Nighttime You has big plans. Nighttime You swears you’ll exercise first thing the next morning. Nighttime You researches the AM gym schedule, sets the alarm, and congratulates yourself on being smart enough to get the fitness part of your day over with early, so you have the rest of the day to yourself.
Then Morning You comes along and ruins everything. Morning You hits the snooze button, goes back to bed, and leaves you scrambling to find time to exercise sometime later in the day.
Fitness instructor Barbara Vinciguerra teaches classes that start by 6 am four times a week—and they’re packed. It helps that she’s inspired a following so devoted, her students will follow her into the early-morning hours just to workout with her. But, besides that, here are some of Vinciguerra’s tips for getting up out of bed to exercise.
Make It a Group Thing
“Schedule your early morning workouts with a friend or friends for motivation, accountability, and camaraderie,” she says.
Be Prepared
“Pack your bag or lay out your clothes the night before,” she says. “It saves you time, and the action of laying out your clothes or packing your bag mentally commits you.”
Find Something You Love
“Find an activity that you really enjoy doing that you looking forward to going to in the morning versus something you dread doing,” she says. “Liking what you do and doing what you like go a long way towards helping you get up and out of bed early in the morning to exercise.”
Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
“Sign up for a program or a class that makes you make a commitment to going.”
Suck It Up
“As Nike says: Just Do It,” she says. “You will thank yourself and feel better about it once you’re done. We all know once we are up, out of bed, and have gotten the workout in how much better we feel about ourselves.”
Need to see this early-morning motivation in action? Vinciguerra teaches spinning at Club Fit in Briarcliff and Spincredible in Ardsley. She also teaches a F.I.T. Circuit class at Fit House in Ardsley. For that, “you get your strength and cardio training in one class,” she says. “The class combines dynamic warmup, resistance training, cardio intervals, core work, and mobility training using TRX Suspension Trainers, kettlebells, battle ropes, Rip Trainers, ViPRs, Slastix bands, BOSU, and much more. A Performance IQ Smart Studio Heart Rate Monitoring System is used to give clients feedback and monitor and display heart rate, heart rate training zones, and caloric expenditure in every class!” Now that’s something to get you going in the morning.
