Cardio Late at Night?

So I moved job locations and it’s an hour and a half walk home and I get off at 11 pm … I was thinking since the gym is just too far to make at night and get to bed at a decent hour maybe I should do cardio In the evening by running home? This is probably the only way I’d be able to reach my full potential.

My plan is as follows

Wake at 7
Snack
Lift at 8 and go home for a nap/rest
Wake up at 12 and study or read till 3
Head to work and start at 4pm
Work till 11pm and run home and study for two hours since I won’t be able to sleep from cardio so study/hang with gf from 1130-130/2am
Sleep till 7 and repeat

What do you guys think?

If you plan for 5 hours sleep per night… You’re gonna have a bad time. Sleep your full 8 hours rather than breaking it up with a training session

You’re drinking 2 liters of chocolate milk almost every day while trying to lose fat, but you think walking 90 minutes is what’s preventing reaching your goals?

Get some perspective, man. Your diet is crap. Walking pretty much every day is one of the things you’re (accidentally) doing right.

[quote]Lift at 8 and go home for a nap/rest
Wake up at 12 and study or read till 3[/quote]
Am I reading this right? You have a solid 5-hour window in your typical schedule, where the only things you “have to” do are train and rest? What in the holy hell, man. You officially have dickall reasons for continuing to eat a poor diet. If you spent nap time even one day a week, you could cook and prep a full week’s worth of meals.

Nevermind that, with this idyllic timeframe, you have zero reasons to think you need to do cardio at 11 at night.

Yes my diet is crap and I intent on working on that soon. I also am not trying to lose fat specifically at the moment I just want to keep myself from losing potential muscle gains. My goals are quite long term and my training log is just to record my mistakes and climb out of my poor time management skills.

I WANT to train at night because I want to train two times a day with as much rest as I can get in between while studying or improving in some other area. Diet rigt now isn’t my top priority because I have no money for the next three weeks and I have about 10 chicken breasts and a bunch of cans of beans. I’m just trying to get by with that until mid February when I will nail my diet down hard… In the meantime I just want to focus on training and my time management skills. Thank you for the suggestions. It must be frustrating to see me striving for my goals in an inefficient way but I am determined and that’s all I need.

You should focus your determination on the things you can do right so you build good habits early otherwise it will simply undermine you leaving you with a bunch of broken crap you need to fix later. This isn’t Disney land.

Why do you need to train twice per day? Are you splitting one day’s work over two sessions or doing two full training sessions?

The cardio session is going to be roughly 20-30 minutes of running mate and my weight training is roughly an hour. I aim to weight train on day and work on boxing the other day (sparring, shadow boxing, heavy bag, speed bag and double end speed bag)

The reason I want to train twice a day? Well I like to train it helps me escape my stresses and I also want to progress as fast as possible as cardio is just as important to me as gains i dont want to be just a big guy who has shitty cardio I wanna be a beast. Although I’m concerned about that half hour run home on weight lifting days

Dude there’s common mistakes that guys in your position make, which most of us guys who’ve been at this a while have made for themselves. I know I did.

The first is fixating on scale weight. I sure did. I had 200lbs as this magic number in my mind that once I hit it everything would be magical. I got up to 200lbs and surpassed it (think I got up to like 210, I can’t remember now), felt pretty good, then ended up having to cut like 20lbs of blubber I’d gained doing everything I could to push my bodyweight up. Now I’m like 20lbs lighter than I was then and people tell me how much bigger I look. Scale weight is just one very small piece of the puzzle.

The other thing is not taking your diet seriously enough. This is by far and away the most important thing you need to work on. Unless you have the genetics of Lee Priest (you don’t) then your diet needs to be absolutely on point or you’ll never get anywhere.

The final thing is using fear of muscle loss as an excuse to rationalise not doing other important stuff. Muscle is nowhere near as fragile as the internet would have you believe. Doing things like running home after work or whatever will not make your body piss its pants and shed muscle.

So yeah, try not to fall into these all-too-common pitfalls people starting out usually do. And you say “I’m determined and that’s all I need” which isn’t really true. You need to be determined, but you also need to be smart or it’ll not get you anywhere.

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[quote=“ninjalife, post:6, topic:214079”]
The reason I want to train twice a day? Well I like to train it helps me escape my stresses and I also want to progress as fast as possible as cardio is just as important to me as gains[/quote]
I suggest you consider the 90-minute after work walk to be training. Especially if you’re already lifting and doing boxing work, simple walking is fine, for reasons discussed here.

I had a bit of a brain fart when I thought you were aiming particularly for fat loss, but you do have fat to lose along the way. I just get nervous when I see guys who’re already carrying bodyfat start pounding a bunch of milk in the hopes of seeing or “preserving” muscle. Check The Story of Artem, for more reasons why.

I understand not having money for decent food, and it sucks. But there are still ways to eat productively without resorting to junk. A can of green beans bought at the dollar store is still a can of green beans. The “Muscle on a Budget” articles, Part 1 and Part 2, have some ideas that can help.

Like Yogi said, determination is great, but if it’s not tethered to a smart nutrition and training plan, it’ll get you into trouble and wasted time/effort.

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Double it! GOCMAD! :grin: