Sleeping After Running

The benefits of following a healthy sleep schedule extend to all aspects of life. Although it might be difficult to sleep shortly after a run, sleeping after running can help to speed your recovery before another training session. Due to the effects of intense physical activity on sleep, however, you may not experience the full benefits of sleep immediately after running.

Ideal Sleep Schedule

The ideal sleep schedule and amount of sleep varies among runners. While some may need more than 10 hours per night, Kevin Beck reports for "Running Times" magazine, others are able to run at an optimal level with as little as six hours per night. Despite such variability, it is essential that you maintain a constant bed time, wake time and amount of sleep, and that you sleep uninterrupted in order to reap the benefits of sleeping after running.

Sleep Deprivation and Running

While all people benefit from the processes that occur during a healthy sleep, the ill effects of a poor sleep may be particularly pronounced in runners. Study results published in 2010 in the journal "Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise" found that sleep deprivation can significantly hurt your running performance, by reducing the performance of your quadriceps, souring your mood and limiting the amount of glycogen, an energy source, in your muscles.

Benefits of Sleeping after Running

The study reported in "Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise" found that a proper sleep can also improve your sprinting ability, as well as a number of factors underlying your running performance. In addition to these benefits, a team headed by Andrea Dzaja at Germany's Max Planck Institute found, in study results published in 2004 in the "American Journal of Physiology --- Endocrinology and Metabolism," that human growth hormone levels increase with uninterrupted sleep. This hormone, which helps to repair soft tissues damaged during running, is at peak levels within the first few hours of sleep. If your sleep is interrupted during this time, however, you may not attain peak levels of human growth hormone, thus affecting your recovery from a run, training gains and future running performance.

Sleeping Immediately After Running

Although it is commonly recommended that you do not engage in intense physical activity shortly before sleeping, Tero Myllymaki and his colleagues at Finland's University of Jyvaskyla do not believe that this is based on solid evidence. They published their research into the effects of sleeping immediately after intense cardiovascular exercise in 2011 in the "Journal of Sleep Research." Although they did not find that this affected the quality of sleep, the amount of non-REM sleep decreased in those who slept immediately after exercising. As Dzaja and colleagues noted, human growth hormone levels and tissue repair are enhanced during REM sleep. As such, sleeping immediately after running may not affect the quality of your sleep, but it may affect your recovery from a run and future running performance.