Your shifts keep moving. Train anyway.

I am in my forties. I work five days a week, eight hours a day, in a supermarket. I run the bakery section, I unload deliveries, I stock shelves, I break down pallets. Physical work, all day, on my feet.

Most weeks I start at 6am and finish at 2pm. Some weeks I start at 2:30pm and finish at 10:30pm. Three or four nights a month I work overnight, and those are the ones that wreck everything.

Two years ago I noticed the things you notice at this age. Getting off the floor was harder. My back hurt in ways it had not before. My belly was growing even though I was on my feet all day. I had no strength left for anything outside work.

Here is what I learned: physical work is not training. Carrying boxes wears you down without making you stronger. It is repetitive, it is one-sided, and it never progresses. You get tired, you get sore, and you get nothing back.

So I joined a commercial gym. I had trained a little at home with resistance bands before, but that was not enough. I needed real load.

Two years later I train two to four times a week, depending on what the schedule allows. I am currently in a slow bulk. I am not a bodybuilder and I do not want to be. I want to be able to do my job for another twenty years without my body falling apart.

I do not have a diet. I have two numbers.

Protein first, calories second

I know roughly what my daily calorie needs are, and I track them in an app. Within that, the only thing I actively chase is protein. I hit my protein target, then fill the rest of the calories with whatever fits my day. That is the entire system.

Why rigid meal plans do not survive shift work

Every diet plan online gives you meals at fixed times. Breakfast at 7. Lunch at 12. Dinner at 6. Now put that against a week where you eat breakfast at 4:30am on Monday, at 10am on Wednesday, and at 9pm on Saturday because you are on nights.

It does not survive contact with reality. And when a plan breaks, most people do not adjust it — they abandon it entirely. A calorie target and a protein target survive anything, because they do not care what time it is.

Use an app

I log food in one so I do not have to think about the arithmetic. Any of the common ones works. The point is not the app, the point is that you stop guessing. Most people who think they eat too little are eating far more than they believe. I was one of them.

Of everything on this site, this is the part I would defend hardest.

So I protect seven hours the way other people protect their training. If I have to choose between an hour of sleep and an hour in the gym, sleep wins, because a session on five hours of sleep is not really a session.

How I actually get it

Working back from the shift. If I start at 6am I am up at 5, so I need to be asleep by 10pm. That means being in bed before 10, which means the evening has to be managed. It sounds obvious. Most people do not do it.

Napping is a tool, not a failure

If a night got cut short, I nap during the day. No guilt about it. Sleep does not have to arrive in one block to be useful. On night-shift weeks, daytime sleep is the only sleep there is.

The honest bit

You cannot fix shift work sleep. You can only manage it. Anyone selling you a system that makes night shifts harmless is lying. What you can do is protect the sleep you can control, and stop treating "I'll just push through on five hours" as a strategy. It is not. It is how you end up injured, fat, or quitting.

The supplement question nobody answers for shift workers is not what to take. It is when — because "take it in the morning" means nothing when your morning starts at 4:30am one week and 11am the next.

Creatine: the easy one

Timing does not matter. It builds up in the muscle over weeks, so you take it every day and stop thinking about it. This is the one supplement shift work cannot disrupt, because there is nothing to disrupt. I take mine in the morning, whatever "morning" means that day, purely because that is when I remember.

Caffeine: the one that will hurt you if you get it wrong

Caffeine has a long half-life. Roughly speaking, half of it is still in you five or six hours later. That is fine on a normal day. It is a problem when your bedtime moves every week.

If you are in your forties or older, work a physical job on shifts, and you have noticed that you are getting weaker, stiffer and heavier — I know exactly where you are, because I was there two years ago.

You are probably telling yourself some version of: it is too late, there is no time, my body is already wrecked, and everyone at the gym is twenty-five.

What is actually true

It is not too late. Strength responds at any age. The gains come slower than they would have at twenty-five, but they come — and they matter more now than they would have then.

You do not need much time. Two sessions a week for a year beats six sessions a week for three weeks and then quitting.

Nobody is looking at you. The gym at 9am on a weekday is full of people minding their own business.

Your job is the reason to train, not the excuse not to. Physical work will grind you down over twenty years. The people who last are the ones who build the strength to absorb it.

Use the planner at the top. Put in your real shifts, be honest about how many sessions you can make, and start with whatever it gives you. Then just keep turning up. The turning up is the whole thing. Everything else is detail.

My name is Tomasz. I am in my forties, I work rotating shifts in a supermarket — bakery section, deliveries, stocking — and I have trained in a commercial gym for two years while doing it.

I am not a coach. I have no qualifications. I am not selling anything and there is no programme to buy at the end of this. This site exists because when I started, I looked for advice written for people in my situation and there was almost none. Everything assumed a stable week, a stable body clock and a desk job.

So this is just what I have worked out for myself, written down honestly, including the parts I got wrong.

The training planner on this page runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere, stored on any server, or seen by anyone but you.

Advertising and cookies

This site is supported by advertising. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this and other websites. You can opt out of personalised advertising through Google's Ads Settings, and you can review how Google handles data at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

Consent

Visitors from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are shown a consent notice before non-essential cookies are set. You may withdraw consent at any time.

Last updated: July 2026.