When is your motivation at its highest for exercise?

Motivation for exercise is a key question to ask if you want to determine if that time is realistic to your lifestyle and if it's practical around your work. Exercising at different times of the day doesn't necessarily affect results, what affects results is your mindset towards training at certain times of the day and if your body is accustomed to training at certain times of the day.

What I mean by being accustomed to training at certain times is that we all have points throughout the day where our energy levels - both mentally and physically - are at their highest, it's within those moments that we ideally want to train in. If I take the example of a client I've worked with before, they would regularly train on a Tuesday evening at 6pm even though they were tired or exhausted from work. At some point this client decided to try and book in for a session at 6am as he was already up early for work and thought it would be better to train before he started work. Around 20 minutes into the session he was on the verge of fainting with little to no energy, and throughout those 20 minutes he struggled to use the weights we had worked on during our Tuesday evening sessions. What had happened was that even though he was up early every day for work, his body wasn't accustomed to that time of day and his energy levels were much lower than the evening session. We soon returned to our evening sessions and found times throughout the year where he wasn't as busy at work and trained in the afternoon where he was at his optimal levels of energy.

Thats not to say that everyone should be training at lunchtime or during the evening, what we're looking for is trial and error. Try training and different periods of the day - if it's possible with your work or lifestyle - and determine which of those times you have the most amount of motivation and energy to train. We want to make the most and perform your best out of those training sessions, so it doesn't feel as hard and it's that little bit more energetic and enjoyable. Motivation coincides perfectly with how you perform within each session. If you're currently training early in the morning but you feel sluggish, tired, find it tough and lack the energy, you clearly shouldn't be training at that time, and you definitely won't be motivated to keep doing it or stay consistent. Look at your work and life schedule and find a time that gives you the motivation and energy you need.