Are you an early bird or a night owl? Do you train before work or after? Training early can be better for maintaining a solid routine and avoiding the possibility that any of the day’s trouble throw off the session, but ughhhh waking up early?! Pass!
It’s no surprise the gym is most crowded between 5 and 8pm. But if we take pre-workout at 5pm, and we want to go to sleep at 11pm, how effective is our sleep, if we can get to sleep at all?
We grow while we’re asleep – the body doesn’t like to force change while we’re awake – while it’s busy trying to walk, talk, think, and everything else. We see this chemically. For example, growth hormone is at its highest concentration at night. We also see this with nighttime eating, as eating protein before bed improves daily muscle protein synthesis.
The half-life of caffeine is 5-7 hours in fast metabolizers. Add a couple of hours for slow metabolizers. We know you guys are after the hard-hitting pre’s, having 300+ milligrams of caffeine and probably other stims too, so figure you have at least 150mg still roaming around at bedtime. Even if you manage to fall asleep, that caffeine is still preventing your body from achieving rest – delaying growth factor release and ultimately shrinking your overnight anabolic window.
Not only that, it’s harder to get back into your groove the next day! It’s not like you can go into work late just because you were up late or don’t feel rested! So you get back to the gym the following day more tired with each and every day. That’s not a recipe for success!
Short of moving your whole schedule around, you have the option of non-stim pre-workouts. These products, in some ways, are actually better for improving things such as performance or pump, as they can contain more pump and performance ingredients. It goes without saying, that they can be ideal for workouts occurring late in the day. If you’re a nighttime caffeine consumer and have noticed your sleep is suboptimal or your weekend gym energy trumps your weekday lifts, take a look at a high-quality, non-stim pre like Rhino BLACK Pumped – packing 20g of pump and performance ingredients!