How to Wake Up Early for a Morning Workout, According to Women Who Do It at 4 A.M.

There’s waking up early to work out… and then there’s waking up to work out at 4 a.m. (If you’re not a morning person, you just died at the thought alone.) Truth: It takes a special type of person to wake up at the crack of dawn for a sweat session. But with the end of the year sneaking up and the holiday season in full swing, your work calendar and social schedule are about to blow up. If you’re a strictly-sweat-at-night kind of girl, now might be the time to embrace the morning workout. It doesn’t have to be before the sun rises, but consider signing up for a 7 a.m. class at your go-to studio, and you might come away with a new favorite instructor. (Not to mention, science says waking up earlier can change your life.)

Not sure how to get started? Below, seven women who get up nearly every day at 4-in-the-freaking-morning share how they find the energy to break sweat while we sleep—without hating their lives or falling asleep at the office.

RELATED: How to Motivate Yourself to Go to the Gym on Cold, Dark Days

“I keep my alarm in my bathroom.”—Macy Vonderschmidt, 22

After graduating from college, I realized I had absolutely zero motivation or energy to lift or run after a full day of work. So I started experimenting with what it would be like to get it out of the way super early. It took me about a month to adjust, but my biggest tip? Put your phone out of reach. I keep my phone in my bathroom, so when the alarm goes off I’m FORCED to wake up and get out of bed to turn it off. (Also try this snooze-proof Red Bull alarm app.) I would say 95 percent of the time that works for me—and the other 5 percent? I cozy back up in bed. Because sometimes it’s just not happening—and that’s okay. I feel amazing coming into work knowing that my workout is already done, I’m caffeinated, and have taken my dog for a nice walk. Then, I can use the rest of the day to focus on everything else in my life.

RELATED: This Gym Makes It Hard to Breathe for a Better Workout—So I Tried It

“It’s when nothing can get in the way of my workout.”—Kayla Coffey, 28

I work out in the morning because nothing gets in your way at 4 or 5 a.m. except yourself. Not family, not partners, not work, not chores. The first couple of weeks I was tired, but I just did it. After a few weeks, I was able to get up earlier and earlier without hesitation. It helped me develop discipline that’s carried over into the rest of my life. My advice: Stick with it for at least two weeks by signing up for early morning classes with a cancellation fee, finding a morning accountability buddy, writing down your goals, packing your bag the night before, and drinking water first thing in the morning. Trust me, there’s no better feeling than being done your workout at 6 a.m. before the world is even out of bed.

RELATED: 5 Reasons Mornings Are the Best Time to Work Out

“I remind myself that it’s the only chance I have for my WOD.”—Ella McDaniels, 24

Five days a week, I’m up for CrossFit by 4 a.m. I work at a hospital, so my hours are really unpredictable. If I don’t get it done right away, there’s a really good chance I’d miss the afternoon or night classes. It was hard getting up that early at first, but I never regretted it and noticed that I felt better throughout my day. So I kept doing it again and again and again. My advice is to give your body time to adjust to getting up and working out so early. It may be hard at first, but stick with it, and you’ll be glad you did. Oh, and go to bed early!

“I count down from three when my alarm goes off.”—Rachel Turner, 24

As a busy mom and business owner, sometimes the only possible way I can get a workout in is if I do it at 4:30 a.m. before my son wakes up. It’s not ideal, and there are some days I definitely hit snooze too many times and miss my chance. (If you can relate, you need to read this: Fit Moms Share How They Really Make Time for Workouts) To help the wake-up process, I use the three, two, one rule; when I hear my alarm I count down from three and get up, no matter what. (And that means no scrolling through my emails!) My biggest piece of advice is to pick a form of exercise you actually like. It’s way easier to get up when you’re not dreading the workout. Whether I’m doing a 10-minute AMRAP, yoga, or a longer workout, movement makes my body feel more grounded, focused, and empowered throughout the day.

“I put a coffeemaker with a timer in my bedroom.”—Stef Bishop, 34

Honestly, when I first started to get up early, it was a nightmare for two full weeks. (Also see the super-relatable struggles of this fitness Instagrammer who tried to become a morning person.) Then I began to settle into a routine and saw the benefits—physically and mentally. The key to my success is preparation. I make sure my clothes were packed the night before and that my food is ready to grab from the refrigerator. I keep water by my bed and drink it as soon as my alarm goes off. That way, if I try to press snooze, I won’t be in bed for long before my bladder gets me out from under the sheets. I even go as far as putting a coffeemaker with a timer in my bedroom. It may seem strange to others, but it gets me up and sweating before the sun rises. With everything planned like that, I can get out of my house within 15 minutes of waking up. (Take a closer look at many fitness trainers’ morning routines, too.)

If you’re just getting started, try planning your workout the night before, enlisting a friend to train with you in the a.m. Place your alarm across your bedroom, and put some tunes on as soon as you wake up to get you moving.

