We all know that nothing is better than good night sleep and how important they are. Unfortunately, nowadays many suffer insomnia and other sleeping problems. Sleeping affects us in many ways. This post does not only consider how it affects us but also evening training and sleeping relationship.

Effects of sleep

Sleeping improves our immune function and lowers susceptibility to illness. It plays a big part in both physical and mental recovery. Lack of sleep or poor sleeping, in the long run, can lower performance level. One bad night doesn’t make a big change, other than that you feel tired. As you might have heard progress happen in rest, and during sleeping, regeneration takes place repairing the body tissues, that have been destroyed during the training.

It also affects to anabolic hormones, maintaining normal testosterone and growth hormone levels. Sleeping also improves learning, such as memory and motor learning, and concentration, decision making and ability and reaction time. Also, those who sleep less than 5 hours a night each day, have a bigger risk to get flu than those who sleep over 7 hours a night.

Training and sleeping

Many of us do their exercise in the evening. Some studies say that light exercise done before 2 hours bedtime decrease 0,92% amount of light sleep, increase 1,33% amount of deep sleep and delay the first REM sleep cycle by 7,7 min. Thus, it can be said that light training before going to bed has no terrible effect on sleep, its quantity or quality.

Whereas, hard exercise less than one hour before going to bed, impairs sleep. That’s why hard exercise should always perform at least 2-3 hours before sleeping. Hard exercise means different things for everyone, but some studies suggested that 30min 80% of maximum heart rate is a good guideline.

recap

Sleep enough! Avoid hard exercise before going to bed, light exercises are okay and might even be good. Especially in the fresh air.

Sweet dreams!

Stutz, Eiholzer, Spengler, SportMed 2018