Working Out Twice A Day or With No Sleep: Pros And Cons
For some runners, getting in one run per day is a feat in and of itself. And, let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: running or exercising one time per day most days in the week is fantastic and should by no means be considered inadequate. However, some runners have more time, energy, and motivation and are eager to consider working out twice a day.
Sometimes called “doubles” or “two a day,” working out twice a day can look like anything from running twice a day to running every morning and strength training in the evening to doing a yoga class at lunch and a cardio or strength workout at night, and anything in between.
Can I Workout Twice A Day?
Any type of exercise places some amount of stress on your body, so it’s natural to ask, “Can I work out twice a day?” or wonder if working out twice a day is beneficial or harmful to your body.
In general, it can be completely healthy, and sometimes even beneficial, to work out twice a day, but there are also scenarios in which two days are counterproductive, if not a definitive net negative on your body. The differences lie in the specifics of the workouts you do and your overall health and fitness goals.
In fact, from elite runners to everyday people just looking to stay fit, many people follow a two-a-day workout routine multiple days per week every week and find it to be the training structure that works best logistically for their lifestyle and/or yields the best physical results.
What Does Working Out Twice A Day Entail?
As runners, we’re inclined to immediately picture running doubles when someone mentions working out twice a day, and while this is a relatively common practice among elite and professional runners, working out twice a day can entail nearly any iteration of stacking two workouts within the same day.
Yes, it encompasses running in the morning and again in the afternoon or evening, but the options are endless.
Doing yoga followed by an indoor cycling workout, a long run followed by mat pilates, resistance training after swimming, and rowing and running hills after work are among the near countless iterations of exercise routines that qualify as working out twice a day.
In a nutshell, working out twice a day simply means you perform two bouts of exercise, either of the same or different types, within the same day but separated by a period.
According to this definition, most of the time, people do not consider running and then immediately lifting weights or doing yoga right after their bike ride to be working out twice a day, as the exercise session is continuous and not broken up into two distinct periods in the same day.
Pros Of Working Out Twice A Day
Depending on the type of exercise you do, and the intensity and duration of your workouts, working out twice a day can double down on many of the positive benefits of exercise.
Promotes Overall Health
Exercise can help support weight loss, reduce blood pressure, improve cardiovascular health, lower blood lipids, regulate blood sugar, and reduce the risk of several lifestyle diseases. Any minutes you accrue being physically active in the week can contribute to these positive benefits of moving your body.
Enables an Increase in Training Volume
Working out twice a day has also been shown to provide additional benefits over working out just once per day, especially when doing so enables you to increase your overall training volume.
In other words, the benefits of two days are likely amplified if you can fit in a 45-minute workout in the morning and a 30-minute workout in the evening rather than just a single 60–minute workout in the morning.
The doubles will result in a total of 75 minutes of exercise, 15 minutes longer than if you did just one longer bout.
Improves Strength and Endurance
There’s also evidence to suggest that strength training twice a day yields greater neuromuscular adaptations than single daily training sessions. This enhanced muscle fibre recruitment leads to practical increases in muscular strength and power.
Working out twice a day can also cause favourable metabolic adaptations that contribute to glycogen sparing, leading to improvements in aerobic endurance. This bodes well for distance runners looking to stave off the dreaded bonk around miles 20-24 of the marathon.
Boosts Mental Health
The mental and emotional benefits of exercise should not be overlooked. Exercise produces endorphins, which elevate your mood and provide you with a sense of well-being.
Low- and moderate-intensity exercise also lowers levels of cortisol, helping your body and mind feel less stressed and more at peace. However, the body perceives vigorous exercise as a stressor itself, so hard workouts usually increase cortisol levels.
Exercise can also improve your focus and energy, so working out twice a day can give you a double boost of feel-good chemicals, reduce pent-up stress, and help your brain feel sharp two times in the same day.
Helps You Fit It All In
Finally, working out twice a day can have practical benefits. Many people have inflexible schedules and lack a longer block of uninterrupted time to work out. By splitting your exercise into two sessions, you can fit in all the movement and training you’d like to do without waking up hours before dawn or upending your entire life schedule to fit in a continuous workout.
Similarly, some runners don’t have time, motivation, or energy to stack the two workouts they want to do back to back in a single session in their day, so doing doubles can allow them to get both types of exercise in.
Cons Of Working Out Twice A Day
Is working out twice a day bad for me? Let’s take a look at the downsides.
Inherent in the workout routine of exercising twice a day is the risk of overtraining, injury, and mental and physical burnout, particularly if you are in fact increasing your training volume with your doubles.
It should come as no surprise that higher training volumes are associated with an increased risk of musculoskeletal injuries because your body is doing more physical work. Moreover, working out twice a day reduces your body’s time to rest between bouts of physical exertion and stress.
