Exercise in the morning

Morning workout has many benefits. I’ve read and talked about it and wrote about it many times. Some time ago I wrote an article on the benefits of morning exercises. In another article I have already discussed the question of whether to train sooner or later.

However, for a long time, I was never able to go to workout early in the morning before work. The benefits for me, an old night owl, simply weren’t compelling enough to break my habit forever and give up the benefits of exercising in the evening. I changed this earlier this year. Over the course of eight weeks, I decided to consistently reschedule my workouts into the early morning hours.

After these eight weeks, I would like to share my personal experience with you in this article. To do this, I want to very openly and honestly talk about my personal advantages and disadvantages that I experienced during this time. Aside from the expected benefits, there are also some unexpected ones that I found during my morning workout. However, I definitely experienced some of the disadvantages of early training in my self-experimentation, so I almost stopped experimenting in the meantime.

Since I am clearly talking about my personal experiences in this article, I will be talking to you less often when I talk about the advantages and disadvantages of learning in the morning. You have to find out for yourself if you can transfer all these things to yourself and your life. However, I’m sure you will also find many points for yourself.

Morning Exercise – Benefits

I have always considered myself an owl and could not identify myself with morning workouts. Because of some good reasoning, I allowed myself to get carried away with this experiment. That being said, I have found that there are many reasons why I should exercise early in the morning. I also found some arguments for myself that I did not expect. I want to share with you eight of the strongest of them.

1) Morning workout gives me victory right after getting up

Every morning, when I get up and finish my morning ritual by doing sports, I have a big victory against my inner bastard. It helps me start the day with a positive attitude and more energy. I also checked my to-do list before other people got up.

2) I need less time to get up when I exercise in the morning

I usually take a long time to get started early in the morning. Usually between my alarm clock and at least an hour until I can leave the house. If I go to the gym right after I wake up in the morning, I just don’t wait for my head to rise. I had already packed all my things next to the bed, turned on the sports equipment with an alarm clock, did the morning ritual, drank a little booster before training, and immediately started training.

I just force myself to stand up straight and start exercising ASAP because I want to get up as little as possible. When the alarm goes off, I know that after 30 minutes I should be warming up in the gym. If I am too slow, I will have to shorten my study time or be late for work.

3) My gym is empty when I work out early in the morning

I usually train at McFeat near my apartment. It’s right on the way to work and luckily when I want to exercise early in the morning before work. Early in the morning at 6 a.m. there aren’t too many people crazy enough to train with heavy weights.

So I’m calm, I can easily find a locker, I don’t bother anyone and …

4) I save time on my morning workout

I myself would not have believed it if someone had told me in advance that I would save so much time if I went to workout in the morning. But in fact, I train 10-15% faster, as if I were training in the evening. Since I exercised in the morning, I spent a lot more time posting my workouts to Instagram.

But just because I don’t have to wait, because the devices or the weight are not free, I’m already saving a lot of time. I haven’t had to wait once since I started training so early to start bench presses, deadlifts or squats. I can even easily overset without disturbing me.

In addition, small talk in the morning is also much less extensive. On the one hand, you meet fewer people, but on the other hand, most of them have no particular desire to talk for a long time early in the morning.

5) My gym clientele is different in the early morning

I don’t mean to say that my audience is better in the morning. Many good friends regularly train in the evenings and I really enjoy meeting them there. However, my impression is that the people in the gym are just friendlier in the morning. It can also be related to the general situation. If there is no shortage of scales, then there is no need to argue about scales.

You quickly know each other, greet each other, briefly help each other. Somehow we are sitting by a few crazy people who learn so early in the same boat. It somehow connects and creates a positive community atmosphere.

6) Clean and clean in the gym in the morning

This is really great, especially for the restrooms. The cleaning crew is either straight or still in the middle when I come to practice in the morning. Personally, I’m much more interested in exercising when I can work out in a clean gym and then take a fairly clean shower.

7) Sober learning enabled

Of course, sober training isn’t for everyone. I don’t want to go into details when it comes to energy supply processes, I have to write my article for that. There are benefits to exercising without food, however, especially if you’re dieting and looking to lose weight and define your muscles. If I go to workout right after getting up, it will still be easier for me to train without food.

8) After training I am immediately in good shape and motivated

For me, early training is a kind of natural energy booster. When I finish my workout, I will have more energy for a few hours. As a result, my most efficient time of the day is around three to six hours after I finish my workouts. As soon as I come to work after a workout with a fresh shower and drink my Protein Shake, I am fully able and able to take care of the most important things of the day with full energy.

I think these are good arguments for going to workout in the morning. In addition, it is sometimes very difficult for me to motivate myself to work in the evening after work. Am I going anyway? Clear! But there is also a little something if you checked it out early in the morning.

Morning exercises – disadvantages

During my preliminary research, I noticed that there is a lot to be learned about the benefits, but very little about the disadvantages of exercising early in the morning. Articles on morning exercise are mostly about benefits. However, in my experiment, I also noticed some disadvantages that I would also like to share with you here.

