When Should I Schedule My Exercise?

hubie writes:

The question is more important than you think:

When should I fit exercise within my daily schedule? For most, the answer depends on our family's schedule and working hours, and perhaps on whether we're 'larks' or 'night owls'. But over the past decade, researchers have found that much more hangs on this question than these constraints. That's because recent findings suggest that the effectiveness of exercise depends on the time of day (Exercise Time Of Day, ETOD).

Now, a randomized controlled trial not only confirms convincingly that ETOD affects the effectiveness of exercise, but also shows that these effects differ between types of exercise, and between women and men. The results are published in Frontiers in Physiology.

The authors recruited 30 women and 26 men to participate. All were between 25 and 55 years old, healthy, highly active, nonsmokers, and with normal weight. [...]

Importantly, female and male participants had been independently randomized beforehand to either of two regimes: exclusively training in the morning (60min between 06:30 and 08:30), or in the evening (between 18:00 and 20:00). Those assigned to morning exercise breakfasted after exercise, and ate three further meals at four-hour intervals. Those assigned to evening exercise ate three meals at four-hour intervals before training, plus another afterwards.

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