Working out twice a day can also cause cortisol levels to increase, which then can suppress your immune system, impact your appetite, and disrupt sleep patterns. The greater the intensity and duration of your workouts, the more they will increase cortisol.
Lastly, working out twice a day can be mentally taxing and have the obvious impact of taking up more time and energy in the day, whether just from the additional minutes of exercising, or commuting to and from a workout location, preparing your gear, showering and so on.
Working Out With No Sleep a Do or Don’t?
Your head barely hit the pillow. Should you still hit the gym?
Kevin Durant, Michelle Wie, and Steph Curry — what do these pro athletes have in common? Aside from their awe-inspiring track records, these athletes prioritize sleep for peak athletic performance. They (and countless other fitness-minded individuals) have realized that the true gains of exercise cannot come without sleep.
Should you be working out with no sleep? As we’ve hunted, that’s usually unwise (more on this later). But if you still want to engage in physical activity, even with a lack of sleep, read on to find out how you can work out right in a no-sleep situation.
Working Out With No Sleep Has More Cons Than Pros
As with everything in life on little sleep, working out with no sleep is teeth-clenching difficult, more so than usual. Ahead, we show you how the cons of working out with sleep loss outweigh the pros.
It Demotes Your Performance in the Gym and in Life
Not getting enough sleep, whether you have to work out or not, means you’re weighed down by sleep deprivation, which is mainly categorized into:
- Acute sleep debt: This is the amount of sleep you’ve missed out on in the past 14 days relative to your sleep needs. For reference, that’s the genetically determined amount of sleep your body needs to feel and function at its best. Unlike what many people think, not all of us do best on eight hours of sleep. Instead, most of us need a little more, averaging roughly 8 hours and 10 minutes (give or take 44 minutes; meaning most of us to need somewhere between 7.5 hours and 9).
- Chronic sleep deprivation: When you consistently fail to meet your sleep needs and stay in the red for years, you’re now chronically sleep-deprived. Some may look at it as a badge of honour of the hustle culture. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has declared sleep insufficiency as a “public health epidemic.”
Sleep affects every bodily function, from brain activity to the immune system. When you don’t get enough, rather than hit the ground running, you’re running on fumes before your day has even begun.
When you’re already struggling to get through your to-do list, working out on no sleep means you have even less energy to push through almost any kind of workout, not to mention hit a PR.
So too, the reduced reaction time and attention span that come from sleep loss equal duller reflexes. You’re now more likely to give yourself a workout injury.
When sleep loss, and a failure to pay it back, become a regular occurrence, you also predispose yourself to chronic illnesses, such as Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and even certain types of cancer.
Suffice it to say, sleep deprivation doesn’t just take a toll on your training session in the immediate future. It also downgrades every aspect of your life in the short and long term.
You Miss Out on Prime Time for Recovery and Gainzzz
When you lift weights or push yourself through the last mile, you essentially break down your muscle cells. A good night’s sleep that meets your biological sleep needs prompts your body to secrete human growth hormone (HGH). This hormone is crucial to post-workout recovery from the exercise-induced strain and helps your muscles build up stronger and bigger over time.
But when you pass up on snooze time, you deprive your body of the chance to rest and recuperate to build muscles and bulk up your body weight. In fact, new research discovered that just one night of no sleep reduced muscle growth by a whopping 18%!
You also increase your risk of a pulled muscle or worse by 1.7 times if you slept less than eight hours the night before. On the flip side, when you increase your nighttime sleep duration by 60-plus minutes before rising, you may downplay your odds of an injury by 70%.
Working Out With No Sleep? Be Smart About It
The answer to whether you should work out with no sleep is often a clear, hard “no.” As you’ve seen earlier, the cons of getting your heart rate up on little sleep far outweigh the pros.
With that said, life happens. Perhaps you just got off a red-eye flight in which you tossed and turned the entire time and wanted to work off the ill feeling of poor sleep in the hotel’s gym. Or maybe your teething newborn kept you awake for most of last night, but you’ve already made an appointment with your personal trainer this morning.
No matter the reason, your sleep-deprived self can still break out the exercise mat, so long as you don’t make working out on no sleep a regular thing — and you have little sleep debt, to begin with.
Meet Your Sleep Need to Meet Your Fitness Goals
Unlike what the hustle culture portrays, exercise and sleep are essential to helping you meet your potential every single day. The bottom line is that you need to sleep and meet your fitness goals.
But on the rare occasion that you want to exercise despite being sleep-deprived, structure your day in a way that allows you to get the best of both worlds — train without intensifying your sleep debt.
Your Energy Schedule in the app tells you the exact timing of your daily energy peaks and dips. This way, you’ll know the best times to knock out a workout routine while grappling with sleep loss.
Last but not least, use the Sleep screen to find out where you stand about your running sleep debt. Only when you sleep for exercise will you see real results with how you feel the next day and your well-being in the longer term.
