When is it better to run in the morning or evening. Best time to train

It is believed that the hours when training has an impact best effect on the body - these are the intervals from 6 to 7 am, from 9 to 12 noon, and also from 17 to 19 pm. But not everyone has the opportunity to run at such a time. Study, work, and sweet dreams often make it difficult to free up these hours for sports activities.

To understand when running is best for you, you should think about such a thing as your own biological clock. Each of us has them. Some people consider themselves larks, others are night owls, and others are far from ornithologists; they can get up and go to bed at any time, adapting to their work schedule.

If you are a morning person, then morning running will not be a problem for you. You wake up full of energy, and an additional boost of vigor and good mood will only improve your day. But in the evening, when you are tired and dreaming only of relaxation, the need to go for a run can make you sad and turn you away from it of the most useful kind training.

But if you are a night owl, then for a morning run you will not only have to get up earlier, but also push your half-asleep self out of a warm house into the street, experience stress and feel like tired muscles all day. But in the evening you run the required distance with the ease of a seasoned athlete, return home and feel great the whole next day.

Comparison of morning and evening

For those for whom it is not particularly important to live according to the regime of a night owl or a lark, we can say the following. Running in the morning is good because you feel energized all day. Jogging in the morning mobilizes you, improves your overall tone and mood. But, according to researchers, morning exercise is often stressful for the body, which has not yet woken up.

An evening jog allows you to relieve stress that has accumulated during a hard day at work. Your muscles relax, you go to bed feeling refreshed, and then you sleep well. Evening running can help you cope with insomnia.

Some people claim that only morning jogging can help you lose weight. Others say the same thing, but about an evening run. One thing is certain: despite any authoritative statements, everyone benefits from running, both those who run in the morning and those who run in the evening.

It is best to study at a time that seems most convenient to you. The most important thing is the regularity of jogging. Precisely regularity, and only regularity, and not at all perfect time running day will allow you to get in great shape and feel great.

Recently, sports doctors have increasingly begun to claim that light jogging in the evening is much healthier than jogging in the morning. There is no stress load on the body that has not yet fully awakened, all systems work in full. It is believed that light running in the evenings acts as a mild relaxant and relieves physical and nervous fatigue accumulated during the day. Is this true or not? Let's try to find out.

What are the benefits of running in the evening?

Not so long ago, it was believed that the best time for jogging for the purpose of recovery was early in the morning, immediately after waking up. Intense morning exercises were actively cultivated, accompanied by mandatory jogging, sometimes over fairly long distances.

Many people know how difficult it is to get out of a warm bed for a run, and those men who served in the armed forces remember army morning exercises as a bad dream.




But if in the army a quick rise and physical activity immediately after it is a severe necessity to maintain combat readiness, then is it worth it for a civilian to experience torment if he really doesn’t want to?

And so sports medicine specialists, at first timidly and little by little, and then more and more confidently, began to declare greater benefits for overall health human body, evening run over morning run.

The fact is that our body draws energy for physical activity by breaking down glucose that enters the body with food. In the morning, before breakfast, the body's glucose reserves are depleted after a night's sleep and by running at this time, we force our body to use fat to replenish energy.


However, all these facts do not mean that running in the evening for the purpose of losing weight is completely useless! By following a few simple rules, you will get the maximum benefit from evening running and will be able to get rid of extra pounds just as effectively as in the morning:
  • Never cancel your warm-up before starting your workout. Perform simple and warm up all muscle groups. This will help avoid injury during training.
  • You should not sit down to dinner 1.5 - 2 hours before the start of your run. A full stomach will create discomfort while running, and the nutrients received before training with food will slow down the process of lipolysis (the breakdown of fats).
  • Also try not to eat for 1.5 - 2 hours after a run. If you run in the evening to lose excess weight, the last meal before bed should be fairly light and high in protein. It can be low-fat cottage cheese, kefir, boiled fish or a small piece of meat without fat.
  • The duration of a running workout should be more than 30-40 minutes. During the first 20-30 minutes of training, the body uses accumulated energy and only after this time begins to use fat folds as fuel.
  • To speed up the fat burning process, try using. About a minute of intense running followed by 4-5 minutes of calm running. Do 3-5 such rounds.
  • Avoid running on hard asphalt and concrete surfaces. This is bad for the joints and spine. If there are no other options, choose ones for training whose soles are equipped with a shock-absorbing system.
  • Do not sit down to rest immediately after finishing your run. Walk for 5-10 minutes at a relaxed pace, you need to restore your breathing and heartbeat.
  • To improve your health and lose excess weight, two or three running workouts a week are enough. It’s not worth exercising more often; the body needs some time to restore its reserves.