“I get up because if I don’t, I won’t be able to move the rest of the day.”—Sonya Marie Reis, 30

I get up because my body and my health rely on it. I have rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, fibromyalgia, and two other autoimmune diseases. Two years ago, I got so sick that I couldn’t walk on my own most days, and had to use a cane or a walker. It took a while for me to recover and re-learn how to walk again, and some days it’s still hard. I wake up to exercise really early because if I don’t, it’s hard for my body to move fluidly the rest of the day. Getting out of bed when you’re exhausted and it’s freezing outside is tough, but I tell myself “now or never” and repeat it like a mantra. For me, it’s true: If I put it off, I really will never feel my best later. (Here’s a whole list of morning mantras to get you started.)

“I never let myself think about how early it is.”—Christine Cody, 27

Waking up early to work out used to sound like the worst possible idea to me. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would do it—that is until I tried it. It took about five days before I fell in love. So, I started working out at 5 a.m. before work four or five days a week, and I’ll never go back. Now, when I skip a morning workout, I can clearly feel myself dragging. My biggest piece of advice is to don’t think. The more time you give yourself to think about what you’re about to do (get out from under the covers), the more likely you’ll be to keep snoozing and “start tomorrow.”

To get our top stories delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Healthy Living newsletter

This article originally appeared on Shape.com.

Source link

What Exercise Burns the Most Calories?

Your time is precious — and limited. So when it comes to working out, it’s not uncommon to wonder: what exercise burns the most calories?

Exercise scientists have rigorously studied the amount of energy people expend during different types of exercise, and they’ve determined which workouts are best for burning calories. The thing to keep in mind: the more muscles you engage and the harder (and longer) you push those muscles, the more energy your body will churn through, says Dr. Tim Church, an exercise researcher and a professor of preventative medicine at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University. So in order to maximize the number of calories you’ll burn, “you want an exercise that uses both lower and upper body muscle groups and is performed at a high intensity,” Church says.

You might therefore expect something along the lines of CrossFit or Tabata-style interval training to burn the most calories. And you may be right.

A study on one popular CrossFit workout called the “Cindy” — in which a person does a series of pull-ups, push-ups and squats in as many rounds as possible — found that it burned an average of 13 calories per minute. The workout lasts 20 minutes, so exercisers burned an average of 260 calories in total. While perfect apples-to-apples studies aren’t available, some Tabata research has shown that one of these workouts — composed of 4-minute training blocks that mix maximum-intensity bouts of resistance and aerobic training with short periods of rest — burns 14.5 calories per minute, or 280 calories during a 20-minute workout.

These per-minute calorie averages beat out many traditional forms of exercise. “But there’s such a variety within these classes and the people doing them that scores are all over the map,” says John Porcari, author of the Tabata study and a professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. For example, some people in his Tabata study burned up to 360 calories during the 20-minute workout, or 18 calories per minute.

Yet “per-minute” calorie burn isn’t always the best way to assess a workout’s energy demands, Porcari says. The total time spent training and a person’s willingness to stick with a workout are also important factors. “You can crank like the dickens for 30 seconds and burn a lot of calories,” he says. So if you’re extremely short on time, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) is probably your best option. But in the real world, Porcari says, many people won’t be comfortable (or capable of) engaging in regular or extended bouts of high-intensity training.

He says a “more fair” way to assess an exercise’s true energy demands is to ask people to do it at a pace that is comfortable for them. And when it comes to vigorous, calorie-burning exercises that people are comfortable doing for extended periods of time, running usually comes out on top. “When you look at the literature, running tends to burn more calories than other modalities,” he says.

According to an online calorie estimator from the American Council on Exercise, a 115-pound person running for 30 minutes at a slow-to-moderate pace (a 10-minute mile) would burn about 260 calories: the same amount people who did CrossFit typically torched in 20 minutes, according to the research. A 175-pound person would burn nearly 400 calories during that same 30-minute run. Pick up the pace, and you can achieve an even greater rate of calorie burn.

You may be wondering whether more intense forms of exercise lead to a higher rate of calorie expenditure even after training is finished — or a so-called “afterburn effect.” Research from Colorado State University has shown that, yes, intense exercise does keep a person’s metabolism humming longer than mild exercise. But this afterburn effect tends to peter out quickly — within a few hours — and it accounts for a small fraction of the total calories a person expends during and after exercise.

Also, a workout’s length — not just its intensity — helps to keep a person’s metabolism elevated after training, finds a review from the University of New Mexico. So if your goal is to burn the maximum amount of energy, you’ll want to find an exercise that is vigorous and that you can stick with for a long stretch of time.

For a lot of people, that mode is running. For others, it may be fast stationary cycling or Tabata or using an elliptical. The research suggests all are more or less comparable if you’re able to put in the time and keep up the intensity.

The bottom line? The best workout for burning calories is “the one you actually do,” Church says. You can find extreme forms of exercise that maximize per-minute calorie burn. But if you don’t stick with them or do them regularly, they’re not much good to you.

Source link

Missouri 5-Month-Old Survives Heart-Lung Transplant—Making Him Youngest Recipient in 10 Years