Morning exercise gives you much better sleep....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 7-12-2012

Regular exercise has an astounding list of benefits and NOT exercising at all has an equally frightening and even more scary list of harms that it causes.

One of the benefits long known for exercising most days of every week is that people who get such regular exercise, go to sleep more easily and reliably and get more restful sleep than people who don’t.

There are many reasons why morning exercise is so valuable.  It helps you wake up and be more productive later that day all day long.

The most important reason is that exercising first thing in the morning happens almost always BEFORE the other demands of the day.  So you skip far fewer days of exercise AND the chances of you continuing get regular exercise at least double. 

(My own records show this too.  I exercise at least for a few minutes 7 days a week in the first part of my morning. I do at least some exercise something like 360 to 364 days in a 365 day year.  I also do a short session of a different set of exercises on Monday and Wednesday night.  Some months I miss one to three of my eight possible evening sessions.  I get home too late or I need to go somewhere important that night.)

A few days ago I got an email from Dr Oz and Dr Roizen quoted a study of brain waves during sleep and found that:

“Compared with midday or early evening workouts, hitting the pavement, the pool, or the bike around 7 a.m. will help you spend 75% more time in deep sleep and let you cycle through the four stages of sleep more often.”

That’s huge!  Such good sleep allows you to be more alert and mentally sharp and effective.  It relives stress better.  It is thought to trigger more growth hormones and repair in your body.  There’s even evidence that too little quality sleep tends to make you fat and more likely to get things like high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.

And you’ll feel better.  Either you’ll feel good instead of blasted or you’ll feel somewhat sleepy and a bit blasted early in the day instead of badly blasted all day long.

That likely also means that morning exercise is more effective as an antidepressant.

Best of all, you can fit exercise in and great benefits by doing at home strength training and/or interval cardio most days of every week.  And, by doing this at home in the morning and by having no travel time to add, you can fit in 6 to 30 minutes of exercise into a schedule that has little time available to exercise.

If you have a bit of extra time two or more mornings a week to go to a gym that can also work well for you.

Last, but far from least, because morning exercise helps you sleep that much better, if needed, you can even get up 20 or 30 minutes earlier to fit in morning exercise.  In fact, because regular exercise is so valuable and morning exercise makes it so much more reliable, it may be a really valuable strategy to do so.

(If you sleep less than 6 and half hours a night now, that may not be as good and idea.  But if you sleep a good bit more now, you may be more rested and refreshed by your sleep if you do just that.)