There’s some correlation between participating resistance training and better quality sleep. This helps us to get to sleep and to stay asleep and improve quality of our sleep. That’s really cool. It’s kind of like putting ourselves in a different mode. Being in that state would be a lot more conducive to good sleep. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life.

On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well -being. I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co -hosts are Brian Sagan, co -founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence -based strength training. And now for today’s episode. Welcome back to the Strength Changes Everything podcast.

We are in a series of episodes called Strength Training Reverses. We’re talking about how strength training can help us combat some of the negative effects of aging. Today’s episode is all about sleep. So as people get older, many times people notice a decrease in their ability to fall asleep, stay asleep. They end up having to sleep in their recliner. I’ve heard stories of people just saying, you know, my sleep used to be great.

Now I can’t fall asleep to save my life. So we’re going to talk all about this. We’re going to talk about the implications of poor sleep or signs you may not be getting enough sleep, how common this is, you know, why this deteriorates as we age. what research shows about how resistance training can positively impact this and help us in this area and really how it all works. So, Dr. Fisher, how are you feeling today? I feel great.

I feel really well slept and well recovered and ready to go, Amy. How about you? Okay, good. And that’s the foundation of it all, isn’t it? And we’re gonna talk all about that today in this episode. And I think everybody intuitively knows how much better they feel with good quality sleep, but we are gonna break it down today.

So I guess my first question for you is, is sleep quality denigration inevitable as we get older? I mean, that’s really the million -dollar question in all of this. I guess the way I can answer that is to talk about the prevalence of people reporting sleep problems. Statistically, 30 to 70%, so quite a big spread there, but if we think about the upper boundary of that, it’s 70 % of older adults experience sleep problems overall. The general term is sleep architecture, and that might be thought time take to fall asleep, time in deep sleep, number of wakeful moments or stave arousal through, through the sleep and through the night as well. So they, they report problems with sleep architecture and sleep problems overall.

Um, and 40 to 70 % other statistics from other research says that 40 to 70 % of older adults have chronic sleep issues. So, uh, is it inevitable? To some extent, it looks like it happens to a lot of people. So, uh. Yeah, let’s hope it’s not inevitable. Let’s hope there’s something we can do.

Absolutely. Well, let’s talk about why this happens. Tell us, you know, what are the causes of this? Yeah. So I think as we go through something like this, a lot of this is somewhat hypothetical or theoretical in nature, but there are some things that we know that do link back to a decrease in sleep quality. So we know that, for example, circadian rhythm moves earlier into the day.

So our circadian rhythm doesn’t kind of align as well with daylight, so we feel sleepier earlier in the day. Now I’m going to linger on this point because this to me is a vicious cycle. We wake earlier, we feel sleepy earlier in the day, we fall asleep in the lounger, like you said, you know, the number of old rattles that I know that take an afternoon nap, it’s quite incredible. And to some extent, I get a bit jealous. So maybe I’m hitting that age point as well.

But they then, of course, aren’t tired. when it comes to their normal sleep time in the evening. So then they have trouble falling asleep and they start to report sleep issues or insomnia or so forth. So problems with the circadian rhythm could be one. The hypothalamus, which can be thought of as the master clock in our body that helps us to kind of know when we should sleep and is linked to our circadian rhythm, is less responsive to light. So it It’s simply not, not telling us that there’s light or there’s darkness and that light is a time to be awake and so forth.

And of course that might be further aggravated by the fact that as we age, we might not go outside as much. We might not spend time. You know, when I think of my son, he’s outside playing all the time. I’m sat inside working at a desk a lot of the time and so forth. So as we age, we maybe spend less time active or outdoors as well. So our, our capacity to, to.

reset our hypothalamus is limited there as well. Our production of melatonin decreases, so melatonin is kind of our sleep hormone or our sleep chemical, so that decreases with age. And then of course there might be other mechanistic issues such as obstructive sleep apnea, which is a blocked airway, or central sleep apnea, which is kind of brain signals telling our body effectively to keep breathing during our sleep. So those are in prevalence, but they’re kind of adjunct to what we’re going to talk about today. Okay.

And I know when I’ve studied menopause too as a woman, I know there’s hormonal disruptions or changes that lead to decreased sleep. very particularly for women around that time, involving spikes of cortisol and decrease in progesterone, which is known to be the calming hormone. So there’s that going on. So there’s all kinds of causes at play affecting people’s sleep quality is what I’m hearing you say. Yeah, absolutely. And there’s also, there’s less time spent in a deep sleep as a product of some of those things.

