Sleep gets hard in pregnancy and in the first year after birth. And everyone has advice. Walk more. Try yoga. Lift something. But which kind of movement actually helps you sleep? A 2026 review tried to answer that by putting 23 trials side by side.
What the review did
The researchers searched nine research databases for trials that tested exercise on sleep quality. They counted anyone from the start of pregnancy to one year after birth. In all, they found 23 trials with 1,862 women.1
The trials fell into five types of exercise: aerobic exercise, aerobic exercise with resistance training, yoga, Pilates, and relaxation exercises. The team then used a way of comparing that lets you line up types never tested against each other in a single trial. It does this by linking them through the trials they share.
What ranked first
Relaxation exercises came out on top. The review gives a number for the size of the effect, and a range around it. The number was 2.71 and the range ran from 1.45 to 3.96, in the direction of better sleep. That is a very large effect for a sleep study, and the range is wide. So we would not treat the exact number as a promise.
The team also looked at how much exercise went with the best results. Programmes of four weeks or less ranked highest. So did one or two sessions a week, and sessions of 30 to 60 minutes.
Notice what that is. It is a ranking. It says which options did best across the trials that happened to exist. It does not say a short programme beats a long one, and it does not say yoga or a walk will fail you. The review also does not spell out what counts as a relaxation exercise in each trial. We have not checked that, so we will not guess.
What we take from it
The comfort in this one is the opposite of the usual message. Nobody here is told to push harder. The top-ranked type is the gentlest one, in modest doses.
That fits what we see with new mothers. When sleep is thin, a hard session can cost more than it gives. Calm, short, regular practice is easier to keep. And it matters because sleep is tied to how mothers feel. We wrote about that in our post on postpartum sleep and quality of life, where sleep mattered more than the belly gap did.
A few honest limits. These were trials gathered from many places, with different people and different programmes. A ranking can shift when new trials arrive. And sleep that stays poor is not a coaching problem alone. If you are not sleeping at all, feel very low, or are worried about your health, talk to your doctor.
If you want to build a gentle routine that suits your body and your week, that is the work we do. Start on our postpartum support page.
- "Optimal types and doses of exercise for improving sleep quality in perinatal women: a systematic review and network meta-analysis based on randomized controlled trials," BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth (2026). Read the study ↩
