The good news for athletes who train in the afternoon or evening is that you can habituate to a routine and essentially train yourself to get to sleep after a workout. What matters are the magnitude of the exertion and the time between the finish and bedtime. What about shorter workouts or events? A shorter event closer to your bedtime can have a similar effect to a longer event that ends further before bedtime. A day-long endurance competition like the Leadville 100, Dirty Kanza 200, or an Ironman pushes cortisol levels up and out of sync with the normal daily cycle for cortisol, which can contribute to sleeplessness. As a result, you are normally at the lower portion of the cycle when you go to sleep at night. On a day to day basis your cortisol levels fluctuate naturally on a cycle which peaks about 30-minutes after you wake up and slowly declines throughout the day. However, when an athlete’s training workload is too high and someone is struggling to recover from workouts, chronically elevated cortisol levels are likely part of the problem. This increase isn’t all bad it contributes to the training stimulus that drives positive adaptation. CortisolĬortisol is released in response to stress, which means elevated cortisol levels are a natural consequence of exercise. Two of the hormones that appear to play a significant role in post-workout sleep disturbances are norepinephrine and cortisol.
The more strenuous the exercise and the longer the workout or competition, the longer you have been in this excited or aroused state. It also has an excitatory effect on your nervous and endocrine systems. There isn’t one simple cause for post-exercise insomnia, but there are definitely factors that contribute to it: HormonesĮxercise ramps up your heart rate, core temperature, and sweat rate. What gives? How can an exhausting event leave you sleepless? And even if you are able to get to sleep initially, you struggle to stay asleep and fail to have a restful night. Your sleeplessness may be compounded by feeling like you are radiating heat or you can feel/hear your heartbeat. Here’s a scenario a ton of athletes experience, but few talk about: The night after finishing a big endurance competition or a long and strenuous workout, you lie awake in bed or toss and turn despite being thoroughly exhausted.
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