By: Thomas Pickering, MD, DPhil, FRCP, Director of Integrative and Behavioral Cardiology Program
of the Cardiovascular Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York.

The benefits from a program of regular exercise are well recognized for people with high blood pressure, and include lower blood pressure, weight loss, and higher HDL cholesterol. Here's another one, reported from a recent trial conducted in 43 older men and women in California. To get into the study the subjects had to be at least 50 years old and have complaints of moderately disturbed sleep. Half of them were allocated to an exercise program (four 30-minute sessions of brisk walking per week) for 16 weeks, and the other half to a control group. Sleep was evaluated into ways: by having the subjects keep a diary of when they fell asleep and woke up, and by answering a questionnaire. Both methods gave the same result: the people in the exercise group fell asleep sooner (by about 15 minutes), and slept for about 45 minutes longer than the others. It took about eight weeks to reach the peak benefits of the exercise program on sleep.

Doctor's comments

Inadequate sleep is a common affliction in our society, and taking sleeping pills is not the solution. This study suggests that exercise is a win-win solution for poor sleepers. If you also have high blood pressure, another benefit is that your pressure will be lower when you're sleeping than when you're tossing and turning.

Where it was published