FRIDAY, 19 JUNE 2015
Have you ever slept like a stone after training or racing? A new study by the University of Pennsylvania used sleep and activity data from 429,110 adults and showed that many types of activity correlate with better sleep. Poor sleep is defined as being less than 7 hours and is known to put you at risk for poor mental and physical performance. In the study, they looked at walking, aerobics, biking, gardening, golf, running, weight-lifting and yoga/pilates. All of them helped with healthy sleep duration, while more strenuous exercise had a bigger effect. However, the study also revealed that some forms of activity can have a negative effect: when people received most of their activity from household work or childcare, their sleep was more likely to be insufficient.This suggests that these activities are more associated with stress and maybe there are two different types of exhaustion: A positive one that results from physical exercise and makes you sleep better, and a negative one that also drains your mental capacity for stress and makes it harder for you to rest and actually worsens your sleep. The obvious solution I draw from this is that if you sign up your kids to a sports club, all of you will sleep better.
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Written by Laura-Nadine Schuhmacher.
