Daily exercises or 9 hours of sleep, what should you prioritise for better health and fitness?

In today’s world, where hustle culture promotes productivity over sleep, it is only natural to wonder if that’s the right way of living. With the hectic lives people lead, a good night’s rest often takes a backseat, along with daily movement. This quite literally becomes a ‘breeding ground’ for several chronic diseases, such as heart-related illnesses, obesity, cancer, and other issues.

When it comes to taking care of your health, both sleep and physical activity are considered important. However, according to a new study published in Communications Medicine, most adults struggle to achieve the required amounts of both. To understand which is more important: daily exercise or adequate sleep, researchers studied the interaction between nightly sleep and daily movement to gauge how they are linked.

What the study says

The study conducted by researchers from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia analysed data from more than 70,000 adults, collected from 244 geographical regions between January 2020 and September 2023.

Also read | Daily exercise can keep your brain sharp, but timing matters most

To monitor sleep, participants put sleep sensors under their mattresses and used a smart watch to record daily step counts. This helped researchers examine how sleeping patterns at night affected physical movement the next day.

The study found that fewer than 13 percent of participants met the recommended target of 7-9 hours of sleep per night along with 8000 steps per day. What was striking was that the quality of sleep indicated how much people moved the next day, suggesting that sleep influenced physical activity more strongly than physical activity affected sleep.