Taking time every day to be physically active can lift your mood, lower your risk of injury, and improve your overall physical and mental health.
Regular physical activity can lower your blood pressure and cholesterol, keep your blood sugar under control, and decrease your risk of cancer. If you’re stressed or worried about something, exercise can actually help relieve those symptoms.
Exercise can also improve your sleep, memory, and give you more energy throughout the day. If you aren’t really physically active, it is important to try to incorporate it into your lifestyle. Do something that you like. Do something that you enjoy so that way you’re likely to do it regularly.
But do you know when the right time to workout is? Some say early rising warm-up and exercise is good for health, others say evening exercise is more relaxing.
Several researches have shown that there is an optimal time to train.
That helps with:
- Muscle growth
- Strength growth
- Performance boost
Finding the perfect time to exercise is as much about personal preference as it is about physiology. Exercise is supposed to feel good, but if the muscles are tight in the morning or working out too late disrupts sleep, it can feel counterproductive. So it is important to know the right time to exercise.
A study on morning and evening training for physical performance and muscle hypertrophy show us that the evening exercise may lead to improved muscle mass and may be more beneficial for endurance. However, the results were very minimal.
Another study from 2009 from the journal of strength and conditioning shows us that subjects who trained in the evening experienced slightly greater muscle growth than those trained in the morning throughout a period of 10 weeks.
So this means that if you are trying to optimize your training for effectiveness regarding muscle growth, improvement in strength, and performance, evening exercises are better compared to the morning.
Athletes say their exercise performance was better in the evening as they consume less oxygen that is they use less energy for the same intensity of exercise in the evening versus the morning.
- Stress relief from a long day
- More calories in your body which equates to more strength
- The gym is empty at night compared to the morning
- More relaxed morning
This is because researches have shown that peak performance is best when our body is the warmest, which is roughly between 4 to 7 p.m. This is also most likely because you are
- more hydrated
- and more fueled with glycogen
This can greatly vary from person to person.
Working out in the evening has its own downsides as well:
- Not being motivated to workout after a long day
- Could be harder to fall asleep after a workout
- Higher distractions with friends, social media, television, etc
