The Best Time of the Day to Lift Weights

Maximize Your Training to Suit Your Personal Rhythm

man bench pressing in gym

Mike Harrington / Getty Images


Muscle strength tends to peak in the early evening, making it an ideal time to lift weights. However, this may not always work with your schedule or your individual body clock.

There's really no universally perfect time to train because it depends on a host of personal variables. Even so, there are factors worth considering that may help you optimize your productivity for weight training, cardio, or anything in between.

Understanding Your Body Clock

Apart from the time constraints in our daily lives, one primary consideration is how your "body clock" functions, and how this affects your hormones and other purposeful body chemicals over the spectrum of daily activities.

You’ve probably heard the expression: “I’m a morning person,” or, perhaps more often: “I’m not a morning person.” Even though it seems possible to train the body to operate efficiently at different times of day many people seem to have an instinctive comfort at a particular time of the day, and this seems related to the natural cycle of sleeping and waking that your body and brain control.

Some people instinctively like to exercise in the morning, while others feel more comfortable exercising in the afternoon or evening.

This body clock is known as the circadian clock and is an actual group of cells in the brain that emit hormones and electrical impulses according to timing that seems to be genetically set—that is, you're born with it. The hormone melatonin is the principal hormone that regulates this body clock. Melatonin and the circadian cycle are affected by light and darkness.

When Does Training Performance Peak?

Research shows that overall physical performance tends to align with a person's chronotype, or whether they are a "morning person" or "evening person." Morning people may perform better in the mornings and evening people may perform better in the afternoon or evening.

However, strength performance in particular tends to peak later in the day. A review of studies on time of day and muscle strength found that the greatest strength values occurred in the early evening. This included smaller muscles that are involved in grip strength, upper limb muscles that are involved in elbow strength, and the large muscle groups of the legs. 

Body Temperature and Exercise Performance

According to sports scientists, exercise performance is closely related to body temperature, which peaks for most people in the early evening. Even so, the response to exercise is cyclical during the day with the early afternoon being a "down" time for many people.

The optimum time for exercise for you is not just determined by your body clock, but by the type of exercise, your age and health, environmental conditions such as light and heat, and social activities like meals and work patterns.

How Age and Sex Affect Body Clock and Training

Body clocks can also shift with age. For example, athletes over 50 years old tend to be morning people, regularly doing more and harder training in the morning when compared to younger athletes. This may be because as people age, they tend to rise earlier, which would tend to reset the body clock.

The impact of exercise time of day and associated circadian rhythms may also vary between men and women.

A small study broke men and women into two groups. One group exercised four mornings a week for 12 weeks and the other did the same routine but in the evenings. At the end of the trial, the women who exercised in the morning had greater reductions in abdominal fat and blood pressure than women who exercised in the evenings. For men, it was the evening exercises who had lower blood pressure as well as increased fat oxidation (breaking down of fat for fuel).

The study also found that women who exercised in the evenings had enhanced muscular performance, power, and endurance. The men who exercised in the evenings had more fatigue. However, the study only included 47 people so no firm conclusions can be drawn and more research is needed.

Jet lag and certain phases of the menstrual cycle may also affect body clock. For example, shifts in circadian rhythm and sleep disturbances may be more likely to occur in the luteal phase that occurs between ovulation and a menstrual period.

Cortisol and Testosterone

Weight training in the evening may be superior for building muscle, according to research on the hormones cortisol and testosterone in weight trainers.

Cortisol is a hormone that, among other functions, helps regulate blood sugar by breaking down muscle tissue when necessary. This is called “catabolism.” Testosterone does the opposite: It helps to build muscle by utilizing proteins. This is called “anabolism.”

As it turns out, cortisol is usually highest in the early morning and lowest in the evening. Testosterone is also highest in the morning.

The research showed that the ratio of testosterone to cortisol was highest in the evening because cortisol, the muscle breaking hormone, dropped more over the day than testosterone did, providing a more anabolic, muscle-building state in the evening.

Workout Timing Strategies

Another important consideration in choosing a training time is the normal time of your competition if you train for a competitive sport. If your competitive activity takes place in the morning, then you should train at that time often, and at the appropriate intensity, in order to get your body used to that activity at that hour of the day.

Recreational exercisers have greater choice. It seems that you can reset your body clock by manipulating waking and sleeping hours to a degree.

This means you can train yourself to get up early and exercise and feel great while doing so. It may take some time, however, to reset your body clock to this program if you are not used to being active early in the morning.

Morning Exercise

The morning often suits running, walking, and cardio exercise, rather than heavy weight lifting. Make sure you warm up before doing anything strenuous, especially in the morning. Take it easy on your back for a few hours after rising. Don't hop out of bed and try for a deadlift personal best.

Weight training in the morning on an empty stomach is not a good idea because blood glucose can be low. (Though people with diabetes can sometimes have high blood sugar in the morning.) Taking in some food or a shake about 30 minutes before training can help power you through the sessions and avoid training in a catabolic environment, which won’t help your muscle maintenance or enhancement.

Evening Exercise

Team sports and weight training may benefit from afternoon or evening workouts.

Muscle strength may peak in the evening, so it makes sense that early evening gym sessions tend to be popular with weight trainers. However, this may not apply to everyone.

Training too late in the evening may not be ideal for nutritional recovery and sleep patterns. Some trainers find that doing cardio in the morning and weight training in the evening works well for them.

Bottom Line

Ultimately, you should exercise at whatever time you feel most comfortable with and can manage while also considering all personal factors. These include your natural body clock plus social, work, health, and environmental conditions as well as training and competing priorities.

7 Sources
Verywell Fit uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
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By Paul Rogers
Paul Rogers is a personal trainer with experience in a wide range of sports, including track, triathlon, marathon, hockey, tennis, and baseball.