THE RELATION BETWEEN TIMING OF PHYSICAL THERAPY SESSION AND SLEEP QUALITY ON WORKING PEOPLE

J. Lappalainen¹, J. Väänänen¹, K. Kauranen¹

Background: Stress is a typical phenomenon in life nowadays. The demands of working life are high and workers try to increase their productivity to the detriment of sleep. The human body identifies physical stress caused by exercising similar to mental stress. It is important to try to improve sleep quality, because a human body needs sleep to recover from stress. Chronotype, the expression of circadian rhythm in human body, is a factor that has an effect on sleep quality. It could be useful for physical therapists to take patient´s chronotype into account when planning the timing of physical therapy sessions.

Purpose:  To examine how exercising during physical therapy session in the morning or in the evening affects sleep quality of working people and are there differences between chronotypes.

Methods: Ten test subjects were recruited and criteria meeting data were gathered from eight test subjects. Test subjects were divided into two groups. Group 1 exercised the first two weeks before 12pm and the next two weeks after 6pm, group 2 on the contrary order. During sleep, the test subjects wore the Oura smart ring, which measures different physiological aspects. The data was analyzed with Student T-test, Wilcoxon test and Mann-Whitney U-test. Variables used in the analysis were the amount of deep sleep, wake up after sleep onset, heart rate variability and heart rate during sleep. The effect of chronotype (evening type, intermediate, morning type) was included into the analysis. In addition, the relation between exercise timing and sleep-wake pattern was studied. The study was commissioned by the Finnish company Oura Health.

Results: The results of the study demonstrated that exercise timing had no effect on the amount of deep sleep, wake up after sleep onset, heart rate variability or average heart rate during sleep (p > 0,05). The results did not change when chronotype was taken into consideration.

Conclusion(s): Based on this study exercise timing does not have an effect on sleep quality and sleep-wake pattern in group level and this does not depend on person’s chronotype.

Implications: The study demonstrated that exercise timing does not affect the sleep habits in either group. For example, people who are considered as evening types, could receive physical therapy later in the evening without having a negative influence on their sleep quality. This observation enables physical therapists to expand the opening hours of their business and adjust their working hours to their personal lives.

Funding, acknowledgements: The work was unfunded.

Keywords: chronotype, sleep quality, timing of physical therapy

Topic: Sport & sports injuries

Did this work require ethics approval? Yes

Institution: LAB University of Applied Sciences

Committee: The Ethical Committee of LAB University of Applied Sciences, Lappeenranta, Finland

Ethics number: 276/12.01.01.00/2020