From Your Health Journal…..”A new study is suggesting that exercise is better for humans if completed in the middle of the day. As it turns out, our health is ruled by rhythms. Many of our organs, the heart, lungs, the liver are controlled by an endogenous circadian rhythm, which professors state is most beneficial if exercise is undertaken midday. This is an interesting study, as I always felt exercise at night was not the best idea, as it puts the body in wake mode, making it harder for many to fall asleep. I also felt exercise in the early morning may not have been the best choice for some, as you are going from complete rest mode (sleep) where the heart is relaxed at a slow beat directly to awake mode with a more intense heartbeat – which always concerned me as I wondered if this type of stress was good for the heart. Now, this new study comes out, and I am quite fascinated by it, so it will be interesting to see more about this in the future.”

From the article…..

Does exercise influence the body’s internal clock? Few of us may be conscious of it, but our bodies, and in turn our health, are ruled by rhythms. “The heart, the liver, the brain — all are controlled by an endogenous circadian rhythm,” says Christopher Colwell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Brain Research Institute, who led a series of new experiments on how exercise affects the body’s internal clock. The studies were conducted in mice, but the findings suggest that exercise does affect our circadian rhythms, and the effect may be most beneficial if the exercise is undertaken midday.

For the study, which appears in the December Journal of Physiology, the researchers gathered several types of mice. Most of the animals were young and healthy. But some had been bred to have a malfunctioning internal clock, or pacemaker, which involves, among other body parts, a cluster of cells inside the brain “whose job it is to tell the time of day,” Dr. Colwell says.

These pacemaker cells receive signals from light sources or darkness that set off a cascade of molecular effects. Certain genes fire, expressing proteins, which are released into the body, where they migrate to the heart, neurons, liver and elsewhere, choreographing those organs to pulse in tune with the rest of the body. We sleep, wake and function physiologically according to the dictates of our body’s internal clock.

But, Dr. Colwell says, that clock can become discombobulated. It is easily confused, for instance, by viewing artificial light in the evening, he says, when the internal clock expects darkness. Aging also worsens the clock’s functioning, he says. “By middle age, most of us start to have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep,” he says. “Then we have trouble staying awake the next day.”

The consequences of clock disruptions extend beyond sleepiness. Recent research has linked out-of-sync circadian rhythm in people to an increased risk for diabetes, obesity, certain types of cancer, memory loss and mood disorders, including depression.

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