If you’ve ever trained in the evening or night, after work, you probably know that familiar feeling of dreading the gym. It doesn’t matter how much you love working out, when you’ve had a long, tiring day at work, hitting the gym probably won’t be very high on your to-do list.
I’ve tried training after work and it just doesn’t suit me. There’s too many hurdles and mental roadblocks you have to go through between waking up, going to work and then the gym.
For me, I personally have to train first thing in the morning. I find that I have more energy, I feel more focused with less things on my mind, I feel more committed and afterwards I’m left feeling great that I finished a great session and still have the whole day in front me.
Here are some of the benefits of a morning exercise routine:
More energy
The day has just begun, and you’ve not yet had the chance for something to come along and ruin your good mood. If you work out in the morning, then you are actively releasing those “feel good” endorphins to the body.
As long as you’re getting enough sleep the night before, working out early in the morning will leave you in a far more positive state of mind going into work. Now, if something bad does go wrong during the day it’s only bringing you down from a higher place.
If you go to work and have a terrible day, the last thing you want to do is go through more hardship after a tough day.
Done and dusted
Even if you like getting fit and you enjoy working out, the actual idea of going to do it can be a bit much when you are busy during the day. This means that if you know you have a 1 to 2-hour gym session after work, you can be dreading it all day in work.
If you work out in the morning, then you can get it out of the way and make yourself far more likely to be productive for the rest of your day.
Working up to going to the gym makes it easier to put it off. Getting it out of the way sets you up for that “just get it done” approach to the rest of your day as well as your approach to fitness in general.
Kills procrastination
It’s easy to follow the above scenario and just skip the gym – once. Then it becomes twice, three times and before you know it a few weeks have gone by. That one bad day can set a precedent for procrastination that can set in and take hold of your conscience and your mentality.
If you get used to procrastinating after work to get fit because you had a tough day or are too drained, you’ll never get yourself into any kind of decent level of fitness.
In my experience, it’s a lot harder to procrastinate early in the morning than in the evening because once I’m up, I start getting ready right away. There’s no time to think about it, you just do it.
Whereas when I go after work, you’ve got the whole day to make excuses – e.g. gotta cook food for the next day, lower back is hurting, got a headache, blah blah blah. Next thing you know it, you’re at home on the couch with some takeaway food watching TV.
It might be tough at first when you start working out early in the morning, but as you can see, there are plenty of benefits that come along with it and once it’s a habit, it’ll get easier as you go along.
