Early Sunday mornings - do they work or should I just stay in bed?
Melbourne weather sucks. Three days after a 30 degree extension of summer, my teeth were chattering as it hailed during my Sunday morning drive to a Rowformer workout at Strong Pilates. That 6:30am alarm didn’t seem like such a great idea any more. So are morning workouts really worth the pain? Is there an ideal time to exercise to get the most benefit when you’re somewhere around middle-aged?
Just Do It - there’s not a “wrong” time for exercise
Before we get too smart and start biohacking our workouts, let’s get the obvious fitness obstacle out of the way. Your available time to exercise is limited if you’re juggling family, work and everything else life throws at you. The perfect time for you to work on your fitness is the time you can do week in, week out. I was hopeless at this for a long time, with plenty of good intentions achieving zero output. What now works for me is to schedule in advance, put it in my diary and repeat (a reason group classes work for me, as there’s a penalty to skip them). If I’m scheduling 8am on Sunday, then it’s going to be every week, unless something significant gets in the way. You do you - pick some times and then lock them in for every week. Repeatable processes get results. Your best results will come when you consistently carry out an activity, whether it’s pumping iron or walking the dog around the block. We can all stick to things that are convenient and that we enjoy, so use this as a foundation of creating your fitness habits.
Now back to our chilly Sunday morning - when is the best time to work out?
workout? or stay in bed?
Morning Glory
There’s a definite slant in the science towards working out in the morning, but there’s a couple of provisos here. Here’s what morning exercise has going for it:
Work hard and you can lift your metabolism for many hours following, which is helpful if you’re looking to lose weight. Your metabolism slows in the evening, so you don’t get the same extended benefit from a late workout
Much of the science suggests exercising before eating taps into stored fat for energy. Exercise isn’t just about weight loss though. Do you need to eat before morning exercise to perform at your best? Do that - I usually throw down a banana on my morning drive.
Does vigourous exercise make you happy? Thank endorphins for that! A fantastic way to set up for a positive and productive day.
Life hasn’t got in the way yet. If you’re up at 6am to work out, there’s no unexpected late meeting, no crisis that’s popped up, no tempting dinner invitation to tear you away from the gym. Most of us will find it simpler to build a morning routine - and routine builds results!
We’re not all morning people though and there’s some potential downsides to setting the alarm early too, particularly as you get older. When we wake up, our body temperature and heart rate are lower. As we get older, many of us are not feeling our most limber when we first get out of bed, so we need to ease into the day. It’s generally accepted that people perform skill-based exercises best early in the day and power-based exercises later in the day, so if deadlifts are your thing, some extra shuteye may be the thing for you. Or are you one of those people who are totally wrecked for the day by an early alarm? Listen to your body and stay in bed!
Afternoon Delight
My personal workout schedule is early mornings on the weekend and as late as possible during the week, because it’s the most convenient way to organise my life. Here’s why I love afternoon and evenings over mornings:
Busy, stressful day? Forget about it! When I’m concentrating in a class for an hour, I’m not thinking about Excel spreadsheets
I feel ready to go and stronger as soon as I walk in the door. I’m not worried about stretching out my back and cracking joints, so I’m willing to push myself harder and end up with better results
Without having specific proof, I feel I fall asleep more easily after a tough evening workout. When compared to a morning that starts off with an early alarm, waking me from a deep sleep, I’ll take the uncompromised rest every time
Truth is, I’m not a morning person! I like evening workouts best and so I’m more likely to do them. That’s probably the best reason of all, which leads us into consistency.
Consistency over Intensity
There’s an old joke I remember from primary school -
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!
Want to lose 10kg? It’s not happening in a week, no matter what you do? Build those guns in a week? How many bicep curls do you think you could possibly do? Short, intense bursts can be fun, but it’s not how to get long term progress. We all know that results come from consistent behaviours over an extended period of time, whether it’s getting fit, learning a language, growing a garden, or writing a book. Understanding the need for consistency is not difficult; being consistent is more difficult.
It’s not that we don’t want to be consistent; instead, we let shit get in the way, we get distracted by all sorts of things. So how do we become consistent? Here’s a few things we can put in place to get past these distractions and get our stuff done -
Schedule it - put it in your phone or diary, book it in the app, whatever. Scheduling is your weapon against distraction
Make it simple - if I’m up early for a class, I get my workout clothes out the night before. The banana I’m going to eat on the drive there is already on the bench, next to my filled water bottle and car keys. My bag is already packed. I run on autopilot from the moment I get up until I’m out the door. Once I’m on the way, I know I’ll complete my workout, as I’ve got past all the opportunities to put things in the too-hard basket.
Accountability - exercise with a friend; pay a coach; join a challenge; make a public declaration. Find a way to hold yourself accountable to someone else and it’s far more difficult to bail out
Track your progress - come up with a way to measure what you’re doing that is a direct outcome of the actions you’re taking. It may be as simple as marking off a chart to show you’ve completed 5 workouts for the week. It can be a performance goal (an improved time, a gradually increasing weight or resistance) or an activity goal (did my 15,000 steps today). Jerry Seinfeld has a very simple method he points towards as the key to his success - check out “Don’t break the chain”
Reward yourself - when I do a morning workout on the weekend, I buy myself a coffee. I savour it more than any other coffee I drink during the week. I’m not a mindful person, but I delight in that first sip. Why? Because I worked bloody hard for it. Find small ways to reinforce your actions.
The final word on early Sunday mornings
Does Sunday morning work? Even though there’s plenty of science giving small positives to different times of day for different activities, the most important thing is to be consistent in your workout regimen. Leave the worries about the one-percenters to the professional athletes, find something you can stick with and do that. If that means you’re joining me in setting the 6:30am alarm on Sunday, enjoy it!
And for the final word on consistency and progress, I’m handing over to Rocky Balboa…
keep moving forward
