Sometimes and by no true fault of your own, you find yourself in a just-out-of-bed early morning workout. Here’s how to tackle it effectively.
So maybe instead of quads you’re more interested in quad shots of espresso. That’s fine, too. In fact, a little caffeine can go a long way. But maybe sheer inconvenience has forced you into a sunrise sweat sesh, how can you optimize this workout?
Don’t Skip the Good Stuff!
The first thing you can do is not skip your warm-up. It’s likely that, despite doing absolutely nothing for the last 1/3 of a day, you’ll be pretty stiff. This includes everything from your spine (more on that later) to your toes and everything in between. Put yourself through your normal preworkout paces and don’t skip out.
Our warm-up at the gym includes everything from floor-exercises like internal/-external hip rotations and pigeon to standing things like single-leg deadlifts and lunge variations. Try to move all of your joints through a full range-of-motion and, combined with a 3-5 minute full-body foam rolling session, you should feel pretty good.
Heart Rate Work
The second thing you can do is add some intervals to wake yourself up. Our favorite is an ascending ladder of either time or distance on either the bike or rower. This could be ascending EMOM (Every Minute On the Minute) sprints (e.g. 10/50, 20/40, 30/30, 40/20, etc) or maybe some increasing rower distances with rest intervals in between.
Another good way to add some extra movement is a light dynamic warm-up. Even if you don’t usually include much of this stuff, some light high knees, butt kicks, shuffling, and skipping variations can help get the blood flowing a little extra compared to your average warm-up.
A Little Rearranging, Perhaps?
The last thing and my favorite early morning workout adjustment is to start with the easy stuff. Traditional strength & conditioning textbooks tell us to start our workouts with our A1, our bread and butter exercises, our biggest compound movements. And I think, for the most part, this advice holds true across all perturbations from would-be disputants.
But early mornings can leave your spine feeling pretty stiff (as well as most of the rest of your body) and your brain feeling a little sluggish, to say the least. So it’s often wise to start with the “easier” stuff that you would traditionally finish the workout with. In other words, work backward. This will allow you to complete a few successful sets, establish even better blood flow, and get your head in the right place to lift something heavier.
So next time you find yourself, against your better judgement, in a first light fight with some weights, give these adjustments a try. Even the most reluctant-to-rise can be successful with early morning workouts with just a few simple tweaks.