A late workout shouldn’t hinder your sleep. It could even help | Hacker News Reader

A late workout shouldn’t hinder your sleep. It could even help

washingtonpost.com

24 pointsa_w12 comments

Heavy strength training, especially deadlift, undoubtedly affect my sleep even if I exercise in the morning. At night would make it impossible to sleep. Eating more seems to help, but I definitely sleep worse or less on those days.

I'm the total opposite. I sleep like a baby on days that i lift, even if i lift late and go to bed immediately after.

Same here. I find a brief, effective lifting session to promote sleep; cardio has the opposite effect.

Have you tried a Zinc and Magnesium supplement? When I powerlift close to bed, I take some ZMA to promote growth hormones. It makes me sleep like a baby.

Yeah, ZMA makes it worse. I have crazy intense dreams. Also, vitamins tend to make me feel depressed, even Vitamin D.

I don't buy it.

Exercise increases cortisol, cortisol increases wakefulness. Cortisol is, in fact, the very hormone that makes you wake up in the morning.

Yeah, me neither, though in my case it's based on personal experience. Whenever I go for a run, my alertness jumps way up for several hours afterward. If it's in the morning, I get a better start to the day. If it's in the evening, I am energetic and completely uninterested in sleep for 3-4 hours.

I do agree that exercise increases your quality of sleep. I've found that it improves my sleep so much that I don't need nearly as much of it. But that's a separate question from whether it delays the start of sleep.

When I was a uni student I spent a summer waking up every day at 5 am and working out until 7 am, eating breakfast and then going back to sleep until 9.30am. When I would wake up the second time I would feel like I hadn't worked out at all. My growth rate (in both strength and size) was phenomenal and I was never able to get close with any other routine.

Well as with everything it depends:

If you just started out (less than two weeks, 4 days/week) then it will make you more awake.

If you passed this point then there is enough fatigue accumulated that your body just wants to rest/sleep. I would still recommend to finish training 3-4 hours before sleep.

Is it dependent on age? I could not sleep at all after working out at 25 at night; doing the same (weights and martial arts) at 40+, I pass out hitting the pillow. Which is excellent. Makes me want to do it more, because if I do not, I have issues sleeping more often.

Usual rant .. I think paywalled articles don't have a place on Google search results and also HN. I suppose someone will reply telling me to change my user-agent or something else.

Edit: actually .. scratch that .. I should have an option on HN to not see paywalled links. Can someone on the dev team make that happen?

WP is not a solid paywall; there's just a limit counter. Read in an incognito window and dismiss when necessary.

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