'Fountain Of Youth' Morning Energy Routine (Ben Greenfield Fitness Morning Stretch Routine)

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. So I am often asked what my.

Gold standard morning energy routine actually looks like. Over the years I have paid attention to everything from Tai Chi to Qigong to breathwork to the so called five Tibetan longevity rights to create a mashup of different stretches and breathwork practices that.

Essentially kind of weave in and mash.

Together many of these protocols to develop what I am about to show you. This is the type of thing that I would wake up and do in the morning and something that I'll sometimes do in the mid afternoon when I need a little bit of an energy pick me up. And one of the beauties of it is that there's no equipment required, right? No foam rollers, no mobility balls, no vibration platforms, no inversion tables. It's just you and your body. And that's kind of why I dig the beauty and simplicity of this routine. What I'm going to do over the next 15 minutes or so is show you, demonstrate to you each exercise, and then you'll be able to, as I have done, slowly memorize each of these exercises. It won't take you long. I would say once you've done this routine five or six times, you'll have most of it committed to memory wherever it is that you happen to be seeing this video. I will also have a list of the exercises for you to reference, whether you keep them on your phone or on a piece of paper to enhance your morning routine should you forget any of them.

And a couple of things before I dive in so that this video does not become too long in the tooth. I won't necessarily do the exact number of repetitions that I will specify for each exercise, but I will demonstrate to you how each exercise is performed. And then the other thing is, of course, because I'll be talking to you, I won't be playing any uplifting music or engaging in any extremely deep breath work. But these are the type of things that you would do as part of this routine. Good music, good breath work. And. And so, as the nature of this video dictates, I won't necessarily be doing much of that because I want to talk to you, but understand that you'll want to have good breath control, deep nasal breathing, good body awareness, and preferably something other than Def Leppard that you're playing through your earbuds or through your sound or your audio as you do this, something quiet and uplifting for music always enhances this routine quite a bit. Or silence if you're out with the birds or outdoors in nature. So, that being said, let's go ahead and begin.

So this routine starts.

Let's say you've gotten out of bed in the morning, you've wandered in your living room, your backyard, your basement, wherever. We're going to start with the five Tibetan Longevity Rites. This is a system of exercises reported to be like 2,500 years old. It was first publicized by a fellow named Peter Kelder K E L D r in a 1939 publication called the Eye of Revelation. They're kind of a form of Tibetan yoga that wake up, so to speak, the energy flow through your body. And you can kind of even think of them as energy, air, water, earth and fire, when each of the five exercises actually stimulate. For more information on this one, there's a really good website@t5t.com that will elucidate the five Tibetan rites for many of the other stretches I'm about to show you. And my apologies for the long introduction. I'm going to get to it shortly. There's also a book by Brian Scott called the Reality Revolution, which not only shows you some of these five Tibetan exercises, but a host of other exercises, including some of those that I'll show you that follow the five Tibetan rites that are also quite helpful. So those two resources, t5t.com and then the book the Reality Revolution, those will help you out quite a bit if you want to do more digging into the history and the reasoning behind these routines.

So you begin with one called the Whirling Dervish.

For the Whirling Dervish, you simply place your hands out at an angle and.

Keeping your eyes fixed, preferably on a.

Fixed spot on the horizon. As you come around in a full circle, begin to turn like so.

Now what you're going to do is 21 total rotations to your left. Every time you come around.

You'Ll want.

To keep your gaze on the horizon. It's normal to get a little dizzy as you do this. That's fine. Again, it's a great way to wake up your balancing muscles and balancing organs when you first rise in the morning. And of course, once you've done a.

Set number of rotations to your left side, you'll then go to the right side.

Now, for the five Tibetan rights. The ideal number of repetitions for each is 21. If you're short on time, you can get away with as little as 10. But I suggest that you go for.

21 repetitions for each of these five rides.

Notice how I'm moving? Very slowly, very deliberately, and in a Very relaxed and smooth manner.

And in a normal situation, if I weren't speaking with you again, I'd be trying to breathe through my nose. And as I do 21 reps of the whirling dervish to the left, then to the right. The second exercise is basically a leg raise.

And for this exercise, you lay down on the ground like so, and hopefully you can see me. There we go. And what you're going to do is come up as you raise both the feet and the head and exhale. So again, I go from a lying position. I lift the head first, come up, look at my feet and come back down again. Head comes up first, curls, feet come up. And this isn't necessarily meant to be performed like you're cranking out sit ups as much as it's meant to be a slow, smooth, deliberate again, nose breathing type of movement.

Okay, so 21 repetitions.

For your leg raises. I'm going to do just a couple more so you can see what it looks like.

