What Is the Relationship Between Exercise and Sleep?
Discover how sleep and exercise affect each other and help you achieve optimal health.
While they may seem separate, the interplay between sleep and exercise is important to understand if we want to optimize both our sleep and exercise quality.
Sleep and exercise
Sleep is integral for enabling our body to recover and perform at its best. In particular, when we enter deep sleep, our body both repairs our muscle tissue and produces growth hormones that allow our muscles to strengthen. We also solidify new skills, and muscle memory while we are asleep for exercises we have been practicing. Practice makes perfect? Not quite! Practice plus sleep makes perfect.
How exercise affects sleep
Exercise is key to achieving optimal sleep quality. When we exercise, our body produces more adenosine which helps us build "sleep pressure." The more sleep pressure we accumulate throughout the day, the easier it is for us to fall asleep in the evening. Additionally, after we exercise, ideally in the morning or early afternoon, we enable our core body temperature to more quickly decrease which allows us to fall asleep and achieve deeper rest more easily.