It sounds like a good idea, but …

Well, should we? Why not? You want to get in great shape, so why not train every day! You take care of other things every day, the likes of personal hygiene, etc, so why not training? It’s all part of keeping in shape and looking (and feeling) good, so why not? And at this time of year, when so many like to undertake new training routines, you might be asking yourself this very question.

Why it might not be such a good idea …
If you train every day I suppose there’s the possibility you might incur more injuries, so that’s something you might want to take into account. After all, you’d be putting your body under more stress, or at least more often. And you need rest just as much as exercise, so maybe training every day might be too much. Also, you could find it boring after a while, yes, even if you really enjoy training! Training too often, without a break, could take the shine off it.

Find the middle ground

Maybe the answer lies somewhere in the middle ground, something that offers the best of both worlds. Some training every day, which is naturally a good thing, but nothing too strenuous. If you could find that happy medium that could be the answer.

I mean, you clearly don’t need to train like Mike Tyson used to train! He had a rock-solid work ethic when it came to training, and the work he would put in in a single day would exhaust most people, even professional boxers, and even if they tried to do the same thing over the space of a week! He would combine road work with weight training, sparring, calisthenics, bag work … an almost endless round of training. But of course he’d also eat lots of healthy food and get plenty of rest.

Take a look at this old video of Tyson training

Amazing to watch him training. Ferocious attitude … blinding speed … laser-like commitment … incredible self-belief … okay, that wasn’t much more than an excuse to share with you a short video of Tyson, one of the most amazing and inspirational fighters of all time. But like I say, we’re not aiming to be in the same league as Tyson, but we can certainly take inspiration from watching him. It’s always inspirational to watch a master at work.

Train like an animal!

And we can take a lesson from other animals, who seem to stay in pretty good shape, and without having any formal training routine. They don’t go near a gym, or work out for hours at a time, yet they manage to stay in the kind of shape that makes is possible to hunt successfully, or to run like the wind, if they suddenly find themselves the hunted, not the hunter.

So how do they do it? Well, they don’t use any gym equipment, that’s for sure. But they do treat the world around them as a gym – they run, they climb, they play fight (as youngsters, at least), they stretch, they rest (they rest a lot!), and they take care of their business, whether it’s hunting or foraging, without complaint and in the most efficient way they can manage.

Basically, they do what’s necessary to keep in shape, and they don’t go overboard. They do just enough.

It’s worth taking a look at cats

Cats, of all shapes and sizes, are definitely worth more than a quick glance. Even our friends, domestic cats, generally keep themselves in good shape year round. They sleep long hours (and go to sleep in a matter of seconds, which many of us would struggle to do), and they don’t seem to do much of anything else really. Yet somehow they do enough. Enough to stay trim and lithe, and amazingly quick, when they need to defend themselves.

When a cat wakes up it stretches. If you watch it you’ll see it goes through a sort of routine all its own. It will stretch, it will arch its back, it will probably bare its teeth and do a few moves of cat yoga, stretching every muscle in its face and neck, and following that it might just stroll around for a while in that magisterial way that cats have. Tempt it with a flickering little cat toy and it will probably treat it as though it were a real mouse, or bird, or whatever it’s supposed to be, even though even the dopiest cat is never tricked for a moment into believing it’s the real thing.

The cat knows instinctively that it needs to keep in shape and it goes about getting the exercise it needs in the most enjoyable or playful manner it can. But here’s the thing: it does it all quite naturally, and it doesn’t make a big deal of it. It doesn’t have a set time to do it, it’s just obeying its body’s urges. And it doesn’t use any special equipment. It uses what’s around it, and its own bodyweight as resistance.

There’s a lesson in there for us all. Maybe we should make sure we have the necessary equipment ready at a moment’s notice, already in place. And by equipment, I don’t mean those gadgets you see on the endless informercials that fill the airwaves at three in the morning, I just mean stuff that’s lying round the house. It could be a couple of dumbbells, if you have any, or for that matter anything that could be pressed into service as weights, and maybe a pull-up bar (or a secure doorframe), or even the branch of a tree in the garden. If there’s somewhere you can hook your feet under securely, that would make it easy to bang out a few sit-ups anytime you get the urge. And if you have an ab-wheel or any kind of makeshift roller, that’s your ab work taken care of, in a matter of a minute or two. You really don’t need much equipment of any kind to start making a difference.

So, should we train every day? Or not?

I think maybe the answer is to have a daily routine, but make it something that we can live with, i.e. not too harsh that we sometimes end up skipping it. And if it’s done in the morning maybe that’s another reason not to go at it too hard – we need to give the body a little while to warm up and ease itself into top gear before we put it under too much strain.

So, how about this – a gentle morning routine that’s designed to waken the body without any undue stress, and an optional exercise period for later in the day, when we’re fully awake and able to handle it (if this is a training day for you). Okay, maybe I’m coming at it this way because I’m not a young kid anymore (although I never admit to myself that I’m older than 23, an age I’ve been more than happy to stick at for quite some time now).

