How to exercise as a shift worker

Shift workers like yourself offer a huge part of the infrastructure that keeps a country running, from first responders, medical and emergency services, engineers, hospitality, manufacturing, social care and security. Society salutes you. 

But it can be an unorthodox lifestyle at times, and it throws up a number of challenges and opportunities as far as health & fitness, so let’s take a look at how to stay fit and healthy as a shift worker.

My experience coaching shift workers

Whilst I won’t pretend to work in the kind of high-demand, high-stress scenarios many shift workers deal with daily, I have worked shifts as a fitness instructor earlier in my career, which would entail shifts of 6am-2pm rotated against shifts of 2-9pm.

I also funded my first fitness website working security in pubs and bars in London and volunteered at a mental health talk line at my university back in the day, so I do have some first-hand experience of what it’s like to try to stay consistent with exercise when you finish work in the middle of the night, and be heading to bed as the world is waking up. 

Friends of mine joined medical and first responder roles, so I got an idea of the life of doctors, nurses and firefighters, over time I started to learn about the challenges of night shifts from those working in some of the toughest scenarios with high-stakes outcomes.

When I took my personal training service online I was able to get more of a play-by-play understanding of the challenges shift workers face, as many were drawn to a coaching service that could accommodate their lifestyle with a custom workout plan.

Over time I’ve found some very effective ways to help shift workers of all varieties achieve their fitness goals, which I’ll outline below.

An unorthodox challenge requires unorthodox solutions

Yes, there is no use hiding it, shift work is going to present some unique challenges, even some potential health risks, It’s just not your typical 9-5 proposition. 

But you know that, for many the unorthodox lifestyle will have been part of what draws you to the work. For others, it’s just a necessary component of the work you’ve chosen to do.

Whichever way you look at it, it’s a non-traditional lifestyle. So it stands to reason that it may also call for a non-traditional solutions to familiar fitness challenges to get the most from your efforts and mitigate the more challenging aspects of your schedule. 

Before we fully explore the solutions, let’s get a feel for the challenges and potential health risks shift work may present.

The physical challenges of shift work

1. Disrupted Circadian Rhythms: Shift work, especially night shifts, can interfere with the body’s natural sleep-wake cycle. This disruption can lead to sleep disorders and chronic fatigue. Essentially it’s forcing the body into an unnatural sleep pattern and that has to be accounted for.

2. Sleep Deprivation: Irregular working hours often result in insufficient sleep duration and poor sleep quality. Some just find it harder to sleep outside of the natural sleep cycle, whilst others will face challenges sleeping at unorthodox times not because of circadian rhythms, but because of the home environment they’ll return to. What is the end of a long shift for you, could be the middle of a busy day for those you live with. Over time this can weaken the immune system and increase susceptibility to illnesses. It can also inhibit our ability to gauge hunger signals correctly and lead to poor workout performances.

3. Increased Health Risks: Shift workers have a higher risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, obesity, diabetes, and gastrointestinal problems due to irregular eating patterns and stress. Lifestyle changes can be made in an effort to alleviate these risks, but it remains important to understand that heightened risk factors exist.

4. Nutritional Deficiencies: Unconventional schedules may lead to skipped meals or reliance on processed foods, resulting in poor nutrition. Particularly if fast food or pre-packaged food is heavily relied upon. Crucially, this can still be the case when taking significant steps to follow an ‘if it fits your macros’ approach, due to the quality of the food being consumed and the presence of other ingredients such as sweeteners, preservatives and flavourings. Importantly, it’s worth emphasising that just because your caloric intake matches your fitness goals on your food logs, it doesn’t mean what you are eating is good for you, even if the purely mathematical approach keeps your weight controlled.

5. Physical Fatigue: Extended hours and demanding physical tasks can lead to exhaustion, reducing overall energy levels for both work tasks and having enough energy remaining outside of work.

The logistical challenges of shift work

1. Inconsistent Schedules: Rotating shifts make it difficult to establish and maintain good sleep hygiene, meal planning, exercise programs, and social connections. This can be a big challenge because it’s consistency and planning that delivers lasting results in fitness.

2. Limited Access to Services: Many facilities like gyms, traditional shops, and medical clinics operate on standard opening hours. This can limit access for shift workers, which can create logistical challenges and long lead times for access to things they need.

