Morning sport routine

Let's consider it to be a matter of fact, that living an active life is good for your health. It has been proven thousands of times already and I have nothing to add here. In this post I want to talk on the sport aspect of living an active life. In particular on how it fits into modern lifestyle and how to squeeze it in when you have too much to do.

Currently, I am a full-time employee and have a lot of stuff going on around me: social life, side projects, travelling etc. For years I was always doing all my sport routines in the evening. Like really... without any exceptions. Even on weekends. However, as my life started to be more saturated with work/responsibilities/other activities I started to note that it is really hard to fit sport routine in the evening. I was leaving home at 8AM and coming back after 9PM from my sport activities and it was intense. Somehow I realized, sport routine in the evening simply does not scale... The evening is a very limited resource, especially when you want to socialize. Common, nobody is going to wait me until after 9PM to drink a beer after I did my sport. And to be honest, I do not want beer after sport :) I just want to go home...

So I started to figure out what I can do about it... Obviously for most of the people it is a binary choice - you either train in the morning or in the evening. Let's be realistic, it will be really hard to fit sport activity in the middle of the day for a regular person. So I decided to give morning routine a try.

Disclaimer: I am doing morning sports routines for more than 2 years now and feel perfect about it

The very first morning you commit to do your sport on. AKA What is the problem with it?

Oh man, it is hard... Really you are trying to find so many reasons not to do it. And all of them are legit. Really, terrible idea. The most prominent are:

1. I will be sweaty/red-face and I do not want to come to work like this
2. I will be tired before I even step into the office
3. I can not have a breakfast before sport and can not do a healthy breakfast on the go

You see... All of it makes sense. And we even did not consider that it is just hard to wake up. However a lot of it also legit for evening routine. Especially food aspect as you might be forced to push your dinner to the later time. Also you are already tired before you hit the gym or whatever else, so your motivation has degraded already. And even the cheapest studios are equipped with showers, so it is just a matter of logistics.

Are we still doing it?

Definitely yes! Some difficulties are expected, but you have to remain strong and targeted! There are ton of benefits doing sport in the morning:

1. You are fresh and ready for challenges - you just had a good sleep (important) and fully ready to accept some stress. Perfect time to give your body a bit of a boost!
2. Believe me, it will charge you up for the upcoming day. First days it will be hard, but it will get better as you get used to it. You just need to explain your body that it is a time to change the common cycle.
3. You will go through your day much easier and relaxed when you did a challenge in the morning.

How to optimise the morning time for sport?

There are multiple rules I follow to make sure morning sport routine does not hurt my productivity:

1. Pack you stuff in the evening. for instance I pack everything in the morning (including my daily outfit) and leave sport clothes on the sofa. As I wake up, I dress up immediately and ready to go.
2. Do your nutrition right. In my experience, it is very hard to do morning sport routine without some basic food supplements. Before sport I drink a protein shake and after sport I eat a Cliff energy bar. I intentionally reference this brand here as it is light years away from anything you can find on the market, in my opinion. Yes, they are a bit more expensive, but the difference is HUGE!
3. Use your commute efficiently - listen some audio content, read, etc. Do not consider your commute to be a time waste. Sometimes when I do my commutes after sport I even do meetings from the car.

Ok got it, but what kind of sport to do?

This is interesting. For me, doing regular gym in the morning did not work. Neither did running. At all... I was simply skipping it all the time as there was no good reason to do it. For me the solution became the kind of activities when you have to book a slot in advance. So you are technically making a commitment to go by occupying a slot. And even more than that, you are sort of stealing this slot from another person who did not manage to get it, so if you skip the class you are double-guilty as your spot just wasted.

This was the time when I discovered CrossFit for myself. Not only it is a good fitness routine if your time is limited, but it also promotes very healthy community culture when everybody supports team members. Also, by some luck, my perfect CrossFit box was so well packed that you simply can not let the slot waste.

Obviously CrossFit is not for everybody, so you might want to pick something else. Key message here is: you need to make a commitment. And let's accept, you likely need to make this commitment for other people. For instance if you still want just run in the morning, find somebody who will run with you(or get a dog). Got no friends near by? Use social media to connect with similar people around you. There is no shame in it!

Be realistic here though. Like it will be really challenging to find a person to play tennis in the morning with you. Or find a team, which will play football in the morning. Pick something more grounded for beginning: Fitness/Running/Yoga/Swimming. Also, make sure that the sport place is in the close proximity from your apartment. We talked about productivity during a commute but everything has limits, right?

Wrap up

Morning sport routines works perfect for me and for many-many other people, so it could be good for you too! If you want to try it, do not give up quickly, develop your routine and find a good place to do it, which is relatively close to the place you live (still important).

No magic here, you will have to wake up earlier than you used to. So you will have to change some aspects of your lifestyle.

For me, it took me round 2 month to rebuild my habits and my body to fully accept sport in the morning. It is challenging but worth it 100%. I definitely felt how it boosted my productivity and made me more energized. It has also magically freed some of my time. So, give it is try! Want to get more advices? contact me on social media and we can chat about your case. Hopefully I will be able to help ;)