Okay, so you have your whirling dervish and your leg raises. And the third Tibetan right that you're.

Going to do is the kneeling back bend.

Be careful with your range of motion on this one. If you experience low back pain or discompression, there's two ways to do it. Place your hands on your butt and basically slowly lean back as you look back behind you, going to the point of full flexibility and coming forward with your toes basically kind of curled underneath you. You might be able to see my toes here, how they're curled underneath me just like this. I lean back and come forward. And the other kind of modified version of this, if you're more flexible, is to place the hands on the hamstrings and literally slide them down the hamstrings all the way to the back of the knee as you lean back. Now for added vagal nerve activation. As you lean back, you can look to the left and to the right and then come back to center. Basically, this is your kneeling back bend exercise as the third exercise in the.

Tibetan longevity exercise routine. Again, ideally 21 reps. You can get away with as few as 10.

The fourth exercise is the tabletop exercise. Okay, tabletop, pretty straightforward. Many of you have done yoga, may have already seen or are familiar with these exercises. For the tabletop, I'm going to sit with my legs at a 90 degree angle and then with fists or outstretched palms on the ground, I'm going to elevate my body until I'm up at 90 degrees, exhaling as I Elevate, squeezing the butt cheeks together, brief hold at the top. And then I return back to my starting position right there. Back in between the hands, and then push through the heels, push up, up, up through full range of motion.

And then back down.

And if I want to do this.

With my fists instead of my palms and wrist pain or anything like that.

I can also do this with my.

Fists down instead of my palms down.

So this is your tabletop exercise.

Okay, so that's number four of the five Tibetan rites. And then your final exercise for the.

Five Tibetans is one that you're for sure familiar with if you've done yoga. And this is just basically your upward downward dog.

Okay, so for the upward downward dog.

I'm adopting my downward dog position. Heels down, feet slightly narrower than shoulder width apart. Okay? And from this position, inhale forward, exhale, lower elbows brush the ribcage.

Exhale, come up as the shoulders draw away from the earlobes. And again you can look over your left shoulder and look over your right shoulder. If you'd like to do a little bit more vagal nerve activation for left and right movement of the eyeballs. And then back up into my down dog position.

You can walk the dog a little bit in this position and with the heels. But again, inhale forward, exhale lower, Inhale, come up as you draw the shoulders away from the earlobes, then back into down dog position.

Okay, so there's your five Tibetan rides. If you were to do those five alone, that's a pretty solid morning routine.

Especially if you're doing 21 repetitions of each. But no, no, no, we won't stop there.

Okay, so the next one is borrowed from Tai Chi.

You'll see this a little bit in qigong as well. You may have seen people in the.

Park doing this exercise. It's called the Door of Life, and it's going to do a great job waking up all your organs, getting the blood flowing. And all you're going to do is rotate to the left and to the right. But as you're rotating to the left and the right, you're kind of slapping your body and moving up and down your body. So notice that I started by rotating and slapping kind of down around the lower back, underneath the kidneys, and then kind of up around the mid rib cage slightly on or above the kidneys, and then up into the heart and liver and lung area right here, up around the upper ribs and then back down, following the path of the arms with my head and breathing or exhaling preferably as I rotate side to side, speeding up as I go for those 21 reps. So.

Through the nose or through the mouth as you exhale.

I'm going to exhale through the mouth.

So you can see what this is like.

My knees are soft.

And again, I like to speed up as I go through this one. And I like this exercise so much. But I'll often do more than 21 reps.

Sometimes I'll do that one for two or three minutes. It just feels so good. Okay, so that's your door of life that you're going to do after your five Tibetan rides.

Next, you want to activate the left and right hemispheres of your brain.

And this is another one that's a.

Key part of the routine. There's two different options for this next exercise. Option A is standing drawing. Left knee to right elbow, right knee to left elbow, 21 taps per side.

It's a very, very simple way to.

Coordinate the body, especially for an early morning wake up.

The second version of this exercise, as an alternate or as something you can do in addition to the exercise I've just shown you, is to get into a crawling position on the ground, like so. And I like to bring my wrists underneath my body so that I can get a little bit of a wrist.

Stretch as I do this.

And then you simply reach. Right arm, left leg.

Left arm, right leg, right and left.

Left and right.

Right and left, left and right. If you want even added challenge, you can reach and then connect your right elbow to your left knee, and then you can reach and connect your left elbow to your right knee. Kind of a few different ways to do that, but either exercise you can.

Choose or you can do both of them. And that's to get a little bit of left and right brain hemispheric activity going.

The next part of this exercise is again, borrowed from mostly Eastern medicine. And it's just loose fists on the back.