How to run correctly?

It would seem that running is one of the most relaxed body movements for a person. In general, this is true, and if you just run as best you can, excess weight will still go away. However, in order to achieve the established results, gain benefits and not harm your health, it is advisable to follow the basic rules of safe running:

  1. If your weight is very high, start with walking. This will save your joints and ligaments in your legs. Afterwards, when the first kilograms go away and your muscles get stronger, start adding speed.
  2. Breathe through your nose while running. If you can’t do it right away, try to at least take breaths through your nose. If you can’t do this either, then the chosen running pace is too fast for you. Reduce the intensity of your workout a little until you become more resilient.
  3. Monitor your pulse. Find out your maximum heart rate zone and try not to get too close to it. The easiest way to calculate the maximum load on the heart is to subtract your real age from the number 220. The resulting number will be the approximate maximum allowable heart rate.

Let's sum it up

As we have seen, healthy running in the evening is, in general, for our body no worse than exercising at any other time of the day. If you follow the basic rules, regular evening running workouts help:

  • improve health;
  • have a beneficial effect on the heart and circulatory system;
  • improve overall well-being and tone;
  • relieve stress and fatigue accumulated during the working day;
  • no less effective than, they help fight large kilograms.

All the tips and tricks listed above are universal, and with regular exercise they will definitely help you create a beautiful, toned, and most importantly, healthy body. Eat right, drink more water, think positively and you will maintain a healthy, blooming appearance for a long time.

Practice shows that those who find it easy to wake up early insist most actively on the benefits of morning exercises. There are 20–25% of such larks. But 30–40% of people are night owls, and they prefer going to the gym in the evening. The rest are just lucky - they don’t care when to get up.

Decreased appetite throughout the day

Scientists from the UK compared data from surveys conducted among runners. It turned out that those who ran in the morning felt less hungry during the day than fans of evening jogging. Scientists have suggested that morning exercise suppresses the release of hormones responsible for appetite. This means that for those who tend to overeat, after a morning workout it will be easier to cope with the habit of chewing something all the time.


It's easier to burn fat in the morning

During physical activity, carbohydrates are first consumed and only after twenty minutes of movement the muscles receive energy from fat. That is why long workouts, no shorter than 40 minutes, have always been recommended for weight loss. However, recent research from the American College of Sports Medicine shows that just 20-30 minutes of exercise in the first half of the day is enough. In terms of fat burning effect, this will be identical to 40 minutes after lunch. The reason is that until 17 o'clock in the afternoon our metabolism is set to consume energy, including fat. And after 17 hours the intensity of metabolic processes fades away, hormonal and other systems are already focused on replenishing reserves. Therefore, in the morning they are stubborn body fat“go to waste” more easily.

Lower risk of injury

After a morning workout, fatigue goes away faster and muscles recover better, according to a new study from the University of Toronto. Doctors observed 3,000 people who were passionate about fitness and found that after morning training, the pulse returned to normal on average 20% faster than after evening training. In addition, a blood test showed that with the same intensity of training, microtrauma muscle fibers and associated blood changes occur less frequently in the morning.

You won't have time to have breakfast

Exercising in the morning on an empty stomach is ineffective and can lead to fainting. Without breakfast, you only have enough energy for light exercise. So what, get up two hours earlier, eat and wait an hour for breakfast to digest? This won't suit anyone. True, you can drink sweet tea with a piece of chocolate, coffee with sugar, juice, eat a banana, a handful of raisins or dried apricots. These products will be absorbed while you are getting dressed.

Thick blood


You did not drink for at least 8 hours while you slept; during this time, some water was excreted in your urine and, possibly, in your sweat. Once the fluid is gone, it means the blood has become thicker; increasing its circulation in such an “undiluted” form means overloading the heart and veins. Therefore, before training, be sure to drink 1-2 glasses of liquid and wait 5-10 minutes for the moisture to be absorbed.

