Writes someone named L — from the Arabian Gulf — commenting on the NYT article "How to Become a Morning Exercise Person/Yes, it can be done."
January 21, 2023
"Just once I'd love to see 'How to become a night owl' or 'How to workout at midnight' - the incessant focus on getting up earlier and earlier..."
"... and forcing yourself into a morning routine is exhausting!
I'll continue to treasure my quiet
late night workouts when I naturally have the most energy."
Writes someone named L — from the Arabian Gulf — commenting on the NYT article "How to Become a Morning Exercise Person/Yes, it can be done."
Writes someone named L — from the Arabian Gulf — commenting on the NYT article "How to Become a Morning Exercise Person/Yes, it can be done."
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22 comments:
Nocturnal shaming? Elois and Morlocks.
I used to be a night owl, but I learned it was easier to actually work out by getting up and doing it before work. It is far too easy to come up with excuses not to work out over the course of a day. Years of getting up early for workouts has effectively turned me into a morning person. These days I envy people who can sleep past 6am.
I have done both. When still working for a living, I found the morning workout, weight training, the best way to do it, but I was also an avid runner, and I did the running after work on site since we had a large isolated campus perfect for running. To workout in the morning, since I had a half hour commute most of my time there, required getting up at 5 a.m. which was difficult, even after I got used to it. Working out in the morning, or after 8 p.m. is the best if you don't like having to share space with lots of people at the gym, but only if you are working a dayshift. I do it now between 2 and 4 p.m. It starts to get crowded just as I am finishing.
I don’t work out in the morning because I don’t like staying up that late.
3rd brother proudly showed off his private parking space when I went to work for the same company. Only VPs we’re supposed to have such, be he effectively had one by being there first every morning, before thousands of others at the plant. He had a couple hours before everyone else showed up, and made use of it - by, for example having more patents and published papers, than anyone else in Austin.
I have never been a morning person, at least since I entered HS. HS was hard, as was freshman year in college because of having to start so early. But starting sophomore year, I could pick my classes, and tried to keep them from starting before lunch. Worked for me. It was really when I went into my 30s that I got enough control that I could mostly eliminate being at work before maybe 10 am. For me, my most productive time was after everyone else went home - starting at maybe 6-7 pm. Every evening, I would have maybe 3-4 really productive hours of work.
Looking back, it was somewhat funny - my brother was #1 in patents filed by our company in Austin, by coming in early, while I was #1 in the number of patents written there, by working late. Luckily, for appearances, we worked in different areas - he in semiconductor process, and I in microprocessor systems and software - at opposite ends conceptually for what we produced. He designed single transistors, while I dealt with many millions of them on an IC.
I can't get into a rhythm of working out regularly in the mornings. I much prefer working out at 10pm or later, and can keep doing that consistently. Part of the reason I got out of the military: 6am runs were miserable.
I’m a natural night owl, and to this day when the pressure’s really on, I’m at my most productive after everyone around me has turned in. I used to resent the tyranny of the morning people, and some of them can still be irritatingly self-satisfied.
But I understand why getting up and getting to work early is held up as a good thing, something more people should do if they can. Because I’m also a procrastinator, and I know what it costs me; and I recognize that if I get up an hour later and turn in an hour later every day, that’s not just my differential rhythm. It’s me putting things off, whether it’s turning in, getting up, or doing everything I need to during my waking day. It’s not something I’m proud of, or should be.
I switched to morning workouts in 2000 because it's too hot in summer otherwise. Now if I haven't done it by 9am it's probably not going to happen
Not sure I could ever switch back.
Hasn't "L" heard?
"Burning the midnight oil" is a no-no now.
Oil prices. Climate change.
I guess they don't worry about that in the Gulf.
Maybe if "L" read these articles at night they wouldn't be so exhausted.
I started rotating through exercises all day. I set a timer and go do a super set of 3 or 4 full body exercises every 20 minutes or so.
Neither my wife nor I are morning people if that means getting up early by choice.
Despite that, if I have something to do that I don't want to do, I prefer to do it soon after getting up. She will be up for hours sometimes before starting her yoga and/or workout, and I'll have already done important things like had breakfast, showered, reported my health status to Big Bro, gone for my first walk, and commented here.
I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (not) at work at 8am or earlier for decades; now I may well not even be up by then.
Lately, the one who sleeps latest is the old dackel, whose bladder control is enviable.