As soon as you finish that left and right hemisphere for about 30 seconds or so, all you're going to do is massage all your low back muscles and your hip muscles with closed fists. Okay? All up and down this area. It's great for digestion. Great. If you have low back tightness, everybody usually wakes up with a little bit of back tightness. This is a great way to free things up. And again, you just massage and dig in there for about 30 to 60 seconds. And again, if I had a foam roller, if I had a mobility ball, I could use it. But this particular routine is designed for.

Just you and your Body.

Ok, so loose fist massage on back. And then very similar. You're going to go up and down your legs, tapping to get blood flow going like so up and down the legs.

I like to go about three to five times up and down the legs, which again is going to be about 30 seconds or so by the time you finish. Okay. And then after you do, the legs move up to the chest. And you can either do it with open hands or you can do it with closed hands like a gorilla King Kong.

Oh.

But either way, we're getting the blood flowing all throughout the body as we slap, slap, slap all the front side. After we've slapped up and down the.

Legs, I like to do about 30.

Seconds to going up and down the legs.

Again, about 30 seconds of tapping the chest.

Okay, now the next exercise is called the tiger bend. Okay, for the tiger bend, we're going to go down towards the earth.

And.

Then reach for the sky. And again, ideal number of reps. You know by now not to sound like a broken record, 21. You can get away with as few as 10 if you would like. Show you from the side what I'm doing here, Just a slight kind of like a half squat, half bend as I reach for the floor and then reach for the sky with my.

Bending and lifting. Again, smooth, calculated, deep nasal breathing. Okay, Very kind of like Tai Chi or qigong esque.

Moving with slowness and precision and calm.

The next exercise, very similar philosophy. Slowness, precision and calm. We're going to go side to side with what are called Zen swings.

Okay, so what I'm going to do for Zen swings is I'm going to swing to this side and swing to this side.

Similar to the side to side twisting exercise. Exhaling as I move side to side, following the path of my hands with my head. I'll show you from the side what this looks like.

This also wakes up the left and right hemispheres of the brain just a little bit. Shifting my weight lightly side to side, preferably 21 repetitions per side as I do that exercise. Okay, we're almost there, almost done. Okay, next we're going to wake up the stomach. Basically the stomach meridian, the thymus and kidneys, and then finally the spleen. And this is just 30 seconds of tapping, starting with the cheeks, just going to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. I know it sounds silly, but these are some of the organs that really.

Need to be woken in the morning.

So this is the stomach meridian, you know, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. That similar to the Chest taps, the leg taps, going about 30 seconds or so. Or you could do 21 taps if you want to do more of counting. And cross my hands, I'm going to ride on the collarbone, kind of like moving across as I tap right from the center of the collarbone, slightly outside the collarbone and back. This is for more thymus and kidneys.

This is the tapping area for the thymus and kidneys.

So I'm tap, tap, tapping that to wake it up.

And then I'm going to finish with.

My spleen meridian, which is right here underneath the very front of the rib cage.

Okay. Right to either side of your breastbone, where it ends at that xiphoid process. And kind of either side of that.

Top of the rib cage.

Tap, tap, tapping that spleen meridian. Okay, so again, about 30 seconds or so on each of those taps. Or you can do about 21 taps in each section. Here, here, here.

Okay. And then finally, you're going to finish with 21. 10 to 21 deep breaths as you shake.

So it goes like this again to.

Shake the whole body. Okay, deep breath in.

Now, I like to combine this with oming to vibrate the entire body. So when I say oming, what I mean is this.

Almost like you're jumping up and down on a mini trampoline.

I like to do about 10 to 21 breaths. If you do 21 breaths of that, it just wakes up everything. It feels amazing. Okay, so those are the exercises, the five Tibetan longevity rights. Then we do the side to side twisting, the knee to elbow, standing or crawling or both. The loose fists massaging on the back, slapping up and down the legs, the chest thumps, the tiger bend, the zen swings, the thumps for the cheek, collarbone, and spleen. And finishing with the Tai chi shaking. That morning routine is amazing. It opens up all your energy portals, get your chi or your qi flowing.

Through all your meridians.

I know it sounds woo to those of you who maybe like to wake up in the morning and say, do some wall ball thrusters and ride the air dyne or, you know, do a hard workout or whatever, but, man, if you start your day with this in a really deep, meditative type of mode with some good music on, you feel absolutely amazing. So I hope that the morning routine that I've kind of mashed together with many of these resources I've Learned from, like, t5t.com the reality revolution, and some other resources I have is one that you can put in your back pocket and have to really, really energize yourself in a positive way each morning.

So I'm Ben Greenfield.

You can get more tips@BenGreenfieldFitness.com or any of my books, which you can also find on my website. Thanks for watching.