Claire Zulkey, a 44-year-old freelance author within the Chicago area, has a well-established morning routine: She drops her kids off in school, activates the TV to her favorite show, and gets moving with a full-body workout. Then Zulkey showers and gets to work.
Meghan Cully, however, works a full day before hitting the gym on the best way home. The 32-year-old graphic designer from Maryland describes herself as a “slow starter” within the morning and finds it difficult to get going early within the day.
Everyone gets their workout, but is one time of day higher than one other?
Consider your fitness goals
A small study from Skidmore College investigated the advantages of morning and evening exercise for ladies and men. Paul J. Arciero, Ph.D., professor of health and human physiology sciences at Skidmore, was the lead researcher.
“We had the groups follow the same multimodal routine and randomly divided them into evening and morning groups,” he says. “We found that women and men responded differently to different types of exercise depending on the time of day, which surprised us.”
The study found that for girls who wish to lower their blood pressure or lose belly fat, exercising within the morning works best. Women who wish to construct upper body muscle, endurance or a general mood improvement should exercise within the evening.
For male participants, the outcomes were somewhat reversed: exercising within the evening reduced blood pressure, the danger of heart disease and feelings of fatigue, while, much like women, they burned more fat when exercising within the morning. More research is required to grasp the explanations for these results.
The smartest thing, says Arciero, is to schedule your workouts across the time of day if you get essentially the most bang on your buck. “If you’re a woman, you might want to do your cardio in the morning and your strength training in the evening,” he says.
Early risers versus night owls
“For many individuals, [the best time to exercise] is determined by their chronotype,” says Jennifer J. Heisz, Ph.D., associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster University and writer of Move the body, heal the mind.
Chronotype is your body’s natural tendency to sleep at a certain time—it determines whether you are an evening owl or an early riser. For the 25% of the population who describe themselves as night owls, it may well be difficult to get each enough sleep and enough exercise, Heisz says.
“Exercising at night can sometimes be challenging because of societal norms,” she explains. “You might naturally stay up until midnight and exercise late at night, but if you have to leave the house at 7 a.m. the next morning, you’re not getting enough sleep.”
Sleep—which provides your body the time it must get better and reap the advantages of exercise—should at all times be a priority when training. Regardless of the research on the advantages of certain exercises at certain times of day, should you do not get enough time to sleep, your results shall be compromised.
How to reschedule your training time
If your goal is to alter your routine to match Arciero’s findings regarding the time of day to exercise, or just to make exercise more enjoyable even when it doesn’t suit your chronotype, Heisz says it’s possible.
“For example, if you want to get into a morning routine, the good news is that both sun and exercise can reset your biological signals,” she says. “Combine them by exercising outside in the sun and you’ll have a powerful effect.”
For older adults who sometimes get up too early and might’t get back to sleep, the change they need could also be to exercise within the evening. “That could help them fall asleep later and sleep through the night longer,” Heisz says.
If you are apprehensive that evening exercise will affect your ability to sleep, consider switching to gentler types of exercise like yoga. Avoid strenuous exercise like running, as this could increase your heart rate and make it harder to change off.
For Cully, who trains within the evenings, the trick is to work out on the best way home from work, far enough from bedtime that it doesn’t affect her sleep. “If I went home first, I probably wouldn’t work out,” she admits. “But then I have the whole evening to wind down.”
No matter if you prefer to exercise, crucial thing, says Arciero, is a multimodal approach. For his study, Arciero developed a program called RISE that does just that – resistance training, sprint interval training, stretching and endurance. “We found that compliance was higher when each type of exercise was performed once a week, and so was the benefit,” he explains.
More about workouts and exercises:
