Research Reveals One Type Of Exercise That's Even Better For Sleep Than Cardio

One of the best ways to ensure you can fall asleep at night—and get quality rest—is to get enough exercise so your body and mind are tired when your head hits the pillow. But is one particular type of exercise better than others when it comes to sleep?

For this study, researchers wanted to know how different types of exercise affect sleep, so they designed one of the largest and longest-running sleep-exercise trials to date.

Just under 400 adults participated, and agreed to follow different types of training plans: Some did resistance exercises (weightlifting machines), some did aerobic exercises (treadmills, bikes, or ellipticals), and some did a combination of both. The groups were supervised for 60 minutes, three times a week, doing the workouts. There was also a control group with no supervised exercise plan.

By the end of the research, those who did resistance exercise clocked 17 more minutes of sleep per night on average, while the aerobic exercise group and combined exercise group experienced no significant change in sleep duration. The people doing resistance training also took slightly less time to fall asleep at night by the end of the study.

As study author Angelique Brellenthin, Ph.D., notes in a news release1, "While both aerobic and resistance exercise are important for overall health, our results suggest that resistance exercises may be superior when it comes to getting better ZZZ's at night," adding that this can also have beneficial effects on the heart—which needs adequate rest to stay healthy.