In the morning the body is still asleep

After sleep, blood circulation throughout the body is slowed down, the lungs are narrowed, and the nervous system is inhibited. Therefore, it is necessary to start charging with a warm-up, gradually increasing the load. Beginners are not recommended to give themselves serious exercise in the morning, such as running or strength exercises, it’s better to walk, ride a bike, swim.

As you know, in the evening the metabolism slows down, which is why a chocolate bar eaten for breakfast will have almost no effect on your figure, but a cake at dinner immediately shows up in the waist area. Moderate physical activity – good way speed up metabolism. However, the load must be moderate, no records!

At night after training, fat will be consumed

We know that burning calories doesn't stop when you finish your workout! By inertia, the muscles continue to consume energy for recovery for at least another 12 hours. Now imagine that after your workout you ate a light dinner and went to bed. There is no more food, new energy is not coming in, which means the body will be forced to turn to stored fat. And so on until the morning. And in the morning, metabolism also has no time for reserves, which means weight loss is inevitable!

Tiredness after work

Not everyone can force themselves to do exercises after work or drag themselves to the pool. Some people don’t have enough motivation to break the usual pattern and do something active in the evening, while others are really too tired physically.

I really want to eat after a workout

Experts from the Swedish School of Sports and Health Sciences believe that this is an indicator of the wrong training. It was clearly either too intense or too long. Replace running with a walk, aerobics with an exercise bike. Shorten the session from an hour to 40 or 30 minutes.

The reason is too intense training.

So, let's summarize. Both morning and evening have their pros and cons. So proceed from your own preferences, as well as from your work schedule. Moving when you feel comfortable is much healthier than not moving at all. And the negative effects can be easily negated by using the advice we have given.

People who exercise want to make the most of their time in the gym and get the most out of it. If you know when it is best to do exercises and which ones to lose weight as effectively as possible, you can achieve the desired result in a short period of time.

This article is not only for athletes, but also for ordinary people who want to train to lose weight, or give their body beautiful shape and want to know for sure what time is best to exercise. You will get the answer to this question in this article.

Below you will read that there is a huge amount of research on what is most beneficial for training, burning fat and building muscle mass. muscle mass time. But do not forget that time is only one of the factors influencing the effectiveness of training.

Many other factors, such as exercise intensity and duration, are also very important and should not be neglected.

Let's look in order at when it is better to exercise in the morning or in the evening, and weigh the pros and cons.

When you exercise in the morning, your body burns more fat. The main reasons for this are:

Low blood sugar forces the body to look for other sources of energy, so it turns the fat layer, or rather the cells in it, into a kind of fuel to meet its needs.

The concentration of some hormones, especially those responsible for burning fat reserves (cortisol), is higher than ever in the morning.

Half of the subjects who participated in the study on the influence morning exercises on the human body, more often preferred to train in the morning, and the second group of experiment participants devoted the other part of the day to training. By the end of the experiment, almost 90% of the subjects switched to morning workouts, indicating that they are easier to fit into their schedule. They also claimed that morning training is the most effective method wake up.

For some people, exercising in the morning is easier than at other times of the day, since after lunch they are usually already tired and do not feel like exercising.

Morning exercises can be a real strain on the body, but this “shake-up” is very important for successful weight loss, however, not everyone is able to withstand this.

Intense morning workouts may cause you to lose muscle mass rather than body fat. If you exercise fasted and very intensely, your body may start to use muscle as fuel. Therefore, it is extremely important to have a protein-rich breakfast if you decide to work out properly in the morning.

If you do exercises before breakfast, there is a chance that you will not be able to maintain the required pace and intensity of the workout, since the energy level in the morning is not quite suitable for intense fitness.

During training in the afternoon, performance is higher than in the morning. Many people believe that this is the best time to train to lose weight.

Several studies have analyzed the performance of groups of people who exercise in the morning and in the evening.

The best results in terms of performance, strength and power were shown during the afternoon workout.

The participants unanimously stated that the body's response to the fat-burning exercises was better, and that they still had the strength to continue the workout, and they were even willing to do a few more repetitions compared to the morning.

Various studies and theories are of course useful and can be used to achieve better results in your endeavors, but what time of day is best to exercise is up to you.

