Exercise and subsequent sleep in male runners: failure to support the slow wave sleep-mood-exercise hypothesis.

10 male joggers participated in a 3-week experimental protocol designed to look at the effects of three levels of energy expenditure (no exercise, regular exercise, and double exercise) on mood and subsequent nocturnal sleep focusing on REM sleep and delta sleep parameters. Exercise conditions were well discriminated by daily (F(2,18) = 65.8, p less than 0.0000) mean hip activity counts during monitored field exercise and by the mean weekly body weights (F(2,14) = 7.24, p less than 0.007). Subjects slept for 2 nights in the laboratory following each exercise condition and filled out two brief, clinical self-rating scales each night prior to sleep. These two self-rating instruments together index 105 somatic and psychobiological symptoms that are subsumed by the five major clinical symptom clusters of: Depression, Mania, Anxiety, Cognitive Disorganization, and Organicity. There were no significant differences in manually scored whole-night sleep parameters with the exception of REM latency (F(2,18) = 3.63, p less than 0.05), and there were no significant differences in self-ratings of psychobiological symptoms by night or exercise condition. These results are discussed in the context of failure to support either the slow wave sleep-exercise hypothesis or the exercise-mood elevation hypothesis.