Better Sleep: The Key to Improving Fitness You Might Not Realize

Did you know that we literally spend about one-third of our life sleeping? Even if this sounds like a lot (which it is), adequate sleep is essential for starting a new day with vigor and vitality. After all, we want to be productive, rested and focused throughout the day. But the number of hours we sleep is not the only determining factor – the quality of the sleep we get is important, too. Particularly during the dark, long winter months, it is crucial to pay more attention to quality than quantity to maintain your daily rhythm despite the darkness. And the better you sleep at night, the more active you will be during the day.

Sleep better, awake refreshed
The first step in improving the quality of your sleep is to track your sleep cycles. How much do you move during the night? How often do you wake up? If you use a fitness and activity tracker, you can track your sleep directly. Just keep your wearable on during the night and activate the sleep mode as soon as you are lying in bed.

Analyze your sleep
No matter which method you use to track your sleep, you should deactivate the sleep mode in the morning, so you can immediately see how restful your sleep really was. Did you toss and turn a lot in your sleep, or even wake up? Were you restless – for instance, because you ate too much before going to bed, and your dinner sat like a lump in your stomach? Or did you have weird dreams? You can enter all this information directly into the app. With this data, you can analyze your sleep behavior, identify disturbing factors and change your habits in a sustainable way.

Good sleep = more exercise
10,000: That is the number of steps you should take every day. Even if you are very motivated, we know that there are sometimes days when it is really hard to reach this number. And the season of the year also has an influence on our need for exercise: Long winter nights mean short days. On these days, we often don’t feel the need to move much or at all after sundown, which in turn can make it even more difficult to achieve our daily step goal.

How many hours do you sleep a night? How many steps do you take a day?

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