Working out in the evening

[Seabassius]

Life is conspiring to keep me out of the gym. I'm having a hard time getting to the gym in the morning and usually eating lunch at my desk so getting away for an hour is not an option and I'm starting to consider trying to workout at night. Does anyone here work out in the evenings? Do you generally allow at least 1 or 2 hours before you go to bed after?
I was thinking of a schedule like
6:00 - light dinner with family
7:30 PM put kids down (sleep, not the other way)
8:00 PM - try to hit the gym for around an hour
10:00 PM - Sleep

5:30 wakeup -

Typing that out, it looks like crap. Maybe sleep at 9PM and get up at 5 to workout but then be under the gun to get kids to School by 8.

Curious about other schedules

[Barkadion]

I am trying to be in bed by 10PM. I wake up at 4AM and I am in my basement gym around 4:30ish.. It is crazy I know and I wouldn't recommend it. But this is only schedule that let me deal with having baby twins and all that jazz...

[Josh]

Last school year I was working out starting at 10 or 11pm and going to 12 or 1, then getting up at 6:30 to be at work. I was pretty focused on getting the work done, but my recovery would explode every couple of months, probably due to the lack of sleep. I have two young daughters and their sleep habits were pretty bad. A lot of workouts were interrupted by running up from the basement to the second floor to calm a screaming kid.

[Maxrip13]

I am a shift worker so I train all over the place. What is your current schedule like? If you are only doing fighter then it isn't the end of the world to have two later night strength sessions. If you are doing operator that is only 3 out of 7 nights that you might lose an hour on.

How long does a session take you ? I can get my operator sessions in at half an hour sticking to 2 min rest periods and 3 rounds, provided I stick to a cluster of 3 exercises.

How many days a week are you training and what exactly are you doing? Most HIC sessions also only take half an hour if you keep things focused.

The best thing I ever did was set up a home gym. I will literally wander out to my garage after this post and get my training in. No commute and no waiting for a squat rack. This allows me to get my training done in a timely fashion. An option for you might be bodyweight or dumbell/Kettlebell clusters if you are time poor and don't have the room/cash for a squat rack.

Give us a few more details mate and myself or one of the others here will give you a way to get some good training in. You would be surprised the results you can get with 10 mins and somewhere to do pullups

[Seabassius]

I think the all over the place training might be what I evolve it to. I'm usually up by 5am with the dog. Some mornings I can work out at home (we have a peloton, rower, body weight during BB, run, HIC with kettlebell type stuff, etc). I can probably get away from work twice a week and do something at lunch or a little later in the afternoon. I wasn't thinking about lifting on weekends, but if I make one of those a lift day then I need to only find two other days in the week to get to the gym for barbell work.

I was just thinking evenings in general to create a routine for some consistency. There are also some muay-thai and BJJ classes I was looking into and they are almost always in the evening.

Was mainly curious if anyone felt like it messed with their sleep patterns to work out hard before bed and what the general consensus was on how long to wait before going to bed.

Thanks for the responses.

Oh, and I keep thinking I need a tower for pull-ups and dips. You've convinced me that maybe that and a sandbag for deadlifts and that could be my crunched for time routine. Just won't have anything for squats.

[Adski]

I've made a recent switch to evenings, mainly because a lot of the time over the last few months I've had to be at work early (6.30 or earlier) getting home at about 4.30-5pm or a bit after.
It seems to work well as I can't always guarantee getting to bed early all the time, however, I am considering switching to strength work in the am on MS days and keeping conditioning for the evenings.
There was a good couple of years where 4am was regular for everything, but that (for me) was due to how work/life was at the time, and it worked best then.
Basically, to back up what others have said, see what works best, if evenings work, awesome, if not, see what else you can adjust to help make things work. All the best!

[Tyr0331]

I think naturally I'm an evening gym rat. Now it depends on what shift I'm on. I always get the workout in right before shift unless I'm on a normal day shift where sometimes I can pull it off in the evening

[BlackPyjamas]

When I'm on shift I work out right after, around 5-6 in the evening. On days off I like getting my running and conditioning workouts in the morning, and weights around lunch time.