Last week, I wrote about how mobility—the ability to move and be moved freely and easily—is not a separate facet of fitness. Rather, mobility is an expression of your fitness, and informs your moment-to-moment reality.

Just as the martial arts masters insist we must be able to kick cold, and Kelly Starrett’s famous analogy describes how a leopard must always be ready to sprint for its livelihood, how can you move in every moment of your life?

Fresh out of bed in the morning is perhaps the ultimate test of your true mobility. If a group is only as strong as its weakest member, you are only as mobile as your stiffest moment.

To add some practical testing and actionable advice to this theoretical musing, I offer this morning mobility check-in. In this video, I describe and demonstrate three quick movement sequences that you can do in a few short minutes any time of day and/or fresh out of bed.

We are most used to paying attention to our movement patterns while in the gym. Similarly, we gauge our physical abilities by PRs and other measures that come after we have dutifully prepared and warmed up.

As you follow along with these quick mobility sequences, pay attention to what you feel in your body. This can tell you much more than what you might feel in training and provide invaluable guidelines to direct your movement practice.

Check out this list of fun workouts and simple exercises to do when stuck at home.

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There is a third option that has picked up a great deal of steam, as droves of successful people have begun to reveal their morning routine that they “couldn’t live without.” While I don’t believe any routine is “magic in a bottle” or “will fix everything,” the right morning ritual can be an extremely powerful tool. It provides momentum, direction, and clarity to drive production and energy through the rest of your day. Your morning habits can become a powerful incremental dose that, over time, leads to tremendous positive growth, however you might define that.

Busy people need to own the morning! And in our sedentary world, movement must become the centerpiece of it.

People often come to me for advice when they’re trying to make a nutrition change or find time to work out. They seem a little frantic as they describe the unpredictability and frenzied pace of their average day. Their days are a long game of whack-a-mole.

It seems like everybody is impoverished for time and in deep need of some ruthless cutting of the non-essentials. To do that, we need to identify what we really want out of life, and what we really value. Most of us understand that our physical and mental health need to be higher priorities. Once we have an idea of what the real essentials are, then we can go about creating a routine that spurs a positive domino effect.

What Makes the Morning So Magical?

When you wake up, whatever you do first sets the tone for your day. Most of what we do and how we think are habits. They are conditioned responses to stimuli. Each habit is just a loop of cue, routine, and reward. Rewards may be as simple as a feeling of accomplishment, or as ornate as a post-workout smoothie that you love.

Waking up is a very reliable and consistent cue. If you shift your hours to allow a slightly earlier wakeup, you’ll find this extra time allows more control over your attention and your day. Furthermore, when you create positive habits for the beginning of the day, you help create a pattern of positive experiences to follow.

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg labels some habits as keystones. One example he cites is making your bed, which is linked with greater productivity and better budget skills. Other powerful keystone habits are having daily routines, planning your day, meditating, and exercising.

The opposite is true as well. If you begin the day with a Pop-Tart and Facebook, you probably aren’t heading to the gym later. The pattern you’ve created for the day is to reach for comfort, not attack challenges, and your goals just got a lot harder.

The Elements of a Good Morning

There is no shortage of advice about what constitutes a perfect morning routine. From cold water immersion, to 5-minute journals, to repeating personal affirmations in the mirror, you can make yourself crazy trying to do everything. My suggestion is to pick one thing at first, and if you desire, add more later.

Movement is the most important habit you can start your day with. Our psychology is heavily influenced by our physiology. Move with intention, power, and purpose first thing in the morning, and you will create a wave of positivity to carry you into your day. Furthermore, the mobility that is so critical to quality of life and cognitive health is dependent upon moving on a daily basis. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Your body needs the movement, and while it may be cranky at first, that movement leads to a more physically dynamic day.

I recommend beginning the day with a mobility flow, like this one from Chris Holder. I’ve done it every morning for the past year or so, and also use it with my athletes before training. It is a wonderful, total body check-in that will help mobilize all your joints. After this, your schedule may dictate what comes next. A meditation practice at the end of your morning routine is a powerful addition. You may choose to follow your movement flow with foam rolling or a healthy breakfast. I like to go straight into my workout routine, which I follow with 20 minutes of meditation.

