How Exercise Can Help You Sleep Better and Improve Your Health
3 min readGood Pain And Bad Pain
After a hard day of exercise, you’re likely going to be sore. The level of soreness you feel could be quite painful. However, this is good pain, provided you don’t stress yourself in an imbalanced way during recovery. If you work out hard on Monday, you want to skip those muscle sets Tuesday, only returning to them Wednesday.
If Monday was “leg day”, so also should Wednesday and Friday be. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday would be “arm day”. Monday through Saturday, you would want to do some sort of aerobic workout in combination with whatever anaerobic workouts you were doing. However, if you were to double down on leg day without recovery, the “pain” could become unhealthy.
Injuries invite unhealthy pain. And when you’re not in shape, muscular and skeletal issues can initiate bad pain as well. Sleeping wrong contributes to “bad pain”. However, the “good pain” of exercise can “tighten” your muscles, which act in some capacity as a cradle to your skeleton. Accordingly, you’re less likely to sleep wrong and get “bad pain”.
So there’s “good pain” and “bad pain”. This is one reason exercise helps you sleep better in conjunction to being better for your health. Keeping muscles strong maintains your bodily “infrastructure”, reducing the impact of unwelcome stresses in a way causing injuries. This is especially true for back pain, and we’ll explore this concept here.
Diverse Pains Can Impact Sleep
When your body hurts, you don’t sleep quite as well as you could. When you’re out of shape, that’s going to make your body hurt worse. You don’t have to be an exceptional athlete to “tighten” your body enough that sleeping won’t “tweak” your body. If you sleep with your arm in a poor position, and have weak musculature, you’ll ache in a bad way the next day.
If your muscles have greater strength and capacity to be stressed, then such positions won’t be quite as painful the morning after. Back pain was mentioned earlier, and correctly: one of the chiefest reasons for back pain is poor musculature. The weaker your core musculature, the greater an issue this is. Strengthening core musculature helps.
Stretching, aerobic exercise, and anaerobic exercise done properly can keep your back more naturally in alignment, and so you’ll find less instances of discomfort in sleep. Beyond simple pain, though, exercise enables you to rest in a healthier and fuller way.
Resting Better, And Mattress Options For Healthier Sleep
Working out right after you wake up will give you a boost of energy. Your body will need to recoup lost calories, but after you work out, adipose deposits are absorbed to repair the fatigue of associated muscles. You’ll naturally be hungry—try not to nap after a good meal in the day if you’re having sleeping issues.
However, the healthiest exercise, nutrition, and sleep can be undermined by poor sleeping conditions. If you can’t get to sleep even though you’re tired, your body can’t properly repair itself. So if you’re working out and still having trouble, you might want to change the mattress you’re using.
To get an idea of what variety of options exist, you might take a moment and examine this list of best mattresses for side sleepers by Health. Certain mattresses are more conducive to health and sleep to certain people than others, so explore multiple options.
In summation: get exercise requisite to your daily needs and keep your body in shape, then assure the mattress you have at home allows you to get the sleep you need for recovery. Combined, these methods will reduce the pain that comes from insufficient rest while enabling you to optimize personal health.