Exercise For Better Sleep: A Guide to the Best Nighttime Workouts

Sleep is essential for our overall health and well-being. It helps us to recover from the day's activities, consolidate memories, and regulate our mood. However, many people struggle to get a good night's sleep.

One surprising benefit of exercise is that it can help you sleep better.

Exercise helps to reduce stress and improve mood, which promotes relaxation. It can also help to process stress hormones from the day, which will in turn help you switch into sleep mode.

If you're someone who wakes up in the morning with stiffness or soreness, working out or stretching before bed can help reduce the amount of time your body has been without TLC. If you primarily exercise in the morning when you first wake up, that is over 24 hours of your body not getting any attention from when you wake up the next day. Spending even a few minutes to prioritize stretching or working through the stress of the day before you go to sleep can sometimes make a huge difference in the quality of your sleep.

Having a Wind-Down Routine to Improve Your Quality of Sleep

If you’re looking to try a wind-down routine before bed to see if it will help your quality of sleep, we have a couple of recommendations. Remember that sleep is a personal experience so while some might find the relaxing wind-down and stretch helpful, others might find getting their heart rate up and doing a more intensive workout more beneficial. This can come down to a lot of different factors, from how stressful our day was to how much energy we have. So try a few different things to see what works for you and your body. 

Here are a couple of recommended workouts you can try before bed to see what helps you get better rest:

• Sleepy Time Wind-down routine:

• After Work Energy Reset:

What works for one person may not work for another. Experiment with different routines or hire a holistic personal trainer to do a custom movement assessment to find out what works best for you.