Weight Training Is Better Than Aerobic Exercise For Improving Sleep, Research Suggests

Apr, 2022 - By SMI

A study designed to investigate the links between exercise, cardiovascular health, and sleep found that weight lifting exercise significantly increases duration and quality of sleep

Physical activity promotes healthier sleep as it’s known, however, there are still many questions regarding the particular type of exercise is better for good sleep. Now researchers at Iowa State University conducted study designed to investigate the links between exercise, cardiovascular health, and sleep and found some new insights showing that resistance-type workouts such as weight lifting significantly improves quality and duration of sleep.

The new study is to be peer-reviewed yet, however, according to the scientists, the findings of this study are promising. In this new study, to fill in the gaps of previous research studying links between sleep cycle and exercising, the team recruited 386 participant with obesity of overweight, who had increased blood pressure and inactive lifestyle. The team randomly assigned the subjects to either a resistance exercise or an aerobic exercise group, or even a non-exercise control group. Then the scientists assigned the task of 60 minutes supervised exercise sessions to the participants for three times a week for a year. The assessment studied the factors such as sleep duration, sleep quality, sleep efficiency, sleep latency and also sleep disturbances.

The team found that 35% of subjects had poor quality sleep and 42% of the subjected did not get the recommended sleep of 7 hours. In aerobic group the team observed a 23 minutes of increased sleep duration each night. While in the resistance exercise group, the team observed an average of 40 minutes increased duration of sleep. Moreover, the study also found that sleep efficiency increased in the combined and resistance exercise groups and the sleep latency decreased only in resistance exercise group by 3 minutes.