Your Body Will Tell You When's the Best Time to Work Out

You've probably had workouts where the whole routine just felt like a grind. Every set led to a long break. You stared at your weights like they were staring back at you, just looking to end you. Your brain would sometimes make small whispers like "let's just use the treadmill", "maybe we can end here for the day", or "maybe we can reduce the weight of the plate or dumbbell." You leave the gym tired and fulfilled, but ultimately you want to just rest for the remainder of your day.

You've also probably had workouts that just felt natural and felt like you were in your peak performance. The weights were moved effortlessly. The pace was sustainable. Every set had you looking at your set rest time because you were itching to go again. Your brain would tell you after each set, "the weight must be added," "the dumbbell must be bigger", "let's do more reps." You then leave the gym fulfilled and ready to do it all over again in the following days.

But here's the kicker: In both scenarios, they were the same workout, with the same exercises, with the same number of repetitions, with the same goal in mind. What could possibly have caused the difference in performance? The possible reasons start listing in your head: motivation, lack of sleep, poor discipline and habits, fatigue from your own schedule. The thing is, there's a good chance that all of them are correct. Maybe not all at once, but for the different times that it has happened, a different reason has shown up every time.

Picture this scenario: You enter the gym. You look around and see all sorts of equipment and machines. You also see the people doing different types of workouts and running exercises. You're at a loss, not quite sure what to do. You decide to either pick up a dumbbell for a basic exercise. Or you decide to hit the treadmill. You don't exactly have a goal in mind; you just want to get started and do any exercise that comes to mind. This will be Scenario #1.

Now picture a different scenario. You enter the gym with intent. You know you want to focus more on building your lower body. So you go straight for the exercises that would do just that, whether it's with any free weight, any cable, or any machine. Or you intend to go for a full-body workout. Or you intend to build your upper body or core. This will be Scenario #2.

You're probably thinking of the two scenarios; the second scenario is what would lead to your body telling you that your routine is more sustainable. Well, it's not really that simple. Let's add more layers to it. Let's say as you enter the gym, it's pretty much full of people. The equipment and machines are not as readily available, and you have to line up and queue for some of them. You think to yourself, this is normal. But then it also happens to be the only time you're available to work out, and you can't stay for far too long because you have work the next day. But then, you won't be able to complete the routine you had planned for the day.

So maybe then, you decide to set your workout time at a different time of the day. You tried setting it after your working hours before, but it coincides with how most people schedule their gym time. So you try the opposite route: you go before working hours in the morning. Unfortunately, it's also still full at this time because a lot of people are either morning people or have been influenced by what they see on the internet about starting your hustle and grind before sunrise. So you decide to set it for when the gym is not so full, which is usually the middle of the day on a weekday. Unfortunately, it also happens to be on a schedule in between certain tasks you have to accomplish for the day. It can be lots of things, from work to family to your own resting time. So you enter the gym feeling more sluggish than usual, and you don't feel like you were at your best performance.

With all of these complications coming into mind, you decide to go for a gym that isn't too full. Particularly a gym that focuses more on personal training. Sounds great, right? You have the area to yourself, a trainer will structure your workout for you, and all you have to do is show up. There's just one problem: Since this is a premium service, it's also at a premium price. Maybe it would be a good thing if you didn't have a lot to take care of. But what if you have a family, with lots of essential expenses, and you can't visualize yourself continuing this for the long term?

Now let's say you found the perfect, affordable gym, where you can indeed still manage to complete your desired routine for the day. However, what if the other aspects of your life, usually your work or family, begin to pile up? You suddenly lack the energy to bring yourself to the gym. Or you do manage to make it, but you're sluggish, and you once again feel like you're not up to par in terms of your performance. Or let's keep it simpler: You want to work out in the morning, but you either always sleep late at night or the workout leaves you with less energy for the rest of the day. Or you want to work out after working hours, but the long grind of the day has you too tired after clocking out.

There are so many reasons that life throws your way that make you unable to build a habit of going to the gym. It's why the gym has become this intimidating training grounds, especially for the elderly who did not build exercise habits throughout their younger years, the parents who would enroll their children in all sorts of sporting activities but never in the one aspect of physical activity that would help their kids for all sports, the working adult who is still hustling and bustling through life and is tackling multiple problems at once, the beginners who are just daunted by the environment, and even people who are already fit but do not feel safe.

This isn't even getting into the workout routine itself. You've likely wondered to yourself the following: How do I know which workout is the best for me? Do I train my legs first? Do I train my arms first? How do I train my back? How do I lose weight? How do I gain abs? How many days per week should I train? When do I use the treadmill or do cardio? Do I do a whole body workout? Or do I go all upper today, all lower tomorrow? And which exercise would be better, the push-up or the bench press?