Let’s settle for this …

Okay, here’s a proposal: and the idea is that this is do-able, and stick-to-able (and if you start a routine that doesn’t meet those two criteria, it might not last long). Design a morning routine for yourself, one that you can do every single day, and go ahead and do that, and keep it separate from your other training.

In other words, if you decide to train three days a week, keep to that, but also keep up with your morning routine. But remember, unless you’re totally committed to regular exercise, make sure your morning routine is fairly undemanding.

The morning routine

The exercise routine for when you first wake up is something for you to decide on. It’s a personal thing. It wouldn’t be much use me stating what you should do, since we all have different abilities and different time constraints. If you’re 19 you’ll probably want to do something pretty vigorous, while if you’re 49 or 59 you’ll probably want to settle for something a little more sedate.

Personally, I try to include some gentle stretching first, since my flexibility is definitely not what it used to be. So before I do almost anything else, I stretch. I’m not going to go head-to-head with the cat, I’d lose out every time if I did, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon hope of increasing my flexibility either.

Then I like to do some deep breathing squats, but again, this is only once I feel flexible enough to take a good shot at it. I have to ease my legs into it before I even try a set of squats, loosening up my knees and making sure they’re ‘on the same page’ with me. The first batch of 10 or 15 won’t be deep at all (I’m still giving my knees time to warm up and get used to the idea of me being awake), but it’s sometimes surprising how quickly I’m able to do them fairly respectably.

The squat I’m talking about is fairly brisk, and as deep as I can possibly go, and I use my hands and arms to keep my balance and to keep my back straight.

The breathing squat

This is a really excellent exercise, and it can wake you up and make you feel loose and limber in a matter of minutes, but it takes a while to describe it. Here goes, it’s something like this:

Stand with your feet shoulder width apart, or a bit wider, and your feet pointing out at a slight angle. Breathe in deeply and reach out with both opened hands to the front. As you start to sink into the squat, draw your hands in towards your body at chest height, closing your hands into loose fists as you bend your knees and go down, and breathing out. Reach down and slightly back (now with opened hands, palms facing backwards), and sink as low as you can into the squat, hopefully touching the floor with your fingertips at the bottom as you swing your hands forward. Immediately swing the arms up and out to the front again to help you stay straight and to help swing your bodyweight up, to assist in getting up out of the squat.

Don’t bounce heavily at the bottom, that wouldn’t do your knees any good. Control the movement, but don’t be afraid to go as deep as you possibly can. You won’t harm your knees if you keep the movement controlled. And if you can’t get very deep, don’t worry, just do what you can.

The motion of this squat should quickly get you breathing deeply without even thinking about it (you breathe out as you squat, in as you stand up). And once you get to the top of the movement your open hands should be out to the front, and you’re ready to move almost immediately into the next squat (although there’s no rush … after you’ve done 10 or 15 you might need to take a few moments rest at the top, and that’s fine, if it means you can keep going for another 10, or 15, or 20).

One of the most effective exercises of them all

This is such a simple movement, but it adds up to one of the most effective of all exercises. It makes you use most of the biggest muscles in your body, and it gets you deep breathing automatically. It also lends itself to a comfortable, rhythmic movement that you will actually want to keep doing, as far as possible. It might not be easy at first, but if you do it every day for a while you will soon feel yourself finding the rhythm naturally, and you’ll be surprised how good the whole thing feels.

If you’re still young and supple you’ll probably find this exercise quite easy, but it will still be doing you the world of good. If you do find it easy, go for a few high-rep sets, maybe 3 sets of 50-100 reps. You’ll find it will be a great addition to whatever training you’re doing later in the day (if it’s a training day for you). And if you’re not so young, be content to do a couple of fairly low-rep sets, say 2 sets of 10-20. You’ll know you’ve woken your body up after this, and if you stick with it you’ll find you’ll start to regain quite some flexibility pretty quickly.

If you can’t touch the floor with your fingertips at the bottom position when you first try this (which is quite likely), put something either side of you, maybe a book or a cushion or something, or even a few books stacked on top of each other, so that you can at least gauge how deep you’re managing to get. As you get more flexible, you can make these side depth-stops smaller till hopefully you’re able to graze your fingertips against the carpet or floor. At that point you’ll know for sure that you’re increasing your flexibility and you’re doing deep, meaningful squats.

If you do this one exercise, and couple it with some stretching, you’ll be well on your way to a whole new level of fitness. And later in the day you can do your other training routine, if you’ve set one.

Of course you don’t have to choose breathing squats as your morning routine exercise. You could substitute pull-ups, or press-ups, instead, or some other exercise. Or you could alternate, doing different ones on different days. But the point is to have some exercise to do first thing in the morning, and to make it something that’s demanding enough that it puts your muscles under pressure and gets your breathing and pulse rate soaring, yet not so demanding that after a few days you decide to give up on the whole idea.

Oh, and by the way, this kind of exercise isn’t likely to cause you any injuries. In fact, it’s more likely to increase your flexibility and give you lots more freedom of movement in your joints, so you’ve no need to worry on that score.