Oct 2, 2024 Study suggests squats may help with sleep
A new study out of the University of Otago in New Zealand suggests that doing short but regular bouts of resistance exercises, like squats, at night may help people sleep longer.
Participants who performed brief bursts of squats throughout the night slept for about 30 minutes longer, the researchers found.
A recent story from Health.com detailed the study and how researchers compiled the data. Below is an excerpt from the Health.com story.
“A lot of people don’t exercise, and a lot of people don’t sleep very well,” Justin Bickford, PT, DPT, a physical therapist at Memorial Hermann who wasn’t involved with the study, told Health. “But if they knew that it didn’t take a lot of exercise or a high intensity to improve the quality and duration of sleep, they’d probably be more likely to do it.”
The findings add more nuance to the long-debated question of how nightly exercise impacts sleep, with previous studies finding mixed results. Here’s what you need to know about the latest research.
Researchers recruited 28 people, primarily women, with an average age of 25.
Participants came into the lab for two sessions. “For the first session, they sat for four hours and just watched TV. In the other session, they broke that four hours of sitting every 30 minutes by performing three minutes of resistance exercises,” Jennifer Gale, lead study author and PhD candidate, told Health.
The researchers chose squats because the exercise recruits the largest muscles—your glutes, hamstrings, and quads—and you don’t need equipment or substantial space.
The participants went home, and the researchers monitored their sleep remotely. “We found that compared to when they sat all evening, the participants slept for about 27 minutes longer when they did the activity breaks,” Gale said.
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They also found the sleep quality stayed the same, which Gale noted is a “good finding” because previous studies have found that exercising too late may disrupt sleep.
The extra sleep also moved most participants’ average sleep duration from below to within the recommended guidelines of at least seven hours per night.
To read the full story from Health.com, click here.