By: Michael Beiter

“Yea, everyone is too busy. We are all overbooked.”

My doctor said that to me last time I was in his office for a physical. He was talking about taking a break from his 5 am workouts because he was banged up with injuries and needed to focus on his nutrition. I told him to call me.

Over the years I’ve shifted my workout perspective from the mainstream ‘get it in at all costs’ mentality to the much more evidence backed ‘sleep first, everything else later’ stance.

I think a lot of people miss the fact that workouts are purposeful bouts of stress we apply to our body in an effort to reap the adaptive rewards.

Combine that with hustle culture and everyone being over booked and you get a lot of people convinced that the only time they can workout is before dawn.

When I started studying sleep more closely I learned that our most beneficial hours of slumber are the last hours of our nightly sleep. This is when the best recovery activity takes place in our brains and bodies.

Too many people are cutting off those last couple hours thinking it would be better to wake up and stress the body out with a workout. This is precisely the opposite of what is best for us.

Yes, I am telling you to sleep in and skip your 5 am workouts if you can. Sleep and nutrition will take you much further health and fitness wise than any amount of gym time ever will.

Don’t believe me? Read Matthew Walker’s ‘Why We Sleep’ and I think you’ll change your tune. To this day it remains the most impactful book I’ve ever read.

Cutting off your late stage sleep to workout is like stepping over hundred dollar bills to pick up nickels.

We all need more sleep. The average American in 1901 slept 10 hours per day. By 2001 that number plummeted to around 7 hours. Thirty percent of our most beneficial hours in a day cut off by market demands and hustle culture.

We need to take those hours back and if it comes at the cost of skipping workout so be it.

I have dozens of case studies from the Covid Pandemic of people who were allowed to sleep in for the first time in their adult careers and exercise later. Not a single one of them will ever go back to 4 am alarms and starting their day with a workout. I had said that to them for years, but it wasn’t until the experienced the difference sleep made that they were sold on the idea.

If you can exercise later in the day and sleep more, you will be better off. If you absolutely can’t I get it, some people are wired for mornings whereas others for nights. The key is to know yourself and not try to force yourself into a routine you hate, especially when it sacrifices sleep.

This may require some negotiating for a mid day workout, or after work. In the words of one of central Iowa’s largest employers CEO, “I’m busier than everyone at this company and I make time every lunch to exercise in our gym. If I can do it, so can you.”