No matter how rich you are, young, old, or rich, everyone has the same number of hours daily. Everyone needs time for work, family, chores at home, eating, and sleeping. They must make time for workouts and stick with the allotted time. There’s a sweet spot when timing your workout. It has to be long enough to get results, but not so long that it’s ineffective and a waste of precious hours or pushes your body past the point of safety.
Timing your workout helps you become more efficient.
You won’t necessarily get better results by spending more time at the gym. Spending 30 minutes exercising will get you better results than spending only 10 minutes. If the exercise is mild, like walking, spending an hour can improve results compared to spending a half hour. Timing helps you stay on track to ensure you’ve gotten adequate exercise. That’s where the “more is better” comparisons end. Spending long hours at the gym doesn’t mean you’re maximizing time. You may be walking around, talking to a friend, and wasting time. When you time your workout, you keep pushing because you’re also working against the clock, so no time is wasted.
Exercise relieves stress, but it also can cause it.
When you exercise, it stresses your body. While you’re burning off stress hormones, you’re also creating stress. There’s a Goldilocks period where you’ve stressed your body enough to build muscles but not so much to cause injury or overstress it. The intensity of the exercise makes a difference, too. A high-intensity workout should be shorter than a moderate-intensity one. The recommended weekly workout time for high-intensity workouts is 75 to 150 minutes. That time doubles if the exercise is moderate.
It’s all about habit and creating a schedule.
Putting exercise on your schedule at the same time daily, as though it’s an appointment, builds a habit. Timing your workout adds another habit—a habit of efficiency. Habits are hard to break. They motivate you. If you time your workout, include the best time for your exercise regimen. It means matching your workout to your body. Each person is different. Morning people should workout the first thing in the day. If your body needs time to wake up, you need to exercise later in the day.
- Track strength training weekly. It takes 48 to 72 hours for your muscles to heal. If you work out too long or have sessions too close together, it can tear down muscles instead of building them.
- Over-exercising and spending too much time in the gym leads to exhaustion. It can show up as depression or mood swings, diminished immunity, and a negative attitude toward exercise. If you dread exercising but used to love it, you need to adjust the time you spend.
- When doing high-intensity workouts, timing is even more vital. Pushing too hard at a high intensity can lead to injury. Your workout is high-intensity if you can barely speak while exercising.
- You can do strength training daily if you alternate muscle groups. Work your upper body one day, your core muscles another, and your lower body another.
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