Why I Love Going to the Gym After Work
When my brain is fried, my body gets moving.
I’m dead to the world at 5 a.m. Eyes glued shut. Nothing in my brain except crazy dreams that I sometimes remember but often forget. The idea of going to the gym at 5 a.m. — or even 6:30 — is utterly preposterous to me. You will not catch me in athletic garb outside of my bed at that time of day unless my house is burning down (God forbid).
In college, I tried one time to work out early in the morning. It was January. The football team was training on the indoor track, and I was going to run sprints.
Ha.
I got started and quickly realized how utterly hollow I felt. No fuel. No energy. No extra oomph.
I abandoned the experiment after maybe 20 minutes of effort — I don’t remember exactly how long — went to breakfast and decided to never try running sprints in the morning ever again. The rest of college, I stuck with my routine of working out in the afternoon or evening. On Fridays, I either closed out the library or the gym, finishing my workout (or my homework) around 10 p.m. while my friends, I guess, actually hung out with people.
When I started my first office job, I quickly developed a post-work exercise ritual. I’d lock up my office, grab my gym bag, and walk across campus to the gym. It’s a routine that stuck for all three years, until I joined a 7 p.m. CrossFit class.
I’ve been reminded lately of why exercising right after work is absolutely the way to go. At the end of March, after more than 6 years of freelancing, I started a traditional full-time job. Every weekday, I’m up in time to have breakfast and pack lunch before heading to the office (a friendly 10-minute commute), and I’m typically home by 5 p.m.
The transition has been hard, mostly because for the last four years, I slept until 9, maybe 10, most days and didn’t interact with many people on a workday outside of my roommate and an occasional call with a client. My first few days at the new job, I was exhausted before the afternoon. Day one, I came home, collapsed onto my bed, and ordered $60 worth of Indian food so I wouldn’t have to run to the grocery store or cook or, really, move.
But that night, I couldn’t sleep. Though my head was worn out, my body wasn’t. I was exhausted, but I wasn’t tired enough to sleep. I tossed and turned and eventually fell into that half-sleep, half-awake state, until my alarm rudely woke me from not-quite-slumber.
Day two, I was just as mentally tired when I got home, but I knew if I wanted to sleep well, I’d need to get some exercise. I dragged myself to the gym, warmed up, did some sort of barbell complex workout that I don’t remember and apparently didn’t write down.
Somewhere along the way, as I moved my body and gave my mind a rest, my brain opened a new store of energy. I felt like I’d just woken from the most refreshing sleep. I was so excited about how alive I felt that, on the drive home, I called my boyfriend to tell him how much I loved working out.
“I feel so alive!” I told his voicemail, and when he got back to me, we bonded on how working out gives us more energy.
“I’ve told people before that the trick to having ‘enough energy’ to work out on a workday is just pushing through the workday fatigue and getting moving, but I forgot how real that is,” I told him. “My brain gets a break, while my body gets to do what it’s made for, and as a result, I have more energy for the rest of the day.”
In the weeks since, the phenomenon has held true. Mondays and Wednesdays are my set-in-stone gym days, and because of that post-workout energy boost, they’ve also become the days (evenings, really) that I work on this newsletter.
My full-time job is all words on screens, and I need the 3-hour brain break before even considering opening my Women’s Barbell Club files. But it doesn’t work if I’m just sitting around my house or wandering my neighborhood or even working in my garden. I need physical exertion that lets me turn my brain off and focus instead on movement, pacing, breath work, muscle engagement. Pushing my knees out during my squat, engaging my core, trying for one more pullup, bumping up the weight a little more for those reverse lunges. Remembering through action that I am a physical being, my body is me.
You could say that working out after work is a productivity hack, but that’s not my point. My point is that it makes me feel more alive. The body and the mind are happier after movement, and so am I.
Recommended Reading
The millennial body image curse (Body Type)
This 86-Year-Old Skied Way More Than You Did This Year (Ski)
When Is the Best Time to Work Out (New York Times)
What’s coming up?
Part three of the Motivation Series.