Exercise improves health, and from recent research, it benefits the body in different ways, depending on the time of day and the activities involved. How often and what time of day do your exercise? Are you a morning or an evening person? And did you know that the timing of exercise produces different effects? The reason behind this is not apparent even to scientists.
However, to unravel the mystery, a team of international scientists carried out a comprehensive study to determine the reason. The findings established that the body produced different health-promoting signaling molecules due to exercises done at different times of the day and in organ-specific mechanisms. The signals impact exercise performance, health, sleep, memory, and metabolic homeostasis.
The Relationship between Exercise and Circadian Rhythm
Circadian Rhythm regulates natural biological processes by almost all known cells over 24 hours. The result is changing the sensitivity of different tissues to the effects of changes in exercises and when they occur.
Researchers carried out a wide range of experiments on mice to understand how this happened. First, they had to be exercising either during the early mornings or late evenings. Then, through mass spectrometry, the researchers analyzed blood samples from different body tissues such as the heart, liver, and muscles. And the results include the detection of hundreds of varying metabolites and hormone signaling in each tissue molecule. The conclusion was that exercising at different times induced signaling molecules.
Dominik Lutter, the study’s co-author, was quick to indicate that exercises helped ‘realign’ circadian rhythms in specific tissues. Thanks to the communication between varying tissues. Additionally, the study brought out new signaling molecules induced by exercise in multiple tissues, requiring more investigation.
There were several limitations identified during the study. First, the experiment was carried out on mice, which share many psychological, genetic, and behavioral characteristics with human beings, and so are their differences. And given that they are nocturnal, the type of exercise may have also limited them. And they were running off a treadmill likely to produce different results.
But despite all that, there is a lot to take into the future that can help in improving health.
