Amid schedules full of work, family and social commitments, we know how difficult it is to find time to take care of ourselves. Among the list of self-care measures, practice physical exercises regularly is perhaps, paradoxically, one of the most important and difficult to fit into our routines.
Faced with the known difficulties and countless barriers to starting to exercise and, above all, to staying active in the long term, science has sought to understand how optimize the effects benefits of exercise. Among the many ways to extract maximum benefits from training, choose the time of day well appears to be a promising strategy.
It is in this scenario that the chronobiology – a branch of biology dedicated to the study of periodic physiological phenomena, such as circadian cycles – joins exercise science. The results of this union begin to indicate that train at nightin many ways, it can be better than training in the morning.
This is what studies show, for example, that compared the cardiovascular benefits of aerobic training (the famous “cardio”) carried out in the morning (normally between 7 am and 11 am) versus the same training carried out in the late afternoon or early evening (generally between 5pm and 10pm). These works have already demonstrated that the effect of reduction of blood pressure it is more pronounced in evening training compared to morning training.
Similarly, other studies have shown that the so-called “autonomic benefits” (system that controls cardiovascular stress) of exercise are greater when training at night. Why does it happen? We don’t know for sure, but it is speculated that exercise in the morning “shift” the biological clockcausing a delay in the circadian rhythm, which does not seem to happen when exercising at night.
Similar results are observed when evaluating the effects on glucose It is insulin blood tests, data that are directly important for people with diabetes and obesity. In these studies, training in the evening also appears to be more beneficial than in the morning.
It is important to highlight that, in many cases, disturbances in circadian cycles are part of the pathogenesis of obesity and diabetes. These people secrete less insulin at night and, during this period, insulin itself has a less powerful effect, causing blood glucose to be higher during the night. Add to this the fact that people generally feel hungrier at night and eat more at nighttime meals, and the result will be more glucose circulating in the blood for longer. And this is precisely where exercising at the end of the day can help: muscle contraction has a very powerful effect of removing glucose from circulation, an effect that lasts for several hours after a single session. By repeating this over and over again, the result will be a lessening of the harmful effects of diabetes on the body.
If these effects are, in fact, real and relevant, we should expect that, in the long term, very long termthose people who are more physically active at night are better protected against diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular diseases than those who are more active at the beginning of the day.
It was exactly this confirmation that a recent study carried out with more than 29 thousand people in the United Kingdom brought: physical activity carried out at night reduces the chances of dying or having cardiovascular problems more than when it occurs at other times of the day.
The good news is that exercising has many health benefits regardless of what time of day is chosen. Although its effects may be greater if carried out at night, studies are almost unanimous in showing that exercising in the morning is much better than not exercising at all.
Furthermore, an important caveat to make is that most of these studies only evaluated people with a normal chronotype, that is, the extremes of the spectrum (namely, night owls and early risers) have been excluded from these studies. Therefore, it is possible that these effects are very different in people who naturally wake up earlier or who are naturally more active at night.
Furthermore, it must be recognized that the union of chronobiology with exercise science is relatively recent, and that the scientific literature is not yet robust enough for us to make recommendations for the population. Therefore, don’t worry If you like to train in the morning or if the only time of day you can train is at lunch: it is certainly better than remaining sedentary.
