When Is The Best Time Of Day To Workout

Hey, my future of Health now enthusiasts, it's Ben Greenfield. And today I'm going to tell you the best time of day to work out for the ideal combination of burning fat and boosting your fitness. Now, that's also the reason that I'm standing outside at 8am in the morning right now in my backyard garden here in Spokane, Washington. The reason for that is because every morning after I roll out of bed and have had my cup of coffee, I go out here and do just a little bit of yoga and calisthenics. And the reason for that is because there are specific times of day when your body is going to be most responsive to a certain type of exercise. So when you look at what's called your circadian rhythm, your circadian rhythm actually has an effect on two things. Your body's core temperature or how hot your body gets, and also something called your muscle protein synthesis, which is how much you have an ability to repair and recover muscles after a workout. Well, it turns out that both your core temperature and your muscle protein synthesis really don't peak until somewhere between 4pm and 7pm in the day, later on in the day. And so later on in the day, such as in the afternoon or the early evening, those are the times of day when you should be doing hard workouts like high intensity interval training or weight training. Now, in contrast, when you wake up in the morning, your liver has actually burnt through a lot of your storage carbohydrate. And because of that, you can have a little bit of an increased activity of fat, fat burning enzymes in the morning. Now that makes the morning a perfect time to do an easy aerobic workout like walking your dog or maybe going on an easy bike ride, or doing what I do and coming out into the backyard and doing some yoga or some calisthenics. Now, I mentioned that I had a cup of coffee before I came out here, and the reason that I do that is because coffee can actually increase your body's ability to tap into those fatty acids. So a perfect day of fat burning and fitness boosting would involve getting up in the morning, having a cup of coffee or maybe some green tea, going out on an empty stomach and doing anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes of easy non stressful aerobic cardio. And then later on in the day, do your hard and heavy stuff, go into the gym and lift some weights, or do some sprints or something like that. Now, of course, you, you don't have to do that every day. A scenario like the one I just described, you could do three days a week, four days a week, or five days a week. You know, some people do things like that up to six days a week. And that's okay if your body can handle it and it's not too stressful. But hopefully that gives you a really good idea of when the best time of day is to work out if you want that optimum combination of fat burning and fitness boosting. So. So I'm Ben Greenfield from BenGreenfieldFitness.com and it's time for breakfast. I'll talk to you later.