It’s an age-old question among fitness fanatics: is it better to work out in the morning or evening, and is there even a difference?
Well, according to a new study, getting your exercise in during the early evening is the most effective way of improving your metabolic health.
Researchers discovered that exercise performed during this time were able to better moderate the negative side effects of a greasy diet, something that morning exercises weren’t able to do.
Experts from the Mary MacKillop Institute for Health Research at Australian Catholic University studied the metabolic health of 24 inactive men - each between the ages of 30–45 and with Body Mass Indices ranging from 27–35 (that is, overweight or obese) - who were at risk of type 2 diabetes.
The scientists invited these volunteers to the lab, checked their aerobic fitness, cholesterol, blood-sugar control and other aspects of health and asked about current eating habits.
The participants were then set up to have meals, containing about 65% fat, delivered to their homes for 11 consecutive days
The 24 were then split into three groups: one exercising at 6.30am, one at 6.30pm, and the control group remained sedentary.
After five days, researchers found that the benefits of evening workouts decisively trumped those of morning exercise.
Fasting blood glucose, insulin, cholesterol, triacylglycerol and LDL-cholesterol concentrations decreased only in participants allocated to evening exercise training.
They also developed better blood sugar control during the nights after their workouts, while they slept, something that neither the control group nor the group that exercised in the morning experienced.
In short, evening exercise was capable of reversing some of the harms of a fatty diet, while morning exercises didn’t.
The results, published in the journal Diabetologia, add to growing evidence that timing matters when it comes to our workouts.
The researchers stressed that while the most important thing is to squeeze in any amount of exercise whenever you can, the study shows that working out later in the day may have unique benefits for improving fat metabolism and blood-sugar control, particularly if you are eating a diet high in fat.
“This study does suggest that evening exercise may be more beneficial for people with disrupted metabolism than the same exercise done earlier in the day," said lead author Trine Moholdt.
"But I think it is vital to point out that it is much more important that you keep exercising than what time of day you are doing it.”
