Resistance Exercise for a Good Night’s Sleep?

An abstract from a conference proceeding popped up in my inbox that was just too interesting not to share. It would appear that a good night’s sleep may be better associated with performing resistance exercise than it is with performing cardiovascular exercise (although this is better than no exercise). At least these are the results presented at a recent Epidemiology, Prevention/lifestyle & cardiometabolic Health conference that was sponsored by the American Heart Association.

In the study, 406 inactive adults between 35-70 years old, who were obese or overweight and had hypertension were randomly assigned to a no exercise group (lifestyle education control group), a 60 minute supervised aerobic exercise group, a resistance exercise group or combination of resistance and aerobic exercise group. All the exercise groups did workouts three times a week for 12 months.

Interestingly, the sleep duration, sleep efficiency, and the time to fall asleep of participants improved the most in those who were in the resistance exercise group. It isn’t currently understood why resistance exercise improved sleep. The study’s authors theorize that it may be due to differences in the release of hormones such as testosterone and human growth hormone or possibly due to the microscopic damage to the muscle that occurs during resistance exercise which signals the brain to undergo the repair processes it uses during sleep.

The abstract of conference proceedings can be viewed here for more details.