- Aug 15, 2018
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Fellas — quick admin note with the weekend coming up.
The clocks fall back early Sunday morning (2:00 AM becomes 1:00 AM), which means we all get an extra hour this weekend. The fall change is the easy one — nobody is losing sleep this time, and most people wake up Sunday feeling like they got away with something. But the shift still moves your whole schedule relative to the sun, and for lifters who run on routine, that matters more than the extra hour suggests.
Here's what actually changes for training. Mornings get darker again — if you train before work, you'll be back to lifting in the dark for a while. Evenings lose their light too, which for a lot of people quietly moves their session earlier or makes the after-work gym feel more crowded. None of this is dramatic, but training consistency lives and dies on routine, and the clock change edits everyone's routine at once.
Every year this thread fills up with the same two camps: the morning crew celebrating an extra hour of sleep, and the evening crew mourning the death of daylight. Both are right. The point of the annual reminder is just to notice the shift instead of sleepwalking through it — the lifters who adjust on purpose always fare better than the ones who wonder why the week feels weird.
The research on clock changes is worth knowing, and it's more interesting than you'd expect. In 2008, Janszky and Ljung published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine looking at daylight saving transitions and heart attacks across Sweden. They found about a 5 percent increase in heart attacks in the week after the spring shift — when we lose an hour — and a small decrease after the autumn shift, when we gain one. The takeaway isn't that the fall change is dangerous; it's that even a one-hour shift moves the needle on the body in measurable ways.
The sleep researchers have a name for the underlying problem: social jetlag. Wittmann and colleagues described it in 2006 as the mismatch between your biological clock and your social clock — the gap between when your body wants to sleep and when life demands you be awake. A clock change doesn't create that gap out of nowhere, but it shuffles it, and for a few days your body is negotiating with a schedule that moved without asking it.
There's also direct work on what disrupted sleep does to training. Fullagar and colleagues' 2015 review in Sports Medicine pulled together the evidence on sleep and athletic performance and found that sleep loss tends to hit the things lifters care about — sprint performance, reaction time, and how hard a session feels. You don't need a study to tell you a bad night makes the bar feel heavier, but it's useful to know the effect is real and documented, not just in your head.
And one more piece of the puzzle: Kantermann and colleagues showed in 2007, in Current Biology, that daylight saving time disrupts the seasonal adjustment of the human circadian clock — basically, our bodies never fully adapt to the shifted schedule. The fall change puts us back on standard time, which is closer to what our biology expects, and that may be one reason the autumn transition feels easier than the spring one.
So what does any of this mean for the training week? Honestly, not much needs to change — but a few small things help. Keep your wake-up time the same on Sunday if you can; sleeping through the extra hour feels good in the moment but can leave you oddly groggy and push your whole Sunday later, which bleeds into Monday. If you train in the morning, expect the first few sessions to feel a little off while your body recalibrates to the darker start — that's normal and it passes. And if you're an evening lifter, this is the week the gym starts filling up earlier, so plan around it.
One more practical note for the competitive crowd: if you have anything scheduled next weekend — a meet, a testing day, a hard session you've been building toward — don't let the clock change be the week you also change three other variables. Keep the routine stable, eat at your normal times, and treat the extra hour as a bonus rather than a disruption. The lifters who handle transitions best are the ones who change the least.
The bigger point is the one this forum comes back to every year: consistency beats perfection. One hour, gained or lost, doesn't make or break a training block. What matters is not letting a disrupted weekend turn into a disrupted week. Get your sessions in, keep your sleep schedule boring, and let the routine do the work.
Log your training as usual this week, and if you notice the change affecting your sessions — for better or worse — post about it. Real-world reports from this crew are worth more than any study.
