Simple morning changes like morning light exposure, consistent weigh-ins, and eating 20-30g protein at breakfast can improve muscle growth and recovery. Skip cold exposure right after workouts if you want to maximize hypertrophy.
What if a few simple tweaks