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 The results, based on sleep patterns during a single night, go
against the usual advice to avoid being too active before bed.
“We believe that the present study has the potential to shed light
on the issue of whether evening exercising should be discouraged,”
Serge Brand of the University of Basel in Switzerland and his
colleagues write.
“The findings may also have practical implications, since, for most
employed adults and parents, evening hours often provide the only
opportunity for exercise,” the researchers add.
They studied 52 Swiss high school students who were an average of 19
years old and played sports two or three times per week.
The participants followed their normal routine on the day and night
of the study, including playing sports for 65 to 90 minutes in the
evening and ending about one and a half hours before their usual
bedtime.
Before going to bed, students rated their mood and hunger levels and
filled out a questionnaire that was designed to evaluate how
vigorously they had exercised. That night they used a device that
measures sleep patterns, called a sleep-EEG.
Brand’s team found that students who reported more exertion during
sports fell asleep faster, woke up fewer times during the night and
slept more deeply than those who had exercised less vigorously.
Higher levels of exertion were also linked to increased tiredness,
better mood and less hunger at night. The same was true when
students repeated those ratings the next morning, according to
findings published in Sleep Medicine.
The results jibe with another recent study that found people who
exercised in the evening reported sleeping just as well as those who
didn’t (see Reuters Health story of February 26, 2014 here: http://reut.rs/1exb0bQ).
Dr. Phyllis Zee, who studies sleep patterns at the Northwestern
University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, called the new
findings “interesting.”
“As (the researchers) pointed out there have been other studies to
show that exercising in the evening - perhaps not as close to
bedtime as in this study - was not detrimental to sleep,” she told
Reuters Health.
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“One of the reasons why sleep is deeper, at least acutely, after
more vigorous exercise is that sleep is also for energy balance and
metabolism,” she said. “And therefore what you’ve done is increase
your metabolic need for sleep.”
Zee said the current study had some limitations, which were
acknowledged by the authors.
For instance, the study only enrolled young, healthy adults, so it’s
not clear that the results would be the same for older adults.
“This is a very specific group,” Zee said. “This group in general
does not tend to suffer from insomnia as much - that tends to be in
the older groups.”
She added that because the study only covered one night of exercise
and sleep, the findings might look different over time.
“I would imagine that if you did that every night that you’re more
likely to actually delay your sleep time a little bit,” she said.
Still, Zee said it’s better to exercise at night than to not
exercise at all, especially for people who don’t have sleep
problems.
“People who do have trouble falling sleep should still be cautious
about exercising too close to bedtime,” she said, as getting the
body and brain going could make it more difficult to get to sleep.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1lOb4MV
Sleep Medicine, online June 18, 2014.
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