The early morning sky bursts with every shade of orange, and hundreds of silhouettes are moving within it. It’s dark enough that they look like shadows dancing, but they’re not dancing. They’re exercising. Arms are flailing every which way, and most are shaking their body in one way or another—waking up body and mind through self-vibration.

This is what I see every sunrise along the banks of Inya Lake in Yangon, Myanmar. It’s what I saw in grocery store parking lots in Bangkok, Thailand. It’s what I saw in public parks in Kyoto, Japan. I saw it happen on sidewalks in Hong Kong and Vietnam, along the Mekong River in Laos and the Ganges River in India.

Dedication to morning movement—not necessarily intense physical training—is truly a mark of Asia, and it offers countless benefits for those willing to commit to it. Let’s dig into a few of those benefits.

For starters, establishing a morning exercise routine seems to be easier than establishing an exercise routine at other times of the day. Dr. Cedric X. Bryant, chief exercise physiologist of the American Council on Exercise, put it this way in an article for WebMD:

"Morning exercisers tend to stick with their exercise habit. By doing the bulk of exercise first thing in the morning, you get your exercise in before other distractions can intrude. We can all relate to that—because once the day gets going, it's hard to get off the treadmill called life."

Morning is often the time of day we tend to have the most control over. We set our clocks, wake at a certain time, and typically have a morning routine that we’re able to go through in relative privacy and before we head out to work. Most of those moving along the banks of Inya Lake, for example, have office jobs that start at 8am or so. Once we put a full day of work in, it may be time for dinner, or additional plans may arise that interrupt our schedule, or we may simply be too tired of mind to get fired up for a solid workout.

Next, there’s a reason I refer to this as “morning movement.” There’s an assumption that exercise for fitness—in the sense of being physically sound and healthy—demands the kind of rigorous training we see in Nike and Gatorade commercials. I’m talking about movement in the purest sense; this means no weights, especially because researchers such as Dr. Stuart McGill, professor of spine biomechanics at Waterloo University, often suggest preserving disc health by avoiding strenuous weight bearing activity until you’ve been out of bed for at least an hour.

I often think of it like this: Who is more fit in the traditional sense of the term, the 90-year-old Japanese woman who can still head out and do her own grocery shopping, or the 55-year-old workout warrior with banged up knees and shoulders? Moving in the morning is a terrific way to start our days with a feeling of empowerment and to naturally wake up our bodies through moving the blood rather than relying solely on caffeine. It should come as no surprise that many of the longest-living people in Asia will tell you that their morning exercise routine is their secret for a long, healthy life.

Then there are the well-known and often discussed metabolic benefits of having a light workout in the morning. A 2015 study published in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology confirmed what many have been preaching for decades. Though the study focused on those with type 1 diabetes, the results were clear: “Morning exercise confers a lower risk of late-onset hypoglycemia than afternoon exercise and improves metabolic control on the subsequent day.”

But what about the effects of morning movement for athletes? Well, recent research continues to uncover those positive effects as well.

A November 2015 study in The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research tested how low-intensity morning exercise influenced the physiological response during unsteady-workload evening exercise. The researchers, observing variables such as VO2max, heart rate, oxygen uptake and In If (what they refer to as “an index of cardiac parasympathetic modulation”) concluded that “the physiological response during evening exercise is enhanced by low-intensity morning exercise, which might be an effective conditioning method on a sporting event day.”

Another study titled, “Comparison of Different Modes of Morning Priming Exercise on Afternoon Performance,” published just one month later in The International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, assessed how professional rugby players responded in the afternoon (both in physical performance and in salivary hormone response) after they conducted various types of morning exercise. The verdict? All types of morning exercise (cycling, running, weights, etc.), improved at least one marker of afternoon performance.

If light movement in the morning can prime elite athletes for better performance in the afternoon and evening, I’m willing to bet it can have a similar impact on the performance of whatever you do for your daily work.

Lastly, research continues to point to how morning movement can impact sleep that same evening. A study in SLEEP looked at how light morning exercise and even simply stretching impacted the sleep quality on postmenopausal women. The women who exercised averaged 70 percent better sleep, and those who just woke up and did a light stretching routine still averaged 30 percent better sleep.

Did this morning movement need to be vigorous and exhausting? The lead researcher, Dr. Anne McTiernan, put it this way in an interview with NBC: “Nobody is saying people have to be athletes and do marathons.” In other words, we need not reach high levels of intensity in order to reap the many benefits of morning movement.

Although this study targeted a particular niche, as did the ones on athletes, I don’t believe it’s the niche characteristic that made the results come true. There is something fundamentally human and positive about waking and immediately moving, especially when it’s compared to the alternative of waking and then sitting to work.

Before getting started, take some time to reflect on previous morning movement routines you may have had. What caused you to stop them? What types of activities were you doing? Did you too often feel the need to reach peak intensity, and burnout because you found it difficult to tap into that level of intensity on a regular basis? Ask yourself these questions, and then begin compiling a list of activities you enjoy and that could become a fairly unintrusive part of your existing routine. Perhaps you can simply wake up, make your coffee, and take a 20-minute stroll around your neighborhood before jumping into your other morning rituals. Or maybe you can come up with a 30-minute gentle sequence of stretches and bodyweight exercises that you can roll out of bed and flow into.

Whatever you choose to do, the research certainly suggests that all of us—athletes, non-athletes, and everybody in between—can benefit from taking a cue from the millions of morning movers all throughout Asia.

The tough (and easy) part is getting started.