Wondering how to make the most of your Saturday morning? Science points towards a refreshingly simple answer: get outside and get moving.
No complicated morning routine required. A walk outdoors can combine two things linked with benefits for our body clock and cognitive performance: natural light and physical activity.
Start With Some Morning Light
Light is one of the major environmental signals involved in regulating our circadian rhythm, the internal clock that helps determine when we feel awake and when we become sleepy.
Getting natural light after waking can therefore be a useful part of maintaining the body’s daily rhythm.
Then Get Moving
You do not necessarily need to spend your Saturday morning doing a full gym workout either.
Research examining acute exercise and cognition has found benefits after exercise, particularly for areas including executive function and episodic memory. A 2024 review reported that around 20 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise consistently benefited cognitive performance.
For a Saturday morning, that could be as straightforward as putting on your trainers and heading out for a brisk walk.
What About Breakfast?
There is less reason to treat eating breakfast immediately before morning exercise as a universal rule.
A 2025 systematic review looked at exercise with and without breakfast in healthy adults. Across the five studies included, researchers found no indication that eating or skipping breakfast altered the effects of exercise on cognitive performance during or shortly after exercise. The researchers cautioned that the evidence remains limited and largely involves young, healthy adults.
In other words, the research does not support turning breakfast timing into another Saturday morning chore.
And Then Comes The Coffee
Put everything together and you have a morning routine that feels particularly easy to adapt to life in Malta.
Get outside, catch some daylight, take a walk and move your body. Then find somewhere nice, sit down and enjoy your coffee.
Not a bad way to start a Saturday.
