I tried working out every day for a month. How did it go? I found that my mood improved, but that the cutoff was at about 5-6 workouts per week. After that the marginal gain of adding another session felt negligible at best and negative at worst. Also, allowing for 1-2 days off per week makes the program orders of magnitude easier to follow.

Adding in cardio has been great for mood and general sense of fitness. I’ve also started biking to work, about 3 km of biking one way.

Currently the bottleneck for this program is recovery. I don’t feel fully recovered between sessions and between strength sessions (of which I do three per week) sometimes I am weaker on the session than the last time I did the same one a week earlier. Perhaps it is due to daily variations in shape, but I think recovery can be improved as well.

So now I’m trying out different methods of improving recovery, one by one. I measure it by how often I can hit personal records at the gym and general feeling in the body.

First was to improve sleep. This helped a lot and I’m very happy about the sleep quality I’m currently getting.

Second thing was to increase protein intake on weekdays (weekends are harder to control due to less routines, and not something I want to control too much.) I increased it by about 75-100 g of protein per day and noticed much better recovery.

The thing I’m currently trying is adding creatine on weekdays. Just started it so need at least a week to evaluate.

After that I have other things lined up like adding l-glutamine, magnesium, more protein.

Looking forward to optimize this. And to go back to the why. The reason I do this is improved mood and health. And to allow me to train this regularly, I need the recovery. Therefore I try to optimize for the recovery right now.