Your first instinct is to search the Internet for answers. Because, well, the fitness space nowadays is extremely saturated, with thousands of fitness influencers and fitness coaches offering advice on Instagram, on YouTube, on TikTok, Facebook, and even on their own websites. There's one small problem: Which one to follow? Fitness Coach A has different advice from Fitness Coach B. There are similarities in certain advice, but then another would come along and claim that the common advice being given is misleading.

So how do you solve this predicament? The good news is, there's a pretty big chance that your body already has multiple sets of answers for you. I know the first half of this article felt like one stab through the chest after another, but let's now get into the part where your body and mind would help you either power through all the problems listed above or help you learn how to work side by side with them.

Your body is most likely to follow through with a workout routine that you set if there is a long-term goal in mind. What is it really you want to accomplish? If you're not sure, I can help you with that. The most common goals people have approached me about that they want help with usually range from certain sports they want to prepare for, aesthetic purposes like weight management and muscle building, recovery from injuries and other health conditions, and just improvement of general health both for the self and for the loved ones around them.

Now, I'm just going to mention this for a small bit because I'm not a nutritionist, but if you also want to help your body build a better fitness habit, you need to take care of your nutrition. It's not half of the work in terms of helping you reach your goal, but rather it's a huge portion of it. You cannot outrun a bad diet.

Back to the workout routine, like I said earlier, if you want to help your body build better habits, you need to set a long-term goal for yourself. Because depending on what your goal is, your workout is going to look different. A workout for a bodybuilder looks very different from a workout for a marathoner. Likewise, a workout plus nutrition plan for weight loss looks very different from a workout plus nutrition plan for weight gain. And once you've set your long-term goal, I'd like to introduce you to a word that's most likely going to change how you plan your workouts and probably even make you dive into the world of sports science. I'm definitely not projecting here. That word is periodization.

Made popular for fitness by sports scientists and strength & conditioning coaches around the world, periodization is dividing your workout plan into different scheduling chunks that allow you to properly plan how you want to progress your workouts. It's most common in workout plans that involve athletes preparing for sports. A periodized program for an event that lasts one day would be different from a program that's prepping for a week-long event. Likewise, a periodized program for a sporting event that spans months, think NBA, would also look vastly different. Can these be applied to non-sporting goals? Definitely! You have people working out hard for wedding events, for certain trips like the beach, or for their New Year's Resolution, which is the most common scenario that results in overflowing gyms to start the year after stuffing themselves in Christmas food.

So picture Scenario 1 and Scenario 2 again: Earlier, Scenario 1 sounded pretty bad compared to Scenario 2, but what if you were just about to start your periodized plan? Not everyone is a sports scientist; a lot of people who have built proper fitness habits started from scratch and began by experimenting with different workouts to see what works best for them or not. But what do all of these have to do with your body telling you when is the best time to work out? Does it suddenly have a fitness clock that tells you that for that certain week, it's better to work out at a certain time or a certain day? Actually, it's quite similar to that.

The true importance of periodization lies in the fact that your body and mind just respond well when there's intent behind your actions and when you know what you're doing. It responds well to a steady buildup and progression. There's a reason why we always start light before we go heavy. There's a reason we always start with basic workouts before moving to advanced workouts. I'm not saying a chaotic scenario is bad; maybe it works well for others because that's just how they prefer things. But even on that end, what may seem chaotic to you is actually organized or normal to them.

So let's say you felt like you couldn't do your planned routine because the gym is full, or because you feel sluggish. You either shrug it off as an off-day, or you start finding alternatives to the routine you set. Workouts aren't limited to the gym. If there's anything the 2020 pandemic taught us, it's that sometimes the only thing stopping you from a good workout is your creativity, because there are actually a lot of things we can do at home. But I'm getting off-track here. One of the best benefits to having a long-term plan is that it would help you include your workout routine into your daily life. You know that you work the standard 9-5 and that you sleep late till morning. So you know the best time to work out would be right after work. Or if the gym available to you makes you unable to do that, you decide to adjust and sleep earlier, so you can work out earlier. Or, you reserve your gym days for the weekend and do other activities during the weekday.

It would also help you cut yourself some slack if you have a day where you weren't able to do your workout, because then you'd start looking through your schedule for the rest of the week to see where it's best to reschedule what you had planned for the day.

So for all the possible scenarios, how would you know which fits best for you? I laid out all those scenarios because it's my way of telling you that when it comes to fitness, there is no absolute. We all have our own situations, and we have our own circumstances. What might be an ideal setup for you might not be an ideal setup for someone else. It's up to us to experiment to see which would work best for us. The good news is, besides the many professionals that could be of help, your own body's response to your workout would be a great indicator of whether it's working for you, if it needs a little adjustment, or if you should try something else.

Above all, don't be afraid to experiment. When it comes to fitness, the journey is often as great as the destination.

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