According to a study presented at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology, Prevention, Lifestyle & Cardiometabolic Health Conference 2022 held on March 1-4, strength-training exercise could be better at promoting sleep than aerobic exercise.
Regularly doing resistance training could help you gain up to 17 minutes of sleep every night, according to the study’s findings.
To conduct their research, the scientists from Iowa State University in the United States followed 406 adults who were not physically active for one year.
The volunteers were individuals who were overweight or obese (with a body mass index, BMI, of 25 to 40) and had elevated blood pressure (120-139mmHg systolic and 80-89mmHg diastolic), with a high risk of heart disease.
They were randomly divided them into four groups for the study.
One group did only aerobic exercise, the second group did only muscle-strengthening exercise, and the third group did a 50/50 mix of cardio and resistance training.
The last group was a control group.
Throughout the duration of the experiment, the volunteers did three one-hour exercise sessions each week.
Participants were also asked to describe their sleep in terms of quality, duration, the time it took to fall asleep, and sleep disturbances.
The result?
“Sleep disturbances decreased significantly in all groups, including the control group,” the study notes.
In detail, among the 42% of participants who started the study sleeping less than seven hours per night, those who did resistance exercise slept 17 minutes more per night.
“These results indicate that resistance exercise may have superior benefits on sleep compared to aerobic exercise, which could provide a novel pathway for the role of resistance exercise in promoting cardiovascular health,” the researchers conclude. – AFP Relaxnews
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