Thursday, May 19, 2011

Early Morning Workouts

Given my busy schedule, I've had to give my self over to the dreaded early morning workout.  Since I often have to work late into the evening, I never know when I'm going to get off work and when I do get out of work at a reasonable time, I just want to go home.  Therefore, I'm forced into the early morning workout routine.

I used to hate, I mean hate, morning workouts.  I moved slower in the mornings, I never felt motivated, it was too cold, etc. Terrible.  But now I've sort of grown to like them.  There are several benefits to an early morning workout:

(1) Guaranteed - Unless you oversleep or talk yourself out of what seemed like a great idea at 10:00 pm the night before, you're going to get your workout in.

(2) One shower - If you workout in the morning and then shower, then you only need to shower once for the day.  Plus, everyone looks better with a morning shower!

(3) Classes - I've found that the breadth of classes offered at gyms in the morning tends to be wide.  At my smaller gym, there are morning bootcamp, spin, yoga and pilates classes.   There are always lots of classes in the evening, but you certainly are no worse off choosing to go to a group exercise class in the morning.

(4) Traffic - My gym is located in the building next to the one in which I work.  Therefore, when I drive to the gym, I am essentially driving to work. At 6:30 in the morning, the commute is markedly faster than the commute at 9:00. Granted, I am only traveling 1.8 miles but still... it makes a difference.

(5) Time saved.  By choosing to work out in the morning, you are, many times, packing a bag the night before with an entire day's worth of outfits, makeup, shoes, jewelry and hair products to take the following morning.  While this is a pain at 11:00 at night, it makes for an efficient morning.  You have no choice but to wear the outfit you brought to the gym, so there's no staring longingly into your closet thinking "I have NOTHING to wear.  I need to go shopping ASAP."

I've noticed that I've adjusted pretty well to the morning workout routine.  It's not so bad and you definitely have more energy to "tackle your day."

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