3. Transportation Issues: Public transport may be less available during off-peak hours, complicating commute plans, and adding a logistical burden. Not just to get to and from work, but to access a gym space.

4. Time Management: Balancing work with personal responsibilities requires meticulous planning, which can be challenging when faced with unpredictable work hours. 

5. Social Isolation: Working when others are enjoying rest and recreation can strain relationships and reduce opportunities for social interaction. This can throw up difficult choices to make between exercising and socialising and when exercise is not yet a habit or has an over-estimated barrier to entry it often comes up on the short end of the bargain.

The psychological challenges of shift work

1. Increased Stress Levels: The demands of shift work can elevate stress, contributing to anxiety and tension. Unmitigated stress can lead to self-sabotage through using food or alcohol as emotional soothers which will significantly undermine your fitness goals. Stress can also increase levels or the hormone cortisol, which has been shown to have a negative impact on body composition.

2. Mood Disorders: Disrupted sleep and social isolation can lead to depression and mood swings. This can make finding motivation and enthusiasm to follow through on the good intentions of a health & fitness regime harder to stand by.

3. Cognitive Impairment: Sleep deprivation can impair concentration, decision-making, and reaction times, increasing the risk of errors and accidents both at work and at home. 

4. Burnout: Chronic stress and absence of rest in general can lead to burnout. Typically characterised by emotional exhaustion and decreased motivation. Often accompanying a number of recognisable health issues and symptoms.

5. Reduced Quality of Life: The cumulative effect of these challenges can diminish overall life satisfaction and well-being, which could lead to a crisis of meaning. Forcing a desire for change or exacerbating feelings of burnout.

The positive side of shift work

We’ve outlined the potential challenges, but where there are challenges there are usually also opportunities. Here are some interesting fitness-based opportunities for shift workers. These are based on my observations as a personal trainer: 

1. Access to quieter gym spaces: (+ courts, swimming pools, saunas) – Undoubtedly one of the biggest benefits of shift work, is that you often get to use fitness and sports facilities when others can’t. Take advantage of this, particularly if you use a fitness centre that has spa facilities.

2. Free reign in open spaces: The same goes for open spaces like local parks, hiking trails and open water swimming venues, you’ll often be able to enjoy some solitude and connect with nature unobstructed whilst everyone else is at work. 

3. Off-Peak pricing: The fact that you can access activities and locations when the majority of people can’t is often going to qualify you for off-peak pricing. This can add an extra bonus to accessing your favourite fitness classes and venues.

4. Early market access: If you’re a bit of a foodie, you may be able to access food markets, butchers, fish markets and farm shops to get the very freshest quality food during the day.

5. Less distraction: One of the biggest banana skins of the traditional 9-5 working situation is that many workforces decompress together after work at a local pub. Whilst it can be good for social cohesion, it’s not a great strategy for your fitness goals. Finishing work at unusual times generally helps you avoid this common pitfall.

6. Time for rest & recovery: One of the benefits of working with a day-on vs day-off schedule is that despite the undoubted challenges of shift work, you do actually often get multiple days in a row where rest will be forthcoming. This can offer a level of recovery those working constant mon-fri weeks won’t enjoy for their whole career unless they are on holiday. When well utilised, this can be a game changer.

7. Adequate time for meal prep: Having multiple clear days off of work before your next shift pattern starts can offer adequate planning time which can be utilised for meal preparation. Again this is time very hard won in conventional work patterns, and may be rather forthcoming for you, take advantage of it.

8. There could be an opportunity to exercise at work: This won’t apply to everyone, but I know for example that many firefighters are able to exercise at their stations. Meaning that they can get many of their weekly workouts in the bag while they are actually at work freeing up their personal time for other things.

Let’s get strategic

We’ve discussed some of the fitness-related challenges and opportunities that come with shift work, now let’s get strategic. These are some of the most successful tips my online personal training clients have implemented to stay fit and healthy working shifts.

Stay Pragmatic

Are your work patterns going to change in the foreseeable future? If not, then you’re going to have to figure this out. Otherwise, what are you saying? That you won’t ever have a regular exercise practice?

I don’t want to sound alarmist, but the challenges around shift work are real, and exercise, eating well, prioritising sleep quality and managing stress are your ways to help mitigate the risks your work life may be putting on you. So you don’t really have a choice, but then, none of us do, it’s just a little more urgent with shift work.

