Q & A: What is the best time of day to exercise – especially if I want to lose weight and tone my muscles?
A: Science has come a long way in precisely determining the ideal times for exercise type, as well as exercise to maximize and optimize your results. Get the timing right and you can boost your results by 47% or more, which is huge! Here are the specific findings from the last three decades of research:
Cardio needs to be started at precisely 3:35am.
· This is 3:35am with Daylight Savings.
· If you’re lucky enough to live somewhere that doesn’t observe (like Arizona), then you’ll have to watch the calendar to see when to adjust your exercise start time.
· Yes, 3:35am is early, but a wise man once said “If you can’t do something perfectly why do it at all?”
Strength training depends on the rep ranges you are using, and I will break down the times:
· Low rep training should be started at precisely 6:10pm. DST again.
· High rep training should be started at 4:05pm. DST, obvi.
· Medium rep training should be started at 5:07pm. Do you need me to Say The time zone?
· We will be updating our studio hours, and periodization protocols to ensure that you only do your different kinds of exercise at the ideal time of day.
I want to thank the good people who run the labs at BSU for their decades of painstaking research to parse out the optimal times for different kinds of exercise.
Are you serious about the best time of day to exercise?
If you mean, “Josef, are you making this whole thing up because it is April 1st?,” then, yes, you got me.
“Scientists discover the optimal time for exercise” is evergreen clickbait. In my head I am like, “well, I know this is BS… but maybe… like maybe there is something to learn… I’ll just take a quick read…”
We humans are full of biases. One is a bias humans have is against randomness – we hate to accept that we don’t know why or can’t explain why something happened. Hate. Since we understand very little, our brains are vulnerable to (or invent) BS explanations for nearly everything – I stepped on that crack and it hurt my momma’s back, if I blow on the dice I’ll roll a 7, if I work out at 3:35am DST then I will burn more fat, etc.
Bottom line on the best time of day to exercise:
I’ve been seeing “optimal time for exercise” headline since the 80’s. (I guess it was flip bait in the 80’s cuz you had to flip pages instead of click.) It was bullsh*t back then, and it is bullsh*t now.
The best time for you to exercise is today. The optimal schedule is the one that should already be in your calendar (that’s what consistency is). If you give your best effort to whatever you are supposed to do today, then you will get the maximum benefit. If you ignore clickbait articles you’ll have more time for fitness.
Happy April Fools,
Josef
PS – You might also like this article: Q & A: Is there really such a thing as “exercise in a bottle?”
Josef Brandenburg, best selling author, is the co-owner and a coach at True 180 Personal Training, Charlotte’s most effective personal training studio for women since 2016. With decades of experience and multiple certifications, he shares his research with you!
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