So we’re in a light sleep and then we’re more subject to, uh, to any changes around us or changes in temperature or sounds or, or things like that. Um, you know, states of arousal, um, other psychological states can impact it. So, so there’s kind of a lot going on that can really negatively impact our sleep. Okay. Yeah. Um, and we may actually should we, maybe we should do a future episode all about sleep and sort of what it means to have light sleep versus deep sleep.

And because we know that it’s, um, that it impacts a lot of things. And I guess that’s kind of my next question is what, uh, what are some signs that one may not be getting enough sleep and how is reduced sleep impacting people’s lives, um, for the worse? Yeah, so now I’m not a sleep expert, and I think if we do that future podcast, we should definitely get a sleep expert on to talk through it in detail, because it’s quite fascinating. From the things I’ve read, effectively, when we sleep, we allow our brain to kind of wash itself, to cleanse itself of some of the things that we’ve taken in during the day, to breathe to reorganize some of the things that we’ve learned and we’ve experienced and so forth. But signs of not getting enough sleep.

Well, A great way to understand the importance of sleep is to know that sleep can be used as a method of torture. By keeping somebody awake, you can really negatively impact their well -being. Signs of not getting enough sleep in our society might be things like daytime fatigue, irritability, difficulty concentrating. It can be associated with memory lapses. And then of course, weakened immunity. So our immune system simply isn’t able to fend off some of the potential bacteria or illnesses that we might encounter on a day -to -day basis.

And of course, our physiological system, our muscular system doesn’t recover from exercise that we’re engaging in. So we kind of fall into this trap of fatigue. So. Mm -hmm. So in all kinds of problematic experiences during the day when we’re not getting enough sleep, right? All kinds of levels on which it’s creating a deeper and deeper downward spiral, I would say.

Okay, so then let’s talk about what research shows in terms of how strength training can help us in this area. Yeah, well, there’s a wealth of research that’s looked at resistance training and sleep architecture, as we said, or quality of sleep, reduction in insomnia, and so forth. And the primary study that I wanted to talk through today is titled, Muscle Strengthening Exercise and Sleep Quality Among a Nationally Representative Sample of 23 ,635 German Adults. Okay, so it’s worth highlighting straight away that this is association, it’s an epidemiological study where they’ve looked at they’ve asked people to report their sleep quality and they’ve asked people to report their engagement in resistance training and then they’ve made a connection between the two. So this is not And by that justification, we should clarify this is correlation, not necessarily causation, but there are also a number of studies that have looked at causation to support this.

So I think that it’s fair to kind of make this connection. And as we said, 23 ,000 German adults. Now, if we look at that, the initial criteria were adults over the age of 18 years, but if we break it down by age group, uh, 22 % of the participants were between 30 and 44, 37 % were 45 to 64, and 24 % were over 65. So there was a good spread of, as they said in the title, a nationally representative sample. You know, it’s a good population level sample. And what they did is, uh, within the study, they sent out a survey and they asked people to report sleep as either very poor, poor, good, or very good.

So kind of a four stage reporting. Um, and then they asked. their engagement in resistance training as once, twice, three to four times, or greater than five times per week, or not at all, of course. And what they reported was that any engagement with resistance training was associated with a reduction in reporting of very poor or poor quality sleep overall. So it didn’t matter whether they were resistance training five times per week. You didn’t need to exercise that regularly to see that reduction in sleep quality.

Any amount of resistance training was associated with better quality sleep. Okay. So, so far we’ve established there’s some correlation between participating resistance training and better quality sleep. So the next question I have is really how is that working? Yeah, so there’s a lot of kind of thinking around how this might work.

There’s talk that the resistance training helps to help regulate the circadian rhythm. It serves to reduce physiological arousal, and I’ll get into that in just a second in a bit more detail. And it helps to modulate inflammatory signaling. We seem to talk about this every single episode that as we age, our inflammation increases and our inflammatory signaling and our inflammatory cytokines increases. And of course, we know resistance training produces these myokines that combat this and that reduces inflammatory signaling. But of course, this is just talks of the wonder of resistance training as a whole.

So we talked there about physiological arousal and one of the kind of concepts that we talk about in this sense is what’s called our autonomic nervous system and an improved autonomic balance. We have two component parts of this. We have what’s called our sympathetic nervous system, which is our fight or flight response. And that of course is associated with increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, increased alertness and adrenaline and so forth. And it’s exactly that, it’s our body’s uh, sensing a need to be in either a fight or flight response. And then we have our parasympathetic nervous system, which is often referred to as rest and digest.

