Cannot sleep if you exercise too late in the day or cannot wake up early enough to exercise before you start your day? New research recently published in the journal Cell Metabolism highlights that exercise at different times during the day can influence homeostasis and other bodily functions. Responding to various health-promoting signals released when we exercise, specific organs are impacted and alter sleep, memory, and metabolism. The study explains how exercise affects the body at different times and how to time exercise to maximize benefits for people with diabetes, obesity, and other metabolic diseases.

Fellow cofirst author Dr. Kenneth Dyar, head of Metabolic Physiology at the Helmholtz Diabetes Center at Helmholtz, Munich, Germany, and colleagues conducted research to build upon earlier work that determined tissue sensitivity and response to exercise vary based not only on the time of day it is done, but also on the individual's circadian schedule.

The team decided to dig further to see if there was an optimal time to exercise to yield the best metabolic outcome and how tissues collectively respond to timed exercise. Their study required mapping seven different tissues extracted from mice and comparing metabolic responses at different times during the day after acute exercise was performed.

Dr. Dyar stressed the importance of his team's work, saying "While our resource provides important new perspectives about energy metabolites and known signaling molecules, this is just the tip of the iceberg. We show some examples of how our data can be mined to identify new tissue and time-specific signaling molecules."

Adding to the value of the research, Dominik Lutter, a coauthor with Dyar and head of Computational Discovery Research from the Helmholtz Diabetes Center at Helmholtz, elaborated further, saying, "As this is the first comprehensive study that summarizes time and exercise dependent metabolism over multiple tissues, it is of great value to generate and refine systemic models for metabolism and organ crosstalk."

The authors also report several limitations of their study—one being that the experiments were conducted on mice. Although there are many common characteristics when compared with human subjects, mice are considered inherently nocturnal, and exercise in the study was limited only to running on a treadmill; both factors do not represent the human experience of daytime wakefulness and high-intensity exercise that can produce different results.

"Despite the limitations, it's an important study that helps to direct further research that can help us better understand how exercise, if timed correctly, can help to improve health," stated Shogo Sato, fellow cofirst author and assistant professor from the Department of Biology at The Center for Biological Clocks Research at Texas A&M University.

The authors summarize that more studies are needed to gain a better understanding of how exercise affects the body at different times of day to maximize the benefits of exercise for people at risk of diseases, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.

The content contained in this article is for informational purposes only. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice. Reliance on any information provided in this article is solely at your own risk.

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