How to Start Exercising in the Morning
The last time you got out of bed at 6 am for your morning workout, you felt great: you heard the chirping of birds; the coffee was especially tasty; you had the energy to run in circles around family and colleagues.
Now, if you could do it more than once.
If you’re not an early riser , getting up for any reason – let alone exercising – before 10 a.m. can seem like a daunting challenge. If, however, morning is the best time to exercise , it’s worth trying to reprogram your day first. Of course, this brings us to how to do it .
First of all: morning is a great time to exercise, when your brain is fresh and set to form new habits. “This is the part of the day when your willpower is at its peak and before distractions start hitting you,” said Manish Sethi, who has been studying behavioral psychology and habit development for over 10 years and founded Pavlok , a wearable device designed to help the user gets rid of bad habits. But in order to take advantage of these benefits, you need precious beauty sleep . We’ve discussed how to sleep better in previous articles, so we won’t go into details here.
Assuming your sleep is normal, it’s still hard to give up comfy blankets to, say, go for a run. This is probably for three reasons: you are trying to do too much too early; you did not plan correctly; you were unable to add any positive reinforcement. Here’s how to fix it.
Start small and grow
One of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to develop a new exercise habit is getting very ambitious. Let’s run five, no, seven days a week! And do the strength training program four times a week! And a weekend hike! Their initial enthusiasm is commendable, but ultimately dooms them to death because they do too much, too quickly, relying solely on willpower to break through the earth . Sethi recommends starting small so you can’t help but do it.
He calls this the micro-habits model, in which a fitness habit is broken down into the smallest possible steps. How small is it? Here’s Sethi talking about a little experiment he did with 240 people in a Facebook group who all made a commitment to going to the gym for the next 30 days:
For the first week, all they had to do was walk out the front door after breakfast in sportswear. That’s all. They could go back and sit down to do what they usually did. It was so easy to do that it was extremely difficult to fail.
The next week, they were ordered to go out the front door, head to the gym, and brush off their membership card. They didn’t need to train. In the third week, they spent 10 minutes in the gym. They spent 20 minutes in the gym in the last week. By the end of this experiment, about 80% of the participants had maintained this fitness habit every day for 30 days.
It might sound like a waste of time to think of spending four weeks just getting started exercising for 20 minutes, but this is the kind of thinking that gives you problems: you shouldn’t immediately strive for excellence. We are trying to get you into the habit of working in the morning constantly. “The longer it takes to form a habit, the longer it will last,” Sethi said.
Start small enough that you can’t talk yourself out of it and reinforce it. For starters, perhaps you can try sleeping in sportswear or doing just one push-up when you get out of bed .
Plan your morning in advance
“You want no decisions required in the morning,” Sethi said. If you, for example, wake up already in sportswear, you give up all the decision-making dancing around dressing up, and you are much more likely to devote yourself to training.
Another example: if you eat breakfast, you will help yourself in the morning by knowing in advance what you will eat and at what time to wake up to have breakfast without upsetting your stomach in front of the gym. Maybe you wake up an hour and a half earlier to eat a whole bowl of oatmeal and eggs; or maybe just a banana and milk will go 30 minutes before the gym.
Take it a step further and have a plan for the month. Here’s a rough four-week plan to start building an exercise habit :
Day 1. Sleep in sportswear.
Day 2: Sleep in sportswear. Take 1 jump.
Day 3: Sleep in sportswear. Make 5 jumps.
Day 4: Sleep in sportswear. Take 5 jumps, do 1 push-up.
Day 5: Sleep in sportswear. Do 5 jumps, do 5 push-ups.
Day 6: Sleep in sportswear. Do 5 jumps, do 5 push-ups, do 1 air squat.
Day 7: Sleep in sportswear. Do 5 jumps, do 5 push-ups, do 5 air squats.
2nd week:
Increase daily from 1 set of 5 jumps to 3 sets of 20 jumps, 1 set of 5 push-ups, and 1 set of 5 air squats.
Week 3:
3 sets of 20 jumps. Increase to 3 sets of 20 push-ups daily, 1 set of 5 air squats.
4 week:
3 sets of 20 push-ups, 3 sets of 5 push-ups. Increase to 3 sets of 20 air squats daily.
Reward Yourself for Taking Exercise Habits
Charles Duhigg, author of the bestselling book The Power of Habit , wrote that a habit is formed through this three-step process :
- Cue: This is a subconscious trigger that triggers your habit. Maybe going to the kitchen is a signal to have coffee in the morning.
- Routine: This is a habit: drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, exercising, etc.
- The Reward: This is ultimately what reinforces the habit. For coffee, that would be an alertness to wellness and a perception of increased productivity.
In short, the best way to build an exercise habit is to associate it with a positive reward. For example, you may not have missed a single day at the gym all week. Why not pamper yourself with that pair of shoes you’ve been looking at for a long time? Or a day at the spa? Of course, the highest reward will be visible here, concrete results – looser trousers, better looking in the mirror, lost pounds on the scales, etc. – but this takes time. In the meantime, you can find suitable non-food rewards. (I say this has nothing to do with food, because making food a reward for exercise is an unpleasant area. )
Also note that none of this will be as effective as it could be if you don’t get enough sleep. So, before you even start forming a habit of exercise in the morning, get as many of these Z’s as possible.