So here are some of the day-to-day tactics I’ve seen work really well for my online personal training clients:

Make Post-workout time enjoyable

When you face resistance in your attempts to get consistent with exercise it never hurts to stack the odds in your favour. After a tough run of shifts, why not visit the kind of gym that has a spa facility? Offering you a period of relaxation and decompression after every training session. Many of my clients have found this a way to give themselves some self-prioritisation time that they would never have given themselves had it not been built-in to their pre-existing gym time.

Build activity into your social life

Some shift work is incredibly active, think firefighters, security guards, ER nurses etc. But other forms of shift work can be largely sedentary, for example when acute attention needs to be paid to certain things for as much as 12 hours in a row, monitoring screens, phone lines etc.

One of the strategies that can help offset this is to take steps to make your social engagements active. For example, if you’re currently dating, why not suggest a walk around the city or open space with a coffee?

Alternatively, you could meet friends for a ‘walk and talk’ or begin to build some of your social activities around fitness classes, groups and meet-ups. You’ll find everything readily available online from hiking groups to local sports teams and martial arts centres.

Don’t go home before working out

One big strategic mistake you can make if you find it hard to exercise is to go home and unwind after work. Because it can set about a chain of events that basically wind up with you just not getting back out again and hitting the gym. 

Think about it, if you’re already tired from work, don’t particularly like exercise and are yet to form it as a consistent habit, it’s going to be very hard to pull out of the comfort your home is going to provide, and this is where you can get into a bit of a ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’ cycle.

My suggestion is to head to the gym on the way home from work before you have a chance to fully unwind. It’s a particularly good strategy if you have a busy household because it taps into the idea of having a ‘third space’ that isn’t home, nor work but a place that is just for you to decompress.

You might benefit from keeping easy, fast-digesting snack food ready if you’re likely to be hungry after work. Context and time of day play a part in your decision-making here, for instance, I’d strongly suggest steering clear of pre-workout supplements if you intend to go home and sleep after your workout.

There’s nothing worse than being mentally tired, but physically buzzing from too much caffeine and unable to sleep. The clear alternative is to simply start your session with a dynamic warmup and pump in some of your favourite music, you’ll soon be in the zone, no need to have your heart racing all night.

To be clear, sometimes you’ll have a poor workout when your tired, everyone does and that’s ok. It’s the process that’s important, small wins aggregate to huge results over time and that’s how you form habits that trump motivation.

Here are the times that my fitness coaching clients have found worked best for them: 

Morning Shift – Don’t Go home after work, get the workout in first. 

Night Shift – Get the workout in the bag before work so that you’ve already had a positive day

Day Shift – Either strategy works here as it’s more in line with traditional timing. It’ll likely relate to the shift pattern you’ve just completed.

Plan a week ahead 

When you work shifts, it’s crucial to plan your week ahead of time. You simply have to know what you’re going to eat, when you’ll go to the gym and what kind of workouts you’ll be doing there. If you leave this to chance there is always going to be a far higher probability of workouts just not happening at all, and rushed expedient food choices choices being made. 

An hour or so of planning for the week ahead will make a huge difference to the quality of your week. This will aggregate over the course of a year, and believe me a year is enough time to completely change your relationship to both exercise and healthy eating.

Consider that when you eat the right food, you’re going to feel so much more energetic, happy and motivated throughout the week. This will ensure you’re more likely to work out, and it all comes down to that hour of planning the week before.

Remove energy drainers 

Whilst I think the following is pretty good advice for anyone, as a shift worker you’re going to be particularly susceptible to periods of low energy, it’s just the nature of your work.

I’d like to introduce the idea of auditing your life to identify any substances, people, dynamics, situations, environments or thought processes that habitually drain you of energy.

Physical energy drainers 

Physical energy drainers are the easiest to identify. These will be things where you’ll notice a pretty linear correlation between their presence in your life and feeling worse. They will be things like alcohol, inflammatory foods, sugar, and unnecessarily high caffeine energy drinks. You don’t have to do away with them completely, but you only have so much energy and if they are robbing you of it on a consistent basis why would you continue with them once you know that’s the dynamic you’re in.

Psychological energy drainers

Ok, so this is an article about how to stay fit doing shift work, so what I’m about to get into is going to verge on the esoteric. Skip this part if it doesn’t seem useful. 