A Morning Movement Practice to Dominate Your Day

If you’d like to begin a general morning movement practice, but are unsure of where to start, I have a routine I created for just such a purpose. It is a great total-body circuit that requires little equipment and will give you a strong foundation. For most, it’s low-impact enough to be done daily with great results.

Perform the following movements barefoot, in a circuit and in order, four times through:

The post Wake Up and Move appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Then there are those of us who have no choice. Work, family, or other obligations require us to rise early and train or not go at all. Below is a plan of attack designed specifically for the morning lifter, complete with pre-workout rituals and pre- and post-workout nutrition suggestions to get the most out of being an early riser.

Rules to Wake Up To

Morning workouts are vastly different than afternoon sessions. Your body temperature will be lower, you’ll have less food in your system to fuel your training, and your body has (hopefully) been holding still for the past eight hours, meaning a possibly stiff spine and a general lack of blood flow to your extremities. With those issues and more in mind, here are a few ground rules.

Have a Serious Warm Up

A quick walk on the treadmill won’t do it for the morning trainer. You need some serious blood flow and your muscles need to be primed and ready for the work to come. You wake up cold, so you’ll need an extensive warm-up routine to include a general phase (walk, bike, or jog), dynamic phase (jumping jacks, burpees, or jump squats), and a specific warm-up for that particular day (progressive sets of squats for lower body, for example).

Despite your morning fog, do everything you can to avoid haphazardly going through the motions of your warm up. Sleep walking through your progressive sets is not only ineffective, it’s also dangerous. Many injuries in the gym are from the lack of attention to warming up, which includes not focusing on the stretch and contraction, not following proper movement paths, and rushing through sets. Treat every set, even each warm up set, as an important component of your workout.

Wake Up Your Whole Core

Traditionally, if you were to train in the evening, your core is already somewhat awake. But morning lifters need some extra wake-up mojo. Forcing blood to the core and activating this vital central strength area of the body will help raise body temperature, and help your spine become ready for battle. This can be easily combined with your dynamic warm up routine by including crunches, leg lifts, and hyperextensions.

Start Light and Fast

Lifting heavy is tough enough, but pitting yourself against the same loads in the morning that you are used to doing in the the evening can feel like you hit a brick wall. If you’re new to morning training, err on the side of slightly lighter loads and higher reps to start. The higher rep range will help you adapt and coax your body into this new time of training. After several weeks, slowly add weight and you’ll be training heavy again in no time.

Take Time to Adapt

Lastly, you’ll want to give yourself time to adapt to early morning training. Jumping in head first will only leave you burnt out before you really start. Give it time, do fewer sets at lighter weight, or generally shorter workouts in the beginning. Just like everything else in the world of fitness, you will adapt over time. Be patient.

The Early Bird Training Program

Start each day of the program with the dynamic warm up listed below. Then, perform each workout shown below once per week, such as Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Dynamic Warm Up:

Perform 2-4 rounds of 10 reps each. Rest one minute between each round.

• Leg raises
• Push Ups
• Bodyweight Squats
• Floor Crunches
• Lunges (each leg)
• Hyperextensions

What to Eat While the Family Sleeps

Next, let’s take a look at your new morning nutrition plan. The goal here is to keep things light and purposeful. You don’t want a huge breakfast that will leave you bogged down with a lump of food in your stomach. But you still want to make sure that you eat a pre- and post-training meal, so that you have some fuel in your body before you start, and the repair process can begin as soon as you’re done.

Keep all foods before your workout lean and easy to digest. If you can’t eat pre-training, that’s okay; an empty stomach won’t destroy your progress. But do get some water in you, since you’ll be dehydrated from not drinking for eight or more hours.

Morning Meal Suggestions:

Pre-Workout (upon rising)

• 1 scoop quality whey protein
• Small piece of fruit

Post-Workout (immediately after training)

• 1 scoop of whey protein
• 8-12 ounces of sports drink

Breakfast

• ½ to 1 cup of oats mixed with 1 tbsp natural peanut butter, cinnamon, and water
• 3 whole eggs scrambled
• 1 cup Greek yogurt

Think your program needs to be fancy to work? Think again:

Don’t Bog Down Your Training With Complicated Programming

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