Afternoon Workouts May Yield the Most Benefits for Longevity
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- 01 Mar 2023
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If you exercise at lunchtime, there may be moments — possibly when you're unpacking the sweaty clothes from your gym bag each evening — when you wonder if it’s worth the trouble. But the findings of a new study of more than 90,000 people may inspire you to keep fighting the good fight: Working out in the afternoon reduced the risk of early death more than physical activity in the morning or afternoon.
The study, published February 18 in Nature Communications, provides good evidence that a nonmedication intervention such as physical activity makes a difference in health outcomes, says Fatima Z. Syed, MD, an associate professor of medicine and a physician at Duke Lifestyle and Fitness Center in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the research.
“The study ultimately shows that doing moderate to vigorous activity (MVPA) is associated with a lower likelihood of dying from cardiovascular disease or cancer. I think this tells us it's not just about weight, but also about moving for overall health,” says Dr. Syed.
But Syed is concerned that people may read the headlines and think that if they can’t exercise in the afternoon, then exercising at other times in the day is not as valuable. “That is absolutely not the case. I interpret these findings to show that exercise itself is worth it, and if you can do that in the afternoon, even better,” she says.
Moderate to Vigorous Exercise Reduced the Risk of Death From Any Cause, Heart Disease, and Cancer
To examine the relationship between exercise, exercise timing, and the overall risk of death, as well as death from specific causes, researchers used health and demographic data from about 92,000 people in a United Kingdom biomedical database.
All participants wore an accelerometer for a week, which tracked the time of day they exercised and how hard they worked out.
After gathering that data, investigators placed participants into one of four groups according to when they exercised:
Morning, from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Afternoon, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Evening, from 5 p.m. to midnight
A group that didn’t show a time preference and exercised at different times of day throughout the week
After an average of 7 years, the investigators checked the death records of the participants. A total of 3,088 (3.4 percent) participants had died; 1,076 (1.2 percent) had died of heart disease; and 1,872 (2 percent) had died of cancer. Read More…