A few tips to help:

  1. Try cardio exercises for weight loss in the morning (for example, walking for 10 minutes) and feel your body. If no problems arise, then add another 3-5 minutes of jogging to your schedule.
  2. If you exercise on an empty stomach and get tired or weak quickly, try eating breakfast first.
  3. For achievement best results you can combine morning and evening workouts. For example, a 10-minute cardio workout in the morning, and then a 20-minute intense workout in the afternoon or evening. This will promote post-workout oxygen “afterburning,” which means even more calories will be burned after your workout.
  4. Intense training in the morning is not recommended without a good breakfast, as mentioned above, this can lead to loss of muscle mass, and this is not good.
  5. Keep in mind that it is too intensive training in the evenings may have a negative impact on sleep. It is best to do the lesson at least 4 hours before bedtime, not at night.

Exercise is important for health and weight loss, and you need to find time in your daily routine for morning and evening workouts.

Personally, I prefer to workout in the morning as it helps me wake up and feel energized throughout the day, but morning workouts aren't for everyone.

Find your path and follow your goal for at least a few weeks to see the first results. You will notice how even your way of thinking will change over time.

How much exercise should you do? The US Department of Public Health recommends that adults spend 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity physical activity or 75 minutes per week of vigorous-intensity exercise.

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Sooner or later in the lives of people who do not consciously approach proper nutrition and neglect physical activity, there comes a moment when it becomes sickening to look at themselves in the mirror. And the person makes a volitional decision to refuse various tasty harmful foods and from now on devote 30-40 minutes a day to training.

That’s when the question arises: what is the best time to exercise so that the effect is most effective and noticeable? In order to understand this, let's first get acquainted with two opposing opinions and find out what the benefits of playing sports at different times of the day are.

One day, active researchers of the capabilities of the human body conducted an experiment through which they wanted to find out what time was most suitable for training. The results of their discovery were very interesting.

They found that the human body temperature becomes higher towards noon and at 4-5 pm. Therefore, it was concluded that this is the best time for training, because getting injured at this time is much less likely than at other times. At this favorable time, you can do heavier and power loads, gymnastics or dancing. But for the early morning it is best to leave small and very simple cardio exercises - jogging, rollerblading, cycling.

If you believe another point of view, it says that for playing sports it is completely unimportant what time of day is effective for losing weight. The main thing is to train at the same time and not miss a single day, since the body itself adapts to your regime and begins to prepare for training in advance.

And in order to avoid injuries, a warm-up is required before each intensive workout. During warm-up, the temperature of the human body becomes higher and the possibility of injury is reduced many times, so exercising at a strictly defined time is not necessary.

All people are very different - with different biorhythms, with completely different daily routines and the availability of free time at different times of the day. Therefore, it is very difficult to find the optimal time that will suit absolutely everyone. Let's look at the benefits of training at different times of the day, and let everyone decide for themselves what time of day will be most convenient for them.

Many people are interested in whether they should do any physical exercise right after waking up in the morning?

The answer is - if you feel a surge of energy and the need to exercise in the morning, then, of course, you should! How does the process of waking up in the morning usually happen? You wake up, but don’t immediately rush to exercise. First you go to the shower, to the toilet, and drink a cup of coffee, juice or plain water. At this time, the body gradually wakes up. And now you can safely go to the gym or go for a run.
What are the benefits of working out in the morning?

  1. In such a training you can give 100%, because in the morning everyone is full of energy.
  2. During morning workouts, it is fat deposits that are burned first.
  3. If you play sports in the city outdoors, then morning exercises are most useful, because... The level of air pollution and gas pollution is lowest in the morning.
  4. Adaptation to physical activity occurs faster in those who exercise in the morning.
  5. After exercising, you feel a sense of accomplishment because you no longer worry about running out of energy or time to workout during the day.
  6. Evening time can be devoted to communicating with friends or family.

Such activities also have a number of advantages:

  1. There is no need to rush, for fear of being late for work, but you can take a more thoughtful and measured approach to training.
  2. Your body temperature and hormone levels are higher during the day than at any other time of day, as discussed earlier.
  3. An afternoon workout can help relieve emotional stress from school or work.
  4. Lunchtime classes can be done with classmates or colleagues. If this becomes a habit, it will be more difficult for you to indulge yourself and skip classes, as often happens when you study alone.
  5. In the morning you can sleep longer, the evening is also completely at your disposal.

