Which is better health booster: More exercise or more sleep?

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When time is tight and you must choose between getting enough sleep or fitting in exercise, which is the smarter health choice?

While many people sacrifice sleep to work out, new research suggests that prioritizing rest may ultimately be the more powerful long-term strategy. According to scientists, a good night’s sleep provides the energy and motivation needed to exercise effectively the next day.

An international research team that included Flinders University in Australia analyzed data from more than 70,000 people worldwide. The team found that sufficient sleep significantly increased physical activity the following day, while exercise did not produce a similarly strong improvement in sleep quality.

The findings were published recently in the journal Communications Medicine.

Importantly, the researchers said that sleep “quality” — the depth and continuity of sleep — had a greater influence on next-day activity than sleep “quantity,” or total hours in bed. For example, people with a sleep efficiency of 94 percent, meaning they spent most of their time in bed actually asleep, walked an average of 282 more steps the next day than those with an efficiency of 83 percent. How quickly a person fell asleep also mattered. Individuals who took 37 minutes to fall asleep walked 209 fewer steps the next day compared with those who fell asleep within 15 minutes.

In contrast, exercise had little measurable effect on sleep. Whether people walked 8,751 steps or 3,090 steps in a day, the quality of their sleep that night was nearly identical. The researchers said the data does not support the commonly held belief that physical activity automatically leads to deeper or more restful sleep.

The study also revealed that only 13 percent of participants met both recommended standards: seven to nine hours of sleep per night and about 8,000 steps per day. A large majority — 87 percent — failed to meet one or both metrics. Notably, 16.5 percent fell into a high-risk group that slept fewer than seven hours and walked fewer than 5,000 steps per day.

Across all participants, the average sleep duration was 7.1 hours, and the average step count was 5,521 — well below the 8,000-step threshold widely associated with reducing chronic disease risk.

Danny Eckert, the professor who led the study, said that for people juggling home and work responsibilities, choosing rest instead of cutting sleep for the sake of exercise may be the first step toward a healthier life. He added that prioritizing sleep is the most effective way to improve energy, motivation and exercise performance, and emphasized that simple habits — such as reducing smartphone use before bed, maintaining consistent sleep times and creating a calm sleep environment — can make a significant difference.

This article from Kormedi.com, Korea’s top health care and medical portal, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.