving mostly young women, with an average age of 25, the results would need to be replicated in larger, more diverse groups before we can say how effective this light evening exercise is for other people.

But researchers hope that these simple exercises — or any similar movements — could become easy-to-follow routines that are less disruptive to sleep than trying to run or cycle before bed.

“Based on what we know from other studies, you could probably get a similar effect if you walked around your house, marched in place or even danced in your living room,” says Meredith Peddie, a sports scientist and nutrition researcher at the University of Otago.

“The most important thing is to get up from your chair regularly and move your body.”

The study was published in BMJ Open Sports and Exercise Medicine.