No weight lifting, no walking. this is the exercise you should do to fall asleep quickly
Many people exercise to improve sleep. It's well known that certain physical activities help us fall asleep and stay asleep throughout the night. But what's the ideal routine? Yoga? Weight training? Walking? That's a complex question, and a team of scientists from Harbin Sports University in China sought to answer it in a recent study.
In this study, they analyzed a total of 30 clinical trials, conducted in more than a dozen countries, that examined various routines. These studies typically compare two types of physical exercise and analyze their effects on sleep. Therefore, the authors of this study felt it might be better to extract each exercise separately and study it at different levels of intensity and duration.
This led them to conclude that the optimal exercise routine for improving sleep is high-intensity yoga twice a week. But be careful: the duration of your workout is more important than it seems.
As we saw earlier, they conducted 30 clinical trials and analyzed the comparative exercises in each one. Their goal was to categorize them first by volume, then by intensity and duration.
Researchers have observed that yoga achieves the best sleep parameters. This makes sense, as it is not limited to physical exercise alone but also relies on controlled breathing patterns that help activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This is part of the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary actions such as heartbeat. In the case of the parasympathetic nervous system specifically, the main actions it regulates are slowing the heartbeat, dilating blood vessels, constricting pupil size, increasing digestive juices, and relaxing the muscles of the digestive tract.
In this case, lowering the heart rate promotes relaxation. It is also believed to have beneficial effects on arthritis pain.