Original articleDaily Morning Running for 3 Weeks Improved Sleep and Psychological Functioning in Healthy Adolescents Compared With Controls
Section snippets
Sample
Participants were recruited from a high school in the canton of Basel-Landschaft, a district of the German-speaking northwestern part of Switzerland. Figure 1 shows the study flowchart and dropout rates. Of the 60 adolescents originally approached, 51 (85%) completed the study (see Figure 1; age: mean [M] = 18.30 years; standard deviation [SD] = .89; range: 17.5–19.5 years): 27 were female (age: M = 18.11 years, SD = .80) and 24 were male (age: M = 18.13 years, SD = 1.00). Participants were
Daily log
Table 1, Table 2 provide the descriptive and inferential statistical overview of the data from the daily log, separately by groups (RG vs. CG) and time (weeks 1–3, weekdays and weekend days).
Sleep quality significantly increased over time and was significantly higher in the RG compared with the CG; the group × time interaction was also significant, reflecting a significantly greater increase in sleep quality over time in the RG than in the CG (Figure 2).
Mood in the morning significantly
Discussion
The key finding of the present study is that, compared with a control condition, an intervention involving running for 30 minutes in the morning daily during weekdays for 3 consecutive weeks improved sleep (objectively and subjectively) and psychological functioning. The results add to the existing literature in showing that even a short-term intervention of regular running in the morning does have a favorable impact on the sleep and psychological functioning of healthy adolescents.
Two
Conclusion
Moderate running in the morning for 3 consecutive weeks impacted positively on objective and subjective sleep and psychological functioning among healthy adolescents. Moderate, but regular, exercise such as running should be promoted as both a remedy and a preventative measure for poor sleep and poor psychological functioning.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Marielle Koenig and Vladimir Djurdjevic for sleep EEG scoring. Moreover, they are grateful to Ladina Schlatter for data collection and data entry. Finally, they thank Nick Emler (Surrey, UK) for proofreading the manuscript.
The entire study was conducted without external funding, and the authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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N.K. and M.G. contributed equally to this work.