If you do a web search on this topic, you will get all kinds of studies pointing out why training at one time or another in the day is best for you. That is exactly the reason why you should not follow the advice in any of those articles. Instead go by your own needs and experience. If you can train in the morning, do so. But if you find that training in the evening works better on certain weeks or months, just do that. I mostly trained in the mornings unless it were summer.. when I preferred training in the evenings. This is because the days were longer in the summer and I had a need to fill my evenings in with some activity rather than sinking into a couch. Subsequently, I also trained a bit longer in the evenings. That, of course, meant my morning routine was a bit emptier in the summer. To compensate, I would simply commute into the office early in the summer months.
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| Florida is working out well |
In recent years, I came to the realization that pretty much all of the injuries I suffered in the gym happened in the mornings. So I increased my warm up time. Some winter mornings, I would park my car at the gym and then go for a brisk walk around the block.. and then enter the gym, take off my winter jacket, etc. before making my way to the gym floor. But still, the morning workouts never felt as smooth flowing as my evening workouts. I would always feel a cold draught or rusted bolt somewhere in my body. It was clear that serious mobility work was also needed before my morning workouts. And I decided that I did not have the patience for that. During the day time, I am moving around the office floor. When working from home, I might run an errand around lunch time and also sneak in a post-meal walk around the block. This is why the evening workouts felt good right off the bat.. I would have been up and around for many hours by the time I touched that dumbbell.
I recently moved to Florida so that I can train in the evenings year round. And I have to say my evening workouts so far have felt pretty good. I expected that. And I am happy. Also, the eye candy in the gym -- and beaches -- down here is off the charts. Nothing in New England to match. I find that motivating. And I have been taking full advantage.. shamelessly so and showing up at the gym diligently. Its like when you have an attractive receptionist at the office. You might not like certain aspects of your job but you had a pretty good reason to stay on. Of course, not all of you can move out-of-state just for fitness reasons. You might have family, mortgages, an employer that requires you to come into the office physically, etc. But I had neither kith nor kin in New England. And I could continue to work remotely for the same company. So I moved. Sunny, breezy and washboard ab days ahead.. and, fingers crossed, no more injuries.
Note: One thing about training in the evenings is having to wait for equipment more often than in the mornings. I simply work around this by not being fixated on any particular way of doing an exercise. If I cannot do the barbell bench press, I would look at doing dumbbell bench presses. If I cannot do that, I would look at doing dips. If I cannot dip, I would look at machine bench presses.. or just get on the floor and do pushups. If there's no floor space, well, I just move on to hitting a different body part altogether.. and come back to chest work later.
