Morning vs Evening Exercise: Experts Analyze the Difference in Effects on the Body

It's no secret that exercise can improve a person's health. Recent research shows that exercise benefits the human body differently depending on when activities are done. However, scientists are still unaware of why exercise timing produces varying effects. To gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms at play, a team of international scientists carried out the most comprehensive analysis to date of exercise performed at varying times of the day.

Varying Metabolic Signaling of Exercise Depending on the Time of Day

(Photo: Nathan Cowley from Pexels)

The recent study shows how the human body produces varying health-promoting signaling molecules in organ-specific mechanisms following exercises done at different times of the day. These signals significantly impact a person's health, memory, sleep, metabolic homeostasis, and exercise performance. Findings were published in the journal Cell Metabolism, titled "Atlas of exercise metabolism reveals time-dependent signatures of metabolic homeostasis."

Professor Juleen Zierath from the Karolinska Institutet and Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen says that a deeper understanding of how exercise affects the human body at varying times of day may help researchers maximize its benefits for people at risk of diseases like type-2 diabetes and obesity.

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Exercise and the Circadian Rhythm

Almost all known cells regulate their natural biological processes over 24 hours. This is known as the circadian rhythm. This means that different tissues' sensitivity to the effects of exercises changes depending on when the activity occurs. Past researchers confirmed that exercise timing with respect to the body's circadian rhythm optimizes health-promoting effects.

The team wanted a more in-depth and detailed understanding of the said effect; hence they carried out a wide range of experiments on mice that exercised either during the early mornings or late evenings. Blood samples and different tissues, including the mice's liver, heart, muscle, brain, and fat, were then collected and analyzed via mass spectrometry. This allowed the team to detect hundreds of varying metabolites and hormone signaling in each tissue molecule and monitored the changes depending on when the exercise was done.

The study resulted in a comprehensive map of signaling molecules induced by exercise at different tissues following exercises done at other times of the day, or an "Atlas of Exercise Metabolism," reports EurekAlert.

Dominik Lutter, the co-author of the study and the Head of Computational Discovery Research at the Helmholtz Diabetes Center, Munich, explains that the conducted study is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive analysis that summarizes the time and exercise dependent metabolism of multiple tissues—adding that it's of great value to be able to generate and refine the systemic models of organ and metabolism crosstalk.

The study brought insights into light, including a deeper understanding of how varying tissues communicate with each other and how exercise helps 'realign' circadian rhythms in specific tissues. Faulty circadian clocks have been associated with increased type-2 diabetes and obesity risks. Finally, the study also identified new signaling molecules induced by exercise in multiple tissues, which needs more investigation to understand how they individually or collectively influence a person's health.