How to Use Exercise-Timing to Boosts Your Metabolic-Health & Sleep Quality - New Research
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A new study strongly suggests that exercising at the same time each day may be a powerful tool for improving your metabolic health and sleep quality.
And the mechanism of action seems to involve training our "peripheral muscle clock" with regularized exercise, just as we want to train our central circadian clock" with regularized light exposure (lots of light in the morning upon waking up and reduced light exposure at night before sleep).
So how does this work?
Well, our body runs on a 24-hour cycle, called a circadian rhythm. This is controlled by the millions of tiny chemically regulated internal clocks in nearly every cell of our body.
One major grouping of peripheral cellular clocks is our peripheral muscle clock. This is where all the cellular clocks in our muscles work together.
The central circadian clock, on the other hand, is found in the brain in two bunches of nerve cells called suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN). These are located in a part of the brain known as the anterior hypothalamus.
This central clock in our brain can sense signals from outside, such as light, and is also affected by internal signals, such as those sent by the circadian muscle clock from activity levels and activity levels. The central clock helps our body to keep a 24-hour cycle, by integrating both internal and external signals.
More specifically, the skeletal muscle clock is very sensitive to exercise, meaning that the time of day when a workout or go for a walk, it can influence our body's gene expression—including genes related to regulating blood sugar levels, for example.
This new study argues that people with metabolic disorders such as pre-diabetes or even type 2 diabetes, often have disrupted skeletal muscle clocks and this increases their risk of disease progression and maintenance.
Most importantly, this new research strongly suggests that exercising at roughly the same time every day may help improve your metabolic profile and help you maintain good metabolic health. It may also help those with diabetes and pre-diabetes prevent or even reverse the disease.
In other words, the use of timed exercise (exercising at roughly the same time every day) may be a chronotherapeutic tool within circadian medicine to treat and prevent metabolic disease processes, by working with and training our body's clocks and circadian physiology.
Not only that but good exercise timing combined with good sleep timing (i.e. going to sleep and waking up at the same time most days) may provide a powerful synergistic strategy for significantly improving sleep quality.
For example, research cited in this new study found that If you don't exercise and sleep at the same time every day, it could reduce your insulin sensitivity by up to 47%. Poor sleep alone (i.e. only getting 5 hours) can lead to a 34% reduction.
For instance, additional research indicates that: "Just as sleep affects blood sugar levels, blood sugar levels may also impact sleep quality. A study of people with type 2 diabetes found that those with higher blood sugar levels experience poorer sleep13. Another study found that 62% of people with glucose levels in the pre-diabetes range are likely to have poor sleep14, compared to 46% of people with normal glucose levels."
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Your Coach David is a former Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapist and Clinical Behavior Consultant turned Certified Stress Management & Sleep Science Coach. He's also an International Sports Science Association (ISSA) Certified Personal Fitness Trainer and Nutritionist.
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