There is also one or the other very subjective topic here, in addition to the generally accepted arguments.

1) Who wants to get up earlier

If you want to go to workout early in the morning before work, you must get up earlier … or go to work later. What sounds perfectly logical should really be remembered when deciding for a morning workout.

Unfortunately, I am not able to regularly visit the office later. This is also because I always slept until I had to get up to get to work. For me, despite the time saved by leaving home, this means that I have to get up about an hour and fifteen minutes earlier than before. It wasn’t fun for an owl like me.

This also means I need to go to bed earlier too. I enjoy using the evening hours very effectively and efficiently to work on this blog here.

2) Increased risk of injury during morning workouts

When you exercise in the morning, your muscles are still tense and still not sufficiently supplied with blood and nutrients. If you start exercising as straight as you could in the evening (which is also not recommended), then the risk of injury is much higher.

For this reason, it is especially important to use a decent warm-up when training in the early morning. This is especially true if you are doing heavy hypertrophy training or even want to train maximum strength. To be honest, I’m not sure if I recommend anyone postponing their max strength training early in the morning …

3) In the morning (for now) we can expect a decrease in training

What I expected earlier hit me in the face like a slap in the face: I just had significantly less strength during my strength training early in the morning. At first it was not too small. Depending on the exercise, I did 10-20% less workouts than in the evening.

This has always been one of the most important reasons why I could never train long in the morning. I just hate that I can move a lot less weight. In addition, shifted weight also plays an important role when it comes to building muscle mass or simply being able to gain as much muscle mass as possible in the diet.

However, by pulling it for a while, I can make it clear. There is some addiction. After a few weeks (4-6) I regained my training weight in the evening. In the evening, when I went back to the comparison, I found that I could only add a little weight. Therefore, I believe that it only had a minimal negative impact on the development of my training and therefore on the duration of muscle building.

4) Difficult food after training

While a sumptuous post-workout dinner was something of a standard for me, the post-workout meal in the morning was a problem. Finally, after training, I drive straight to the office in the morning.

In a diet, this is not so impractical because I just drink a protein shake with micellar casein and thus provide my body with protein, and I am not hungry for several hours. Especially when it comes to eating in the main phase, things are a little more complicated because the most important food is here after training.

Since I have no way of getting a proper breakfast on the go, and cooking has never been an attractive option for me, I had to look for another solution. For me, it now comes down to making a homemade weight gain shake for breakfast on the way to the office or the office, as I described in my article on muscle building products.

5) Wear sportswear all day

This point, of course, does not apply to everyone now. However, since I want to integrate my workouts into my daily life in a time-optimized way, I always try to stop at the gym on my way to or from work. For this to work, I must always have everything I need for my work and learning.

This also means I have to shower at my gym now before going to work. In the evening, I usually took a shower at home only after training. So now I have something else with me. These are the things that stay with me all day after training, along with my gym clothes in my gym bag. On the one hand, it is difficult and annoying, but on the other hand, it is a little disgusting if things have to be in your pocket all day.

6) have you ever heard of sweating

I don’t know if you are also affected, but most people sweat a little for a while after strenuous exercise. It is a regulatory process in the body that does not stop when you shower.

When I exercise in the evening, I just shower when I’m at home and I’m shaking. Then enough time passed so that I no longer sweated noticeably. However, if I train in the morning, I cannot wait an hour after training before I shower and put on fresh clothes for work.

7) Afternoon performance decline

As well as high performance in the morning after a morning workout, unfortunately it doesn’t last all day. After about five to six hours at work, my cognitive performance declines markedly. Since I often work ten hours or more, this is certainly not optimal, but I find that overall I am still more efficient thanks to the morning raise. Fortunately, there is also coffee.

However, what’s really annoying is that in the evening, which has always been my most productive work time (especially for blogging), I can no longer do that much anymore. Here I had to change some of my graphs to compensate for this.

So, what’s really important to you is best addressed in the hours after your morning workout. I also wondered if I could just sit with my laptop in the gym for an hour right after training and work on my blog. So I partially use my high performance for blogging and at the same time I don’t have that much sweating problem anymore.

My conclusion on morning exercises

As you can see, there are many advantages, but there are also disadvantages to exercising in the morning. Some of the arguments may not apply to you, or to the extent that I do. There may be one or two arguments for you that my list does not appear here. It’s important that you figure out for yourself if morning workouts are right for you. It might even help you overcome your inner pig.

But don’t give up too quickly if you want to give it a try. In the beginning, they could have easily picked me up. Now, however, I’m glad I got through this for so long. I figured the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and continue to workout in the morning after waking up.

I hope you enjoyed the article and enjoyed it and will visit my blog again soon. Your best bet is to follow me on Facebook and subscribe to the newsletter so you don’t miss any new articles.

Good luck with your training

And don’t forget: your health is your health.