Now the discussion questions:
1. Are you a morning lifter or an evening lifter, and does the earlier darkness change when you train?
2. On the Sunday of the change, do you keep your normal wake-up time or take the extra hour of sleep?
3. Have you ever noticed your training feel different in the week after a clock change — and if so, what changed?
— OLYMPIC
The clocks fall back early Sunday morning (2:00 AM becomes 1:00 AM), which means we all get an extra hour this weekend. The fall change is the easy one — nobody is losing sleep this time, and most people wake up Sunday feeling like they got away with something. But the shift still moves your whole schedule relative to the sun, and for lifters who run on routine, that matters more than the extra hour suggests.
Here's what actually changes for training. Mornings get darker again — if you train before work, you'll be back to lifting in the dark for a while. Evenings lose their light too, which for a lot of people quietly moves their session earlier or makes the after-work gym feel more crowded. None of this is dramatic, but training consistency lives and dies on routine, and the clock change edits everyone's routine at once.
Every year this thread fills up with the same two camps: the morning crew celebrating an extra hour of sleep, and the evening crew mourning the death of daylight. Both are right. The point of the annual reminder is just to notice the shift instead of sleepwalking through it — the lifters who adjust on purpose always fare better than the ones who wonder why the week feels weird.
The research on clock changes is worth knowing, and it's more interesting than you'd expect. In 2008, Janszky and Ljung published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine looking at daylight saving transitions and heart attacks across Sweden. They found about a 5 percent increase in heart attacks in the week after the spring shift — when we lose an hour — and a small decrease after the autumn shift, when we gain one. The takeaway isn't that the fall change is dangerous; it's that even a one-hour shift moves the needle on the body in measurable ways.
The sleep researchers have a name for the underlying problem: social jetlag. Wittmann and colleagues described it in 2006 as the mismatch between your biological clock and your social clock — the gap between when your body wants to sleep and when life demands you be awake. A clock change doesn't create that gap out of nowhere, but it shuffles it, and for a few days your body is negotiating with a schedule that moved without asking it.
There's also direct work on what disrupted sleep does to training. Fullagar and colleagues' 2015 review in Sports Medicine pulled together the evidence on sleep and athletic performance and found that sleep loss tends to hit the things lifters care about — sprint performance, reaction time, and how hard a session feels. You don't need a study to tell you a bad night makes the bar feel heavier, but it's useful to know the effect is real and documented, not just in your head.
And one more piece of the puzzle: Kantermann and colleagues showed in 2007, in Current Biology, that daylight saving time disrupts the seasonal adjustment of the human circadian clock — basically, our bodies never fully adapt to the shifted schedule. The fall change puts us back on standard time, which is closer to what our biology expects, and that may be one reason the autumn transition feels easier than the spring one.
So what does any of this mean for the training week? Honestly, not much needs to change — but a few small things help. Keep your wake-up time the same on Sunday if you can; sleeping through the extra hour feels good in the moment but can leave you oddly groggy and push your whole Sunday later, which bleeds into Monday. If you train in the morning, expect the first few sessions to feel a little off while your body recalibrates to the darker start — that's normal and it passes. And if you're an evening lifter, this is the week the gym starts filling up earlier, so plan around it.
One more practical note for the competitive crowd: if you have anything scheduled next weekend — a meet, a testing day, a hard session you've been building toward — don't let the clock change be the week you also change three other variables. Keep the routine stable, eat at your normal times, and treat the extra hour as a bonus rather than a disruption. The lifters who handle transitions best are the ones who change the least.
The bigger point is the one this forum comes back to every year: consistency beats perfection. One hour, gained or lost, doesn't make or break a training block. What matters is not letting a disrupted weekend turn into a disrupted week. Get your sessions in, keep your sleep schedule boring, and let the routine do the work.
Log your training as usual this week, and if you notice the change affecting your sessions — for better or worse — post about it. Real-world reports from this crew are worth more than any study.
Now the discussion questions:
1. Are you a morning lifter or an evening lifter, and does the earlier darkness change when you train?
2. On the Sunday of the change, do you keep your normal wake-up time or take the extra hour of sleep?
3. Have you ever noticed your training feel different in the week after a clock change — and if so, what changed?
— OLYMPIC