Exercise at night may help you live longer: study

health

by amy eisinger

Go ahead and sleep and skip your morning workout.

To live longer, doing the majority of your exercise at night may actually be most beneficial, according to new research.

Australian researchers, who published a study in the journal Diabetes Care, looked at data from around 30,000 people over eight years and found that for people with obesity, the nighttime hours between 6pm and midnight They found that exercise tended to be the most beneficial.

Additionally, the researchers noted that any type of moderate to vigorous physical activity is important, and it doesn't have to be a traditional sweat session. As long as your heart rate increases and you are out of breath for a few minutes, it counts.

“We didn't discriminate in the type of activity we tracked. It could be anything from power walking to climbing stairs, but also structured exercise like running, working, or vigorously cleaning the house. may include,” said Dr. Matthew Ahmadi. said a National Heart Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney in a release.

And it didn't have to last long. It turns out that holding your breath for just three minutes has some benefits. (Previous research has shown that just 3 minutes of exercise has a strong positive impact on blood sugar control and lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease.)

In fact, researchers found that the frequency with which people engage in short bouts of exercise appears to be more important than the total amount of physical activity they engage in each day. In other words, increasing your heart rate for a few minutes throughout the day may be more effective than sitting in your office chair for eight hours after one long exercise session.

Researchers collected data from the UK Biobank on 29,836 adults aged 40 and over who were living with obesity using wearable devices to track their movements. Nearly 3,000 of the participants also had type 2 diabetes.

Study participants wore activity trackers non-stop for seven days, and researchers categorized their movements primarily into morning, afternoon, and evening. The researchers then tracked what happened to those people over the next eight years. They were monitoring for deaths, major cardiac events (such as heart attacks), and microvascular events (including prescriptions for cholesterol and blood pressure medications), the American Heart Association said.

Researchers considered a number of lifestyle factors (such as smoking, alcohol intake, sedentary time, and fruit and vegetable intake), as well as other attributes such as education level, gender, and age.

As it turns out, evening workouts are beneficial for people with obesity.

This information is in contrast to some previous studies that have shown that it may be best to train in the morning, especially if you're trying to lose weight.

“While exercise is by no means the only solution to the obesity crisis, this study shows that people who are able to plan their activities at specific times of the day may be able to best offset some of these health risks. ,” Ahmadi explained.