Peak Performance May Come Late in Day

When does your body perform best? Christopher Kline, a PhD student in exercise science at the University of South Carolina, wondered the same thing, so he sequestered 25 highly-trained swimmers in his lab for four weekends. As Jeannine Stein reports in the Los Angeles Times, Kline regulated their sleep (two hours of wakefulness, followed by one hour of sleep), and had them swim a  200 meter freestyle every nine hours. The results: Swimmers’ times were generally faster later in the day — fastest at 11 p.m., and slowest at 5 a.m. Read Kline’s report on his research in the Journal of Applied Physiology.