Robin Sharma recommends two daily workouts: a 20-minute session at 5am and a second one at day's end like yoga or a nature walk. He cites dopamine and BDNF benefits, plus sleep habits like turning off devices at 8pm and cold showers to boost recovery and brain health.
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Right now you're probably an entrepreneur or maybe a business builder, a creative person of some sort, or you're building a family, or you're building an empire of spirituality, or you're working on your health. Whatever it is, you have some mountaintop that you're chasing. And along the way it is a little bit of a war. It could be a war of self doubt, it could be a war against temptation, it could be a war against distraction. Because we all have these competing diversions looking for our attention versus staying monomaniacally focused on the few projects or pursuits that'll get us to where we want to get to. So few of us exploit the power of exercising every day. We know that if we exercise, we know it will allow us to live longer, it will give us more energy, it will boost our willpower. It will release dopamine, the inspirational neurotransmitters, so we feel stronger. It'll release serotonin so we feel more relaxed. We know exercise promotes neurogenesis so you'll have more brain cells. We know it actually accelerates learning and processing. We know it releases bdnf, brain derived neurotrophic factor that John Ratey calls miracle grow for the brain in his wonderful book Spark. So why wouldn't you exercise every single day? And we not many people love getting up at 5 in the morning and exercising for at least 20 minutes. But think about how you feel after those 20 minutes. You feel phenomenal. And it's your neurochemistry at work and your neurobiology at work. And you have this in you. It's the way your brain and body has been constructed. You just gotta force yourself to wire it into a habit. And if you believe me, and there's tons of science that proves it, but if you believe me, that exercise is a total game changer. And I recommend to you, do it first thing in the morning because the rest of your day, in terms of your mindset, heart set, health set and soul set, productivity and performance and happiness is fundamentally different. Why would you only do it once a day? So my encouragement, with great love and respect is do it from 5 to 5, 20, and then at the end of your workday, do a second wind workout. The second wind workout. And so if you believe that exercise increases your energy and your focus and your happiness and your productivity, why would you only do it once a day? So at the end of your workday, you do a second wind workout. It could be a yoga class, it could be walking in nature, as I love to do on most days or going for a mountain bike ride. Because when you exercise in nature, it's amazing what starts to happen. You get the fresh air, you get the sunlight, you get the color of the leaves. You reconnect to your spiritual self, you get to breathe the fresh air. Amazing. I recently heard a piece of cutting edge science, which is when you sleep, it's recently been discovered that a fluid moves through your brain that metaphorically washes your brain. I mean, it's amazing the level of research and science that's coming out right now. The point really is it's so important to have deep rest for your energy, for brain optimization and cognition, which is how you think it's so important, important to rest because we know muscles grow in the rest and recovery and a lot of us are very sleep deprived. So make sure you think about your sleep. Make sure you turn off all your digital devices after 8 o'. Clock. So melatonin is at its best and it's in its proper form. So you sleep deeply, sleep in a cool room if you can, take a nice hot bath before you sleep with Epsom salts and then take a cold shower. So then you're actually going to get more melatonin. Again, no, technology in your room is very, very important.
And yeah, get your sleep into world class conditions.