Each of us only has so much energy, we also only have so much time. As a shift worker, you already do work that can make both hard to come by. So if you find yourself in interpersonal relationships, environments or stuck in repetitive thought processes that further drain you of energy on an emotional level you simply must find a way to overcome this. 

The reason I include this here when on the face of it we should be talking about workout tactics is because in my experience as a personal trainer, the biggest challenges people face when trying to stay in shape are rarely anything to do with simply not having the right workouts.

It touches on depth psychology, but generally, there will be a reason you aren’t where you want to be. Not a surface-level reason like having no time, or a bad workout, but a real, often hidden reason somewhere deep within your own psychology.

This could be the story you tell yourself about your relationship to fitness or your ability to succeed. A failure to feel that you deserve to self-prioritise, rigidity of thought keeping you in exhaustive all-or-nothing cycles doomed to fail. Or in the context of energy drain, you could be knowingly or unknowingly participating in some kind of situation, environment or dynamic that keeps you stuck where you are. Be it a workplace, or perhaps even a relationship. The sooner it’s identified the better because again, we all only have some much time and energy and you’re already dedicating a lot of yours to shift work. Find out what’s really holding you back and solve it, because if it was just shift work causing the problem then no one who works shift work would be in shape, healthy and consistent with exercise, and that’s just not the case.

Workout Strategy

Have a 2-tier training system

Have a system that means even when you are completely exhausted and can’t face a gruelling workout, there is still something positive you can do.

Could you push through tiredness? Maybe, if you have 4 days off coming up. Is it advisable? Well, it’s nuanced and really depends on the extent to which you know your body. 

It also depends on the extent to which you have an accurate grasp of your own psychology. My advice would be to follow the resistance you feel. For example, if you know you could train, you have the energy and feel pretty ok, but you could on paper make the case that you’ve had a rough week and it’s understandable not to exercise today, that’s your resistance speaking and you should probably train. 

Whereas, if you know you’re physically wiped out, and it would be in your best interest to take the rest day, just this once despite a scheduled workout, and you are uncomfortable doing so, then that is your resistance and you should reflect on whether you are stuck in an all-or-nothing way of thinking.

In my experience, there are just as many people who struggle to take a rest day even when they are exhausted as there are who struggle to get motivated to make it to the gym in the first place.

We could argue that this is just a matter of discipline, that discipline is how you see results, and you just need to toughen up. In some cases that might all be true, but if you have no ability to tap into your intuition and heed the call for rest when your body is calling out for it, you could burnout and push yourself into overtraining, which could subsequently de-rail your progress for some time.

If you want to take it out of your own hands, consider setting up an app on your phone capable of heart rate variability testing. This technology reads the distance between your heartbeats to determine how fatigued you really are on a physiological level. 

Here’s where it gets interesting though, no activity at all, isn’t the same as missing a training session, very seldom unless you’re actually sick and bed-ridden is it a good idea to let activity go to nil. So it’s prudent to have mobility practices, light workouts and outdoor activities you can turn to when you don’t have the energy for a full on workout.

Workouts:

Ok, but what workouts should I actually do?

First, you’ve got to choose a workout structure that suits you and your schedule. There are two ways to do this. You either take on a normal 3-6 day routine but lose the attachment to the days of the week, or you just pick a less intense protocol and aim for 2-3 total body training days per week. 

Option 1: Spread your workouts over a greater period than a week. 

It almost sounds too simple to mention, but just because a given workout protocol is based around a 3,4,5, or 6-day training week, you don’t have to follow that too rigidly. You’d be surprised how many people get de-railed when things don’t line up exactly as planned. Training slightly out of sequence isn’t going to cost you progress, it can actually be a very flexible way to train.

The great thing about such a frequent training protocol is that you’ll be using split workouts, meaning that you work different muscle groups on different days. So instead of thinking in terms of a normal 7-day week, just think sequentially.

It’s no problem at all if your shifts mix your training pattern up a little bit or force you to train back-to-back for a few days. The most important thing is that you stay consistent, that is how all progress in fitness is made.

This way let’s say you go with a traditional 5-day split: 

Let’s say you have a busy period and you training cycle needs to extend:

Monday –  Chest

Tuesday – Late shift

Wednesday – Late shift

Thursday – Back

Friday – Arms

Sat – Rest 

Sun – Shoulders

Monday – Rest

Tuesday – Legs

Wednesday – Chest (sequence starts again) 

In this example, instead of the cycle starting again at day 8, it does so at day 10, do you really think this would de-rail your training progress? Of course not. 

