Trying to form a morning exercise routine can be really tough. I worked until midnight last night and so when my alarm went off at 5.45am this morning, as you can imagine, I didn’t really feel like doing a workout.

What I have decided to do is to exercise anyway, no matter how long for. I’m trying to make the habit of exercise more important than what I actually do initially.

This morning I didn’t have much time as I needed to be at work early, so I went to the gym and did 10 mins on the treadmill and 7 mins on the bike.

My strategy is to make those minutes I do exercise, count. And boy did theses ones count this morning!! If I’m only going to run for 10 minutes, I don’t want to do a gentle jog, I really want to push myself and get my heart rate up. I usually jog at 8 km an hour, so this morning I pushed up to 10.5km an hour, then for the last 60 seconds, 12.5km per hour.

The impact this had is:

– I feel great that I exercised, even though it didn’t take much time

– I feel much more awake and alert than if I go to work with no exercise

– I’m starting to learn to push myself. Only for short periods of time, but I will gradually extend that to longer periods

– I feel like I am on my way to forming my morning exercise habit

If you are trying to form a habit, no matter what it is, it might be useful to take this approach. Try to accomplish it every day, but don’t make the goal too big. You should be able to find 10 minutes every day to exercise and this should help you form the habit and you can build it up from there! Let me know how you get on in the comments below.