Finding your successful side at 6am in the gym

Exercising in the morning does really kick start your day.

So I’ve decided to go a bit left field this week and focus on talking about a change I made to my routine about 3 months ago.

As an avid gym goer I’d tried many a time to change my routine to the morning with no avail. No energy….lift less weight…apart from morning cardio what was the point? That was until I saw a Ted talk given earlier this year about the effect of getting up at 4am on productivity (ok so I didn’t go that far!). In the end it turned out to be pretty self-glorifying rather than being useful but it did get me thinking:

What impact would training in the morning have outside of any physical benefits?

I decided to give it a go and this is what I’ve learnt:

1. You have more time

Put simply, everyone has 24 hours in the day, but if you go to the gym first thing in the morning you’ll feel like you have so much more time. In the past training after work would mean that once I’d finished work, gone to the gym, come home, cooked dinner and sat down it’d be 9pm already and I’d be wondering where all the time had gone. Now once I get back from work I have plenty more time to read, learn and write blogs likes this.

2. You become healthier

I’ve always found the hardest meal of the day to get right is breakfast. You wake up late, you have an early morning meeting, breakfast is the easiest meal to rush, and when it’s rushed it’s just not as healthy. This can then have a knock on effect on other meals. Getting up and getting to the gym early means you’ll have plenty of time to prepare the most important meal of the day. Having more time in the evening also means you have more time to prepare lunch/dinner for the next day. Usually I prepare meals for the week on a Sunday, however additional time in the evening during the week now means I have a nice buffer if for whatever reason I don’t have time on the Sunday.

3. You sleep better

When you train after work you end of eating late….a bad combination for getting bad sleep. The later you’re up the less chance you have of getting a really good night’s sleep. I’ll be honest, the first month I pretty much had to force myself to get out of bed (with the aid of caffeine pills if I’m being honest). However once I’d got into a routine I was feeling fresh in the morning, and suitably tired at night to sleep great. Over time I found my energy levels increase too, this helped a lot with being able to lift heavy in the morning. If I’m honest, in the past one of the reasons I’ve not been able to stick to morning training is down to my opinion it’s good for cardio but you just can’t lift as heavy in the morning. Once you get into the routine this isn’t the case, just be aware you probably will have to sacrifice a bit of that for the first month.

4. You feel more motivated

A morning routine really does kick start your day and make you more motivated. There’s a certain sense of satisfaction knowing you’ve ticked off an item of the to-do list in your head before most people have even got out of bed. This sense of motivation coupled with the increased energy mentioned above means that you walk into work motivated to get through your to-do list as quickly and effectively as possible. Lifting heavy early also gives you the motivation to tackle those most avoided tasks early doors.

5. Your life becomes more flexible

Constantly training after work meant that my evenings in the week were taken up with the constant dilemma of going outside my normal routine or training. Training always won so I was forcing myself to miss out on opportunities or even just the chance to relax. Getting exercise out of the way early in the morning means that I have a lot more flexibility to do what I want, especially any last minute plans that in the past would’ve totally thrown my routine, now they just become a part of it.

6. Finally you just straight up feel better about yourself

To keep this short and sweet, most importantly of all…..you’ll feel better about yourself, and even if the above 5 points don’t end up relating to you, this last one will….and everyone wants to feel good right?