Welcome! If you’ve ever felt like fitness advice ignores the reality of night shifts and rotating hours, you’re not alone.
This series flips the script and helps you build a fitness strategy around your actual life, because working strange hours is pretty effing rough.
Forget the daytime gym goers advice
I said it because I've lived it and believe it. The industry is geared towards 9-5 clients because that's where the money is.
According to the Australian Bureau of statistics (ABS) Roughly 16% or 1.4 Million Australians work shift work
But how to be fit when you live a different lifestyle?
The unique challenges we face are around time, energy, diet, trading times of other businesses and just having access to the same things.
Gym's can be 24/7 but that largely leaves us to our own devices, some people are able to use them effectively but in reality "after hours access" represents a fraction of actual commercial gym use.
Why market it? because it appeals to everyone and that increases leads for gym memberships.
To effectively hit your goals you need to plan in a way that uses your schedule as the blueprint
In this blog series I intend to break down:
- Time - How to structure your fitness to make your schedule work for you
- Diet - Strategies to eat and support your lifestyle rather than relying on a handful of late trading convinience options
- Moving & Feeling better - Building programs that address your needs, not those of a body builder
- Tracking - How to measure to know where you are at and what you should focus on next
- Rest - The "I'll sleep when I'm dead" approach isn't going to do you favours in the long term
- Adapting - Strategies to keep you progressing in a way that is maintainable whilst managing the stress of your own energy levels and career.
It's entirely possible to maintain great fitness and have improved lifestyle for almost everyone who works shifts, we just need repeatable strategies to overcome the unique obstacles we face.
About the Author: Millhouse had a long history of working in the hospitality sector before deciding to study fitness due to his own lived experience and seeing lifestyle & fitness challenges in the wider community.
He is an acredited personal trainer, currently running a queer bootcamp, studying yoga and strong advocate for accesibility for queer, nuerodivergent and shift working communities.