This is the best time of day to exercise

Before you go outside for a morning run in the summer sun, a new study found that evening exercise is the most effective way to improve metabolic health. The researchers found that exercises performed during this time were better able to mitigate the negative side effects of a fatty diet, something that morning exercises couldn’t.

The study, published in the journal Diabetologia, limited its focus to sedentary and overweight men. Unlike other studies that introduced exercise timing and collected vital health data, these researchers also monitored participants’ meals.

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Participants only consumed a diet of fatty foods that were sent to their homes by delivery. Five days after the diet, they returned to the labs for their vital signs and began their training sessions, which were scheduled in the morning or in the evening, depending on the group.

For all groups, the results were not as good after eating fatty meals for five days. But the group that worked out in the morning had the same high cholesterol and molecule patterns in the blood that indicated cardiovascular and heart disease. The evening group had far better results.

After five days of training, they had lower cholesterol and showed better cardiovascular health in their bloodstream. They also developed better blood sugar control in the evening, which neither the control group nor the group that exercised in the morning experienced.

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In short, evening exercise was able to reverse some of the disadvantages of a high fat diet, while morning exercise did not.

This exercise was performed on a limited pool of subjects in highly controlled situations. It doesn’t mean that morning workouts are bad (any type of workout is better than no workout), but it does suggest that evening workouts can affect the meals you consumed on the same day, especially if they are fat and harmful to your cholesterol.