Sleep and Exercise: Elevate your Energy

Let us paint a picture of a tough day. Actually, the photo above does a nice job.

You go down for the night. Not too early, not too late. Dinner was eaten at the right time, shower, and teeth are clean. The bedspread provides a Goldilocks body temperature and there is neither electronic sound nor light pollution. You did everything right, but you still can’t seem to fall asleep! Eventually, your alarm goes off, but you don’t feel refreshed from your nights sleep.

You make it to work on time, but no amount of caffeine prevents the nodding off sensation that hangs in there all day. This has a negative impact on productivity and morale. By the way, too much caffeine is not helping a sleepless situation!

When finally home, all of your workout friends texted to ask why you skipped the group exercise class. A lack of energy and enthusiasm is the reason, of course.

This is a disastrous trifecta of unpleasantness. Replace the workout with an afternoon nap or more caffeine and one could be faced with a pattern which is difficult to reverse.

So clearly sleep and exercise have an impact on one another. Elevated quality of one elevates the quality of the other and it is easy to understand the way in which adequate sleep would improve exercise. But how exactly does exercise help one get a good night’s sleep?

Exercise can help:

And a good bout will tire you out! One just needs to break the pattern.

Remember to also think of exercise as an alternative to pharmaceutically induced sleep.