Option 2: Choose a total body protocol. 

Another option would be to move to a total body training approach, this could be particularly advantageous when you either don’t know exactly when you will be able to exercise due to short notice requests or want to take more on a diverse exercise regime.

With this strategy you’ll have the choice between total body strength sessions, cross training or total body HIIT circuits, the point being that in every session you’ll be working your whole body. So even if your work schedule is so unpredictable that you often go days without being able to exercise, it’ll only ever be so long before your whole body is worked again. 

You could loosen this a little bit and go a little bit broader to upper vs lower body splits, the main point is that with this strategy you’re reducing the number of training cycles it takes to stimulate all of your muscles, which should offer quite a lot of peace of mind even at your most unpredictable times.

You must have a contingency plan

Having a plan is great. But you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men right? What you really need is an ‘if this, then that’ strategy which involves taking some time to think through anything that could go wrong, and then ensuring you have a strategy for overcoming any potential setback. 

For example, let’s say for one reason or another you can’t get to the gym. You could simply make sure you have a home workout backup. Or let’s say, like many shift workers you’re frequently called to cover a shift at short notice, could you do a quick workout before work that could deliver some benefit? Could you have a backup training kit in place that you could take to work to either exercise there or on the way home? 

Meal-wise, consider having some easy-to-prepare and store meals on hand at all times to ensure that even when you’ve had a rough day, or finish later than usual you have plenty of healthy backup options stored and available. Things like trail mixes and healthy protein bars would be handy.

Some positive news about workout duration

Whilst most workouts tend to come in around the 45-60 minute mark, typically speaking going beyond this is going to take you to a point of diminishing returns, so there is no point in doing so unless you have a serious endurance event goal, in which case I’d say you’re training for sport.

There is good news on the other side of the coin too, in that studies have shown that strength training can be effective in as little as 13 minutes if muscles are training to fatigue, likewise, HIIT workouts can be effective in under 20 minutes, at a frequency of three times per week, so a lack of time is rarely the barrier to seeing results we make it out to be.

Learn the methodology

Different workouts are going to have different demands and consequences on your central nervous system. So understanding why a given workout would or wouldn’t be effective and the potential impact of your training goals on the way you feel will help you manage fatigue and stay consistent.

If you want to gain muscle, the process is going to come with greater energy drain and recovery demands. If you just want to stay fit and healthy, there really is no reason to have aching muscles all the time. Likewise, if you want to get lean, and trim there is no need to be out pounding the pavement for miles on end, there are much more energy and time-efficient ways to achieve these goals. 

Or, work with a personal trainer.

There are two huge benefits to enlisting a personal trainer to help you achieve your fitness goals. Firstly, having someone in your corner who you know is both holding you accountable and rooting for your success can be extremely motivating.

Throughout my time as a personal trainer many of my clients have told me that simply knowing someone else had oversight on their activity and food logging was enough to make the difference between exercising and not. 

The other major benefit is that it massively lowers the sense of health and fitness-related guesswork, basically knowing that a qualified personal trainer has built your program for you is going to assure you that it’s going to work if you stay consistent with it, and mindset wise, that’s half the battle.

Due to the unorthodox nature of shift work, I would suggest working with an online personal trainer rather than an in-person fitness coach because they will be able to build you a custom training program that syncs up with your shift patterns and can easily adapt it when things don’t play out as intended.

Final Thoughts.

Yes, shift work comes with some built-in challenges. But it also comes with some unusual opportunities. Your task as a shift work is to minimise the risk and impact of the downside and take actions to maximise the upside.

If shift work is going to be a part of your life for the foreseeable future, your only real choice is to take the reins and make sure you implement a strategy that keeps you fit, healthy and excelling in your chosen career. 

What I mean by that is that whether you have specific fitness goals in play or not you have to look at things through a lens of health. Consistent exercise, healthy eating, staying hydrated, managing stress and sleeping well over time is how you’ll take your future into your own hands and work to mitigate any risk factors placed upon you.

If you would like me to help you formulate a strategy, build you a program that works around your shift patterns, and then hold you accountable to it, let’s schedule a call to discuss me working with you as your online personal trainer.