Drop the Weight with Ej: When is the Best Time to Workout to Maximise Results

Consistent exercise is a big part of a healthy lifestyle that supports lasting weight loss. But once you’ve made the commitment to exercise consistently, how do you know the best time to get the most fruit for your labor? There are some workout times that are more ideal than others, but in the grand scheme of things, your focus should be on the workout time that you can execute consistently.

Today though, I’ll answer the question of the best time to workout by laying out the pros of working out in the morning, afternoon, and evening. And then I’ll give you a simple experiment that you can conduct + a FREE workout to help you do it, so that you can discover the best time for you to achieve a consistent workout habit.

What’s so great about morning workouts?
The biggest benefit of working out in the morning is that you’ll get it out of the way before life interferes. If you don’t have any play in your schedule this is critical because when the unpredictable happens, you’ll know that you’ve already gotten your workout in.

Morning is also the best time if you want to harness the power of your fat loss hormones. These hormones are usually at their peak in your fasted state when you wake up, and working out this early can help you use your body’s full fat loss potential.

Then there’s the fact that working out is a natural mood booster, and it can replace your usual morning cup of coffee if that’s a habit you’re trying to kick. And it can help you feel much better about a day that’s not looking to be so good, or a day that you dread (it’s a great fix for the Mondays for my fellow 8 to 5 warriors).

What’s so great about afternoon workouts?
Afternoon workouts are awesome because they are all about focus. When you’re working out in the afternoon, there’s usually a time crunch (think lunch break or your kid’s nap time if you work at home full time with the kiddos). There’s less time spent dilly dallying and more time getting to the business of working out.

There’s also the fact that your muscles have already been moving significantly through the day so you don’t have to spend as much time warming up to prevent injuries. Of course, if you’re doing complex motions that aren’t even close to your regular everyday activities of standing up, sitting down, or walking, then you’ll want to do simpler versions of these complex motions to help your body get warmed up.

What’s so great about evening workouts?
Evening workouts are the hardest to pull off because you’ll need willpower to drag yourself away from the call of other commitments. But if you’re able to pull yourself away, evening time is the best time to workout for performance.

By late in the day, your body is fueled and ready to go. Your mind on the other hand might have some trouble keeping up if you have a mentally demanding job like handling complex spreadsheets or trying to calm a screaming toddler All day. But, this is nothing that an awesome workout playlist can’t fix.

It’s time to take action…
Now that you have a high level overview of the benefits of working out at specific times of the day, it’s your turn to run a little experiment to find the right time of day that works for you.

As I mentioned earlier, what’s important with using exercise to get results is consistency. So even if the morning is the best time to workout for fat loss results, you won’t get those results if you can’t realistically workout in the morning regularly right?

To help you run this experiment, you can use a simple 12 minute workout called the 12 minute Full Body Blast. It’s what we call small but mighty.You can use it to test each time of the day.

To run this experiment, select the best time that sounds great for you and your schedule and spend the next seven days doing this 12 minute workout at that time every-other-day. This will help you see how working out at that time makes you feel.

If you find that it doesn’t work for you, then you’ll just pick another time and test it out the next 7 days. The 12 minute workout makes it super easy to do this because it’s a short enough time that you can fit it into your schedule. Plus you’ll be getting into the habit of doing short intense workouts, which are one of the best workouts for fat loss but that’s a strategy for another day.

In the meantime, download your free 12 minute Full Body Blast workout and start experimenting.

Photo Credit: Diego Vito Cervo | Dreamstime.com