Even in the evening you can and should do:

  1. Some people are most active in the evening.
  2. Evening workouts are considered best for building muscle mass due to the levels of hormones in the blood.
  3. There are no time restrictions like morning or afternoon.
  4. Muscles in the evening are the most flexible and warmed up after a whole day.
  5. You can visit the gym with friends.

Our modern life The world is seething with its richness and dynamism, and sometimes we don’t even have enough time to rest. Often, due to work, school, or both, it may not be possible to devote the same amount of time to physical activity every day.

In this case, you can play sports at any time convenient for you, but the main thing is regularly and very actively. 3-4 times a week will be enough for the results you want to begin to appear, provided that you show persistence and don’t give up exercising halfway to a slim, athletic figure.

Whatever time you practice, remember one of the main rules physical activity– you should not eat food 1.5-2 hours before physical activity and the same time after training. During this time, your body must independently spend its calories and accumulated fats.

So, we have looked at the benefits of training at different times of the day. We are all different and one person’s lifestyle is not similar to another’s, so everyone has the opportunity to choose. Whatever time you choose to practice, and whatever sport you prefer, do not forget that regular training, proper nutrition and proper rest are the most important components effective weight loss and feel great!

Every person who wants to not only improve their health with the help of physical activity, but also lose excess weight, inevitably faces the question of what time is best to do this and whether to eat before and after training. Our material contains the conclusions of the latest scientific research

The majority are in favor of “shooting off” early, even before work, and in the evening to do household chores or relax, and not rush headlong into Gym or to the stadium. However, the desire to work out early in the morning is challenged by a much stronger desire to sleep an extra half hour or hour. It most often wins, which is why most athletes still train in the evenings.

This especially applies to residents major cities with their constantly accelerating pace of life, forcing them to save every minute, and their ever-increasing workloads.

However, Peter Hespel, a professor at the Sports Research Center at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, as befits a real scientist, decided to test this statement and conducted an interesting experiment.

Peter Hespel invited 28 young and healthy guys under 21 years of age to participate in his study. All of them had to switch to a high-calorie diet proposed by scientists for six weeks. Everyone was fed the same. All volunteers daily norm in calories increased by 30%. At the same time, they ate 50% more fat than in everyday life before participating in the experiment.

Study participants were divided into three groups. Those who were in the first group were allowed to forget about training and going to the gym for the duration of the experiment. The remaining two groups trained. Moreover, volunteers from the second group went out for training first thing in the morning, as soon as they woke up, and the third group did it after a breakfast rich in carbohydrates. Those who exercised on an empty stomach ate exactly the same breakfast, but only after training. The training in both groups was absolutely identical in duration and load.

A month and a half later, scientists summed up the results. As you might guess, those who only ate and did not exercise gained weight, on average approx. 2 kg each. Those who exercised after breakfast also gained weight, but significantly less - a little more than 1 kg.

Weight did not change only among those participants in the experiment who trained on an empty stomach, before breakfast. It turned out that their bodies burned more calories throughout the day. In addition, they found best performance on insulin.

Of course, it is premature to draw far-reaching conclusions based on this study alone. It was short-term in nature and too few volunteers participated in it, who were also of the same gender and age. It is also noteworthy that those who trained on an empty stomach did not lose weight, but only managed to maintain the same weight.

Yet the Belgian study may have provided some food for thought for the first time on the question of when is it best to exercise: in the morning or in the evening, when fed or on an empty stomach?

Professor Peter Hespel is confident that he has answered this question.

“The optimal strategy for preventing weight gain,” he says, “should be a combination of a healthy and well-balanced diet and exercise. active image life. At the same time, play sports better in the morning and on an empty stomach."

On the one hand, training at an earlier time will help you burn calories effectively, and on the other hand, it will set the body’s operating mode for maximum fat burning for the entire coming day.

Professor Hespel clearly explains the main reason that helps with morning workouts most intense to lose overweight or at least protect the body from their recruitment. To get energy for exercise, the body has to go into the pantries where it stores fats for emergencies like this. The difference from the exact same process of burning fat and calories at other times of the day and especially in the evening is that the body treats this “NZ” very carefully. First of all, it always burns what it received after the last meal, i.e. breakfast, lunch or dinner.

