How to wake up early for your training!
Waking up early, especially for training, can be quite difficult. It’s something many people have struggled with, including myself. But if you’ve ever listened to a self-help guru, or even one of your favourite athletes talking about their daily routine, it almost always starts with them explaining how they wake up early in the morning.
According to MuscleProdigy, Mike Tyson used to wake up at 5 AM and started out with a 3 mile run. If you’ve heard this before, you probably wanted to try the same thing – but have been struggling enough to the point where you came here for help!
So – now to the advice. First, we need to clarify one important thing. While I will help by giving you some useful strategies, waking up early is almost always going to be difficult and require some real effort on your part. I’ve been waking up at 5:00am to start my training for quite a while now, but there’s still some mornings where it takes a little extra effort on my part to get out of bed. With this out of the way, let’s start with some strategies – common and unconventional.
Have consistent alarms
This is very common advice, for good reason. Whether you like it or not, the more consistent you are with your alarms the easier it will be to wake up in the mornings. This includes weekends too!
Wake up with a bottle of water next to your bed
When your alarm goes off in the morning, immediately start drinking water! Lots of it. It’s simple, but it was one of the biggest things that actually helped me wake up. I found that once I consciously chugged down a ton of water, I was very awake and ready to start the day
Have your clothes ready
Have your clothes gathered and ready to go. I found that if I had my shorts ready for my morning run already out, it became much easier to get quickly changed. This pairs well with the next tip.
Stand up sooner rather than later
Don’t continue lying down, staying in the comfort of your bed for whatever reason. The longer you spend in the bed, the more likely you are to fall back asleep and not get out. Find a reason to stand up, because it makes it so much easier. Remember, as the great Isaac Newton said “An object will remain at rest or in a uniform state of motion unless that state is changed by an external force”….. That might be a little bit of a stretch?
Have plans – wake up with purpose!
Having plans can prevent you from falling back asleep, as you actually need to get up early to get them done. If you’re only waking up for the sake of getting up early, then you will place a lot less importance in it! Make a daily schedule!
Check out Alarmy, or other mission based alarms
There are some evil, evil alarm apps in your phone store that can make you get up early. There are likely many just like Alarmy, but it’s the only one I have experience using. Essentially the premise is that you need to finish a ‘mission’ to shut off your blaring alarm. It could be math equations, it could be scanning a QR code or making you walk 20 steps. None of them are fun to do first thing in the morning, but they all wake you up.
Anyways, I hope you can take some of these tips and use them in your life. If you have any more, please feel free to comment them!