Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our

podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're discussing

why muscle strength is so important to our health and our

guest shows us how it's possible to harness the power of your muscles to enhance your

quality of life. Professor Karen S. Sir from the Department of Physiology and Aging at the University of Florida.

Let's kick off with a surprising quirk of human anatomy.

Did you know that there's one time of day when we're all at our strongest?

So four or five o'clock in the afternoon, you are going to be stronger.

And the impressive part about this, it's men, it's women,

a variety of different ages.

The exercises range from things like grip strength to sort of leg extension kinds of things and it's

tremendously consistent which isn't always true in human research that

strength is better in the afternoon.

And at this stage, people have, you know, looked at,

is it the nerve?

And there's no indication it's how the nervous system is

recruiting the muscles. It seems to be something locally at the level of the muscle.

And so that's one example where we have some evidence that likely the clock is playing a role and sort of, you know, under regular conditions, you are stronger.

You're going to be stronger in the afternoon. Now, why?

I don't, you know, we don't have a why for that,

but that's how it works.

The other one that some of my colleagues from the Netherlands

...