Five reasons to exercise in the morning

Most of us know that being active and moving is important for our health, but few manage to incorporate enough movement and exercise into their daily routine. The most common time to exercise is in the evening, after a day's work or even late at night, before a night's rest. While exercising in the evening also has its advantages, here are five reasons why you should start your day with exercise.

Helps wake up

If you have trouble waking up in the morning, you might think, "Leave that morning workout to the morning people, my body is still sleeping and there's no point in even thinking about it until the afternoon." If you think that too, please read on and consider the arguments in favor of morning workouts.

Our bodies like a set rhythm. If you exercise regularly at a set time in the morning, your body will adapt to it quite quickly and you will soon discover that your body is ready to move actively in the morning hours and waking up is not as difficult as before.

Whether you go to the gym right out of bed or do some other parts of your morning routine first, such as reading the Bible, praying, journaling, etc., giving your body 30–60 minutes to wake up, is a matter of personal preference. When I had to get to the office by a certain time in the morning and used public transportation to do so, a morning routine where I started working out right away and left readings and such for when I was on the train worked for me. Now that I don’t use public transportation in the morning, I start the day with reading, prayer, and journaling, and then head to the gym.

Stimulates metabolism

Regardless of the order in which you do your morning activities, a morning workout will set you up for the rest of the day. By starting your mornings with a regular workout, you may soon discover that you don't need a morning coffee to get you going. Unless you skipped the night before, I'm sure that after a morning workout and a shower, you'll be ready for the day's challenges.

Exercise also boosts your metabolism, and after a morning workout, it works better throughout the day. The most significant boost to your metabolism comes from high-intensity (high heart rate) endurance training. Especially if you have a naturally slow metabolism or a sedentary job, a morning workout can give you a nice boost for the day and speed up your metabolism a bit. Intense exercise can boost your metabolism by as much as 20–30%, and it stays that way for up to a couple of hours, then slowly starts to decline.

Morning exercise is not missed that often.

You may have heard that frequent flyers prefer morning flights to evening ones. The reason is simple: evening flights are delayed or canceled more often than morning ones.

The same goes for evening workouts, which tend to be skipped more often than morning workouts. Especially in the beginning, when regular exercise isn’t a habit, going to the gym every time requires a certain amount of mental effort. After a long day, our willpower reserves can be pretty depleted, and skipping a workout may seem like a reasonable plan at that point. During the day, all sorts of unexpected things can happen that are out of your control.

The evening remains free.

Besides, if you exercise in the morning, you have more time for the evening. You often have to fit a lot into your evening hours: your spouse, hobbies, friends, volunteer work, and homework. Not to mention that your day job often takes up a good chunk of your evening hours. And if you also have children, it can be quite difficult to find time for an evening workout. While you were at work, they were probably at daycare or school, and when you get home in the evening, you have to fit in eating, studying, talking and playing, and getting the kids to bed, which is often a challenge in itself.

If you've exercised in the morning, you'll have one less worry in the evening, and regardless of how the day goes or what the evening brings, at least one important thing will have been accomplished.

Morning exercise helps you lose weight

Various studies show that at least 250 minutes of active exercise per week helps significantly (more than 5%) in losing weight. But this is an average result. If you look at individual subjects, the variability is large. There may be several reasons: biological differences, habits, energy intake and expenditure. However, recent studies suggest that the timing of exercise may be the main culprit, why individual results vary greatly.

A recent study of overweight and obese men and women found that early exercisers lost significantly more weight than late exercisers. So if weight loss is important to you, here's another reason to fit your workout into the morning hours.

You save money

The last and not least argument in favor of morning training is that it is cheaper. At least for those who train in sports clubs. Morning training is usually cheaper than daytime or evening training. And there is also less competition. The probability that you can train at your own pace in the gym with the desired equipment or stretch out on the track alone in the swimming pool is significantly higher in the morning.

As you can see, morning workouts have several important advantages over evening workouts, and this list is not exhaustive. Morning workouts have other advantages, but the most important thing is the workout itself. Missing a workout, even if it was a morning workout, is of no use.