And that slows our heart rate. It lowers our blood pressure. It promotes recovery. It’s a non -stressful state. Well, when you engage in resistance training, surprisingly, you are in, you’re very much in a sympathetic nervous system where your sympathetic nervous system is more active. You’re in a fight or flight state.

Your heart rate goes up. and so on and so forth. And that’s completely normal. It’s meant to do that. But what you get is you get what’s called a parasympathetic rebound. And once your body’s been in that state and worked and exercised, it now has to have a recovery.

So our sympathetic nervous system kind of switches off or dulls down. Our parasympathetic nervous system kicks in and our heart rate slows, our blood pressure lowers, and it promotes recovery. And ultimately it reduces this state of constant physiological arousal or physiological stress and allows us to, and it’s thought that this helps us to to get to sleep and to stay asleep and improve the quality of our sleep. Now it’s worth Just finally clarifying, the reason that this is important is we live in what’s thought of now as a chronic state of stress. Society has all of these things happening, whether it’s family or friends or money or traffic or social media, we’re constantly bombarded with this stress. And it’s thought that our sympathetic nervous system is chronically elevated.

So exercising actually helps us to kind of switch that off. It tells us, when to switch it on, but also we have that parasympathetic rebound, which is really important. And that of course can, can help us to sleep. That’s really cool. It’s kind of like, um, putting ourselves in a different mode, you know, right. I, that’s what I feel like.

Um, I think everyone understands the. the feeling of being like wound up tight, anxious and that adrenaline. We all understand what that feels like, right? Of anxiety or being just overstimulated or whatever word you want to call it and how that’s not conducive to good to falling asleep or to good sleep. We just intuitively understand that, but being able to switch yourself into the parasitic state where your stress levels drop, you can relax and you’re not in that anxious state, I can see how being in that state would be a lot more conducive to good sleep.

So there’s a few other things worthy of mention. Uh, we know that older adults experience a greater degree of anxiety and depression than other than other people, typically than younger adults, uh, historically. And we know that resistance training can reduce anxiety and serve to reduce depression. So there might be other mechanisms that are then impacting, uh, our our arousal state, as we’ve talked about, and allowing us to sleep. But ultimately, there’s a number of studies, and we’ve talked about just the one study there, but there are a number of studies that have looked at adolescents, that have looked at older adults, that have looked at people with Parkinson’s disease, and even that have looked at people with PTSD. So, you know, the capacity for resistance training to improve sleep architecture as a whole is quite phenomenal.

It’s so interesting. Because I think the tendency would just be to say, if I do a workout, a hard workout, I just am more tired. I feel physically tired and that’s the entirety of the mechanism by which my sleep gets better. But it’s interesting because there’s so much more to it than that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, there is.

But of course, the idea that resistance training does induce a state of physical fatigue is, of course, key along the process as well. And there have been studies that have looked at the time of a workout, and they’ve looked at engaging in a resistance training workout within an hour of falling asleep, and it can slightly negatively impact time taken to fall asleep, but doesn’t negatively impact the sleep architecture through the night, whereas a workout earlier in the day you know, didn’t have that negative impact in falling asleep. Now, it’s worth clarifying, I don’t think many people would engage in a resistance training workout within an hour of falling asleep, but some people might choose to, so. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it depends on their schedule, doesn’t it?

Okay, interesting. And really, when I think about this topic, I mean, we’ve talked in the past about how important sleep is then to basically as a preemptive or like a proactive step to best health, you know, and to being able to stay healthy, fight off disease, recover, you know, and continue building up strength. And so if this area isn’t addressed, everything else is impacted for the worse as we experience in real life. So this one’s important to address, but it sounds like it’s a cycle, right? The more we strength train, the better we might be able to sleep and the better then we might be able to function and feel during the day. OK, great.

So thank you so much for sharing all this with us. I mean, today we learned how this works. We learned what the research shows. We talked about why this is such a key area of our health. And so if this is an area you’re struggling with and you’re not strength training, I encourage you to add in some resistance training in order to see if this may help you improve every area of your life, not only your sleep, but that’s sort of a cascading domino that may impact everything else for the better. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Fisher, do you have anything else to leave listeners with on this topic? No, I think we’ve covered everything I can think of. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so much. And we will see you next week on the podcast.

Until then, we hope you remember, strength changes everything. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything . com. Join us next time.

for another episode, and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode. Here’s Here’s to you and your best health.