Morning Training is Awesome

I've always been addicted to the gym, from the very first time I started.

But me training at the gym meant I was at a gym.

By that I mean now I train at home. You might also have a gym setup or at least some sort of fitness equipment or know you can use your own bodyweight. That means you can be more consistent, even more than going to a gym…right?

You tell me.

The times when I used to train were all over the place. From early morning to right after work to sometimes later in the evening. But being at a gym made the pain of the workout easier. I was in the environment and had friends there.

Being at home makes you remember that you're at home. Home means comfort, and after a day of work, it's hard to go for the squat rack instead of the couch (or gamer chair).

Do you have kids? Then that search for relief gets amplified. Any time they're awake (if they're still little), they're going to need some sort of attention. (If they're tiny you can make a little play section for them in your garage. Just make sure to lay out some newspaper feed them every once in a while.)

We actually set up our home gym before we had kids. But consistency? It's hard to say. I was still going back and forth to the gym I was a part of, so if I could train there, I would. The home gym wasn't being used for weeks or months at a time.

At home I'd experiment with different times of the day to train.

During lunch?

I might have meetings.

After work?

The kids would be home.

So if you're in the same boat, you want to have dedicated, consistent training time, with minimal distractions and enough time (maybe 1 or 2 hours) to make it worth it.

The painful solution is to use the mornings.

Who This is NOT For

There are a few populations for which morning training will not be necessary:

• Not for young whipper snappers who have more free time.

• People without kids…maybe. I understand that you might still have a stressful job, but kids make things difficult at home (lack of sleep, etc).

• People with older kids that don't need as much attention. These younguns probably need to be peeled out of bed to go to school and sleep in on the weekends. (They also no longer need your help in the bathroom.)

• Advanced athletes for whom waking up super early is detrimental…if you're here, why are you reading this?

Yet, even if you do fall into one of these categories, you might still have the habit of talking yourself out of working out during the day. You put things off until later in the day. We all do. Excess free time can be dangerous.

But no matter what category you fall under, why do we do that?

The reason is the willpower drain. It drains through the day, and every piece of mental or physical work we have to do starts to chip away at it.

So if that's the case…use the morning!

At the end of the day, you're drained. Going to a physical gym helps a lot because you end up in the environment and everyone else is working out already. But even still, it can be easy to just bail and head home.

Then, once home, the trap of entertainment grabs you at night. You probably waste 1-2 hours per day at the end of the day every day. To get more out of your mornings, shave some of that stuff off, go to bed early, wake up early and go be productive.

It won't be comfortable (training at any time of the day isn't comfortable), but once you get done, you'll feel great. That feeling will last all day.

The Morning Workout Setup

I was going to start with the advice of finding a training program, but odds are that if you're reading this, you have something in mind that you want to do. The problem isn't knowing what program to follow, it's carving out the time to actually do it.

You're in a good spot. Let's begin.

Step 1: The Evening Setup

• The evening setup is what will set the tone for the morning. Good luck waking up at 5am to workout if you were up until midnight playing video games or watching TV.

• Get your clothes ready. It seems small, but you want as little mental friction as possible in the morning. If you care about what you look like, you don't want to be making fashion decisions at the last second when you could just be putting the clothes on and starting. Remember the willpower drain.

• Figure out what nutrition you need (or don't need) in the morning and set it up or at least be ready to make it the next morning quickly.

• Make sure you go to bed at a decent hour. If you aren't sleepy enough at night when you know you should be falling asleep or if you're not alert enough in the morning, don't worry. That alarm clock and morning workout will start to get you in the right rhythm.

• If you really can't sleep, it's probably because you keep staring at screens late into the night. Put your phone down for a least one hour before you know you should be sleeping and pick up a book. Get a stack of fiction from your local library. That'll knock you out faster than melatonin.

Step 2: Go Workout

• If you've set yourself up properly, then you'll be able to get ready for the gym on autopilot. Get dressed, eat your food, go to the gym, workout.

• This is the prime spot where the magic happens. None of that "meh, I'll do it later today" will creep into your head as it would if you were to workout later.

• Don't grab your phone and start scrolling. That's the worst thing in the world for your attention span plus it also drains more willpower. Just pick it up and bring it with you, but you don't have any need for scrolling social media or checking email. Stop it.

Step 3: Feel Good

• There's a positive snowball effect that happens when you workout. You did something hard, something that's taking one step towards goals you have, you feel good and you want to come back for more. Now imagine getting that feeling first thing in the morning. The rest of the day won't feel as bad. It really does set the tone for the rest of the day.

• You're going to have to figure out the logistics of taking a shower and getting to work. Make sure you modify your workout routine accordingly.

The Time is There. Use It Wisely.

People have more free time to work on things that will improve their lives than they realize.

How do I know?

Because the average adult social media use time is 2.5 hours. That doesn't even include other entertainment. You could be using that time to learn a second language in a year.

I know that time isn't a 1 to 1 ratio for being able to workout. There is still the setup involved of figuring out what to do, getting ready, maybe driving to the gym and coming back home.

But the problem is that due to the abundance of entertainment all around us, a lot of us get trapped every night. "I'll just check social media for a second" turns into a 1-2 hour scroll fest that makes you feel awful. Where did the time go?

Besides, it's going to be a grind to get yourself to be pumped and excited to do a workout at 7pm. Work with your energy levels. If you're just wasting time at night and your mind is fresh in the morning, why not use it to your advantage?

No, it won't feel like sunshine and rainbows (especially because the sun won't be up hahahaha), but on the other end of the day, you're just wasting time. It's much better to guarantee doing short workouts every day than to think you're going to be up for a workout in the afternoon every once in a while when you're drained.

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