I'm a biphasic sleeper (by natural rhythm). I wonder if a night owl might find a sleep-wake-sleep schedule pleasant. A little bit of dark quiet, a little bit of early bird.
Just yesterday I learned the beauty of doing a dawn patrol backcountry ski tour. As for typical workouts, I like working out around 5 PM. I never seem to be able to go as hard early in the morning. Maybe that's a good thing? There's probably some research on that.
My experience is he’s correct. We should celebrate our hard working night owls not force them to transition to “morning people.” I’m physically unable to sleep past 5 now I look back rather fondly on my night owl days. Er nights.
In High School the coaches always scheduled 6:00 AM conditioning workouts. That left time to shower, breakfast and dress for class 2.5 hours later. You get used to anything in 20 days or so. I guess we went to bed earlier around 10:30. And strangely we were so tired we fell asleep easily…unless the game/match was tomorrow and we had to plan our every move.
I am by nature a night owl.I prefer to stay up watching internet posts/videos until i pass out from exhaustion around 5AM. this doesn't change the fact that when i get up before 7AM that i get thrice as much done and can rest on my laurels for a WEEK knowing this...
If you're working in a global economy - and your contract hires are halfway around the world - one pretty much has to be a night owl.
Which is kinda why I started my current business. I Love The Night.
About ten years ago I started waking up at 2AM. Wide awake couldn’t sleep. I’d get up, have a few cups of coffee, surf the internet for a few hours, then maybe fall asleep again for an hour or two. Then I read an article about biphasic sleep which was the norm prior to the industrial revolution. So now I understand first sleep and second sleep, like our ancestors did. And I notice our blog host often posts in the middle of the night.
@kate- another biphasic! Excellent, I was chronically tired until I discovered my biphasic nature.
Reading prior comments I see adaptation to one’s natural rhythm is a common way to be more productive at work. I concur. For years I drove to an office in Orange near Disneyland. It started as a way to avoid bad traffic both ways but I soon got used to calling the factory in Sweden because my first two hours overlapped with their last two hours. Some problems got resolved quicker because we avoided the one-day lag of the usual communication. Then our east coast customers realized they could get ahold of us when they first get to work and our service issues got resolved before our west coast competitors even left for the office. Now I work from home and can get half a day’s work done before my colleagues in Kenosha get to work.
I am Mr. Unstructured and that includes sleep. My mom used to call me an "early bird" when I was a kid. (I'd wake up early to watch cartoons!) My brother was the night owl. But for a decade or two, from my teens to my late twenties, I would stay up late to party and sleep late.
There was no "exercise" as my metabolism was super-high and I burned off everything I ate. My party years came to an end as my hangovers got worse and worse. One time in my late 20s I had a hangover that lasted most of a day, with me lying on the sofa going, "I want to die, I want to die, I want to die." After that one I never got drunk again.
But I still saw no need to exercise. It wasn't until middle-age that the concept of "self-improvement" ever occurred to me.
First it happened in Bible study, with Jesus dropping all these mustard seeds in my brain. The twin messages you take out of Bible study are self-awareness, which is like an awareness of Satan ("here are all the sins I've ever done") and an awareness of God and his love ("you are forgiven, washed clean, and a new child of God").
Almost all the men in my Bible studies were also in a work-out group called F3. (Started in my church, now it's spread to multiple cities and a couple of continents). I used to joke and call one day "Self-Improvement Tuesday" because I would go to a work-out at 5:30 a.m., shower at 6:30, and get to work a little after 7:00 a.m.
(I would often get really sleepy at work on Self-Improvement Tuesday, particularly after lunch, and sometimes I would call it a day and drive home for a massive nap).
The idea of imposing structure on your sleep, and going to bed at a regular hour, and getting up at a regular hour (with an alarm clock), that's never been a thing with me. When I get sleepy, I sleep. When I'm not sleepy, I work or play.
Now I work at home, so my sleep patterns are completely wacky. I routinely take two or three hour naps. When I was a kid I could read a book in one sitting. Now I cannot read a book without falling asleep. Falling asleep in a chair happens to me two or three times a week.
I'm still making my early-morning workouts, though. (We do it outside, in all kinds of weather, which would be super-insane in Madison but works okay in Charlotte). Now, though, since I make my own hours, I often crawl into bed after the workout.
Right now I'm wide awake after four hours of sleep. So I got online to do some work. But of course I go here first for fun. You know that Id thing that Dr. Freud talked about? I still got it!
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