Abstract Body: Introduction Insufficient sleep, including short duration, poor efficiency, and high variability (night-to-night variation in sleep), is associated with increased cardiometabolic disease risk. Black adults are more likely to exhibit poor sleep in comparison to White adults, and Black women in particular are at high risk for poor cardiometabolic health. Effective strategies to attenuate these disparities are not well studied. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the impact of resistance exercise (RE) on sleep and cardiometabolic health in young Black women.

Methods 30 young Black women [25±4 yrs; body mass index (BMI)]: 30.3±9.5kg/m²) completed a 10-week, twice weekly, supervised RE intervention. During pre and post-intervention visits we measured BMI, waist circumference (WC), systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), total cholesterol, triglycerides, and fasting blood glucose. We assessed objective sleep duration, efficiency, sleep timing standard deviation (SD), and midpoint using a Philips Actiwatch Spectrum PLUS watch. We measured self-reported sleep quality using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). We assessed pre to post RE changes in variables of interest via t-tests (PSQI) or Wilcoxon Signed Rank tests (sleep duration, efficiency, timing SD, midpoint), and Spearman’s Rank Correlations to assess associations between baseline sleep metrics and cardiometabolic factors with α set to ≤ 0.05.

Results There were no differences in objective sleep measures from pre to post RE. In contrast, self-reported sleep quality improved after RE (PSQI global scores- pre: 5.5±2.1 vs. post: 4.6±1.6, p= 0.020). Regarding sleep and cardiometabolic health, higher sleep efficiency was associated with a lower BMI (r= -0.458, p= 0.013), WC (r= -0.445, p= 0.015), DBP (r= -0.489, p= 0.007), and glucose concentration (r= -0.433, p= 0.019). Higher sleep timing SD (i.e., bedtime) was correlated with higher fasting glucose concentration (r= 0.521, p= 0.013). Unexpectedly, increased sleep midpoint was associated with lower SBP (r= -0.615, p= 0.002) and DBP (r= -0.613, p= 0.002).

Conclusion Our data indicate that 10 weeks of RE improved self-reported, but not objective, sleep quality in young Black women. Pre-intervention sleep efficiency and variability were associated with select measures of cardiometabolic health. Future studies should promote strategies to increase consistent sleep habits to reduce the risks for cardiometabolic disease in Black women.