You know we love this type of stuff at Body Planners. If you have interest in anything performance related these days, or anything where gaining any edge, or ‘free’ bit of progress, whether that’s improving physical fitness, lifestyle hacks, time management or boosting you’re immunity you’ll have heard about marginal gains.

On the face of it marginal gains are exactly that. They’re marginal. If you’re able to combine a few marginal gains together though, you can completely revamp the way progress looks in your training plan.

Naturally where exercise is concerned there’s a clear divide in people who choose to train on a morning, or train on an evening. This is in most cases a choice made consciously based on what an individual might have going off, whether its work, kids, other activities. Training usually goes where training fits. If someone told you that training at the best time for you, and your body would yield better results would you be inclined to change your routine?

You might have seen lately that it has now been proven that for women looking to lose weight and body fat stand significantly higher chances of doing so with early morning training sessions. It has also been proven that training on an evening is more beneficial to males, and has a significantly positive impact on mental health in males.

That isn’t to say however that training at ‘any time’ is a waste of time. We always have to be careful when we put this kind of information out as ultimately we’re aiming to improve the way our clients train, not confuse the way our clients train.

As you’re probably aware at Body Planners we’re all about working out smarter, not necessarily harder. The hard sessions do have their place when you’re trying to bust that plateau and reach new heights, and where progressive overload is concerned they absolutely do need to be done from time to time but it isn’t to say every session needs to destroy you.

Now that we can establish what people need to work on (Usually the things that hold them back), we can cut away all the stuff that will slow their results down, and by allowing them or encouraging them to train at the time that their body favours most we can confidently say the chances of success are significantly higher.

Ultimately, for some it doesn’t fit. And by that I mean our session times might not be feasible for some, but there’s nothing stopping you striding out for a 20 minute walk in a morning just to get the heart and lungs working and all of the other systems in your body working. Walking after all is one of the most accessible forms of exercise and a brisk walk does serve as a perfect ‘Low Intensity Steady State’ (LISS opposite of HIIT) exercise.

If you don’t know already, or you’ve been looking at how we work and what we put out, we run group PT sessions morning and late afternoon to allow our clients to achieve optimum sustainable results in realistic time frames. We cover a varying array of training because it isn’t all about one thing. We focus on different training systems and cycle our training at optimal timings to stimulate progressive overload and best progress our clients.

It’s like anything else though, don’t just take our word for it… Come along, see for yourself!