A study conducted in America also helps answer the question of why training time is so important.

Two groups of men ran on a treadmill until they burned 400 calories, the equivalent of a small snack such as 3-4 pieces of toast.

At the same time, those who were part of the first group ran on an empty stomach, and volunteers from the second group were given a bowl of oatmeal with an energy value of 400 calories an hour before training.

Runners in both groups burned fat. Their body received a setting for accelerated fat burning even after training. But results on both measures were higher among those who skipped a pre-workout meal. In other words, exercising after a long break from eating can set the body up to burn fat longer and more intensely.

There is another advantage to morning exercise, which also helps you lose extra pounds more intensively. This is daylight.

One recent study found that people who were exposed to bright sunlight within two hours of waking up were slimmer and lost weight more easily than those who did not receive natural light, regardless of what or how much they ate.

When choosing between the desire to lose weight and sleep an extra hour early in the morning, you should also keep in mind that fans of early workouts have even created something like a proverb: “He who gets up early lives slim!”

And athletes claim that the optimal time for the body for daily running loads is the intervals from 7:00 to 10:00 and from 18:00 to 21:00, and the choice: to run in the morning or in the evening depends solely on the individual characteristics of each person, his biorhythms and banal from the daily routine. Therefore, it is wrong to ask when it is more beneficial to run: in the morning or in the evening? A much more appropriate question would be: when is it convenient for me to run?

Running in the morning has a number of undeniable advantages for the human body:

  • on an empty stomach (and it is recommended to go jogging on an empty stomach), a person more actively starts the fat burning process, since due to the lack of energy from food, the body is forced to draw it from fatty tissues.
  • Morning jogging performs a kind of launch of all processes in the circulatory and respiratory systems body, thereby improving their general condition.
  • By running in the morning, a person tones almost all the muscles of his body, which in the long term has a positive effect on his physical fitness.
  • According to social surveys, people who run in the morning improve their mood and improve their performance.

Disadvantages of morning jogging

It is wrong to say that morning jogging somehow negatively affects a person’s condition. As such, it does not have any disadvantages for the human body, and the main difficulties are associated not with the physical aspect, but with the psychological one.

  • It's no secret that many people find it difficult to force themselves to get out of bed in the morning and even go to school or work, let alone go for a run. Therefore, a person often refuses to go for a morning run simply because to do this he will have to force himself to wake up at least half an hour earlier every day. Such a run under pressure, of course, will not do any good.
  • Another factor that makes morning jog impossible is the work/school schedule. Most people have school or work that they still need to get to, starting at 8:00, so those who live far from the university or office simply do not have time to jog in the morning, and the only option for running is the evening.

The benefits of an evening run

A quiet run in the evenings will be no less beneficial to the body than daily morning jogging.

  • Evening running relieves stress that may have accumulated during the day, allowing work to normalize. nervous system and the risk of depression, obsessive thoughts and other psychological problems is reduced. By running in the evenings, a person becomes more balanced and reasonable.
  • By running in the evenings, a person burns extra calories received during the day and, as a result, improves his figure.
  • According to research, the excretory system of the human body functions most actively in the evening, therefore, evening jogging helps the body get rid of waste and toxins.
  • A light evening jog helps relieve insomnia. By running, a person can take his mind off everyday worries, problems at work and other external factors that create psycho-emotional stress.

Disadvantages of evening jogging

As with running in the morning, the disadvantages of evening runs are primarily related to psychology and daily routine.

  • Not every person is able to force himself to go for a run after a hard day at work, especially knowing that the next day he needs to get up early for work again. In this case, the choice is often made not in favor of training, but in favor of relaxation.
  • Some people complain that they have difficulty falling asleep after an evening run. But, as a rule, this is due either to the fact that they run just before bed, preventing the body from returning to a normal rhythm, or to their individual characteristics.

Conclusion

So, we found out that there is a universal answer to the question: “when is it healthier to run, in the morning or in the evening?” No. Running workouts useful at any time, but they must fit harmoniously into the general daily routine and not interfere with work or study.

Detailed video about the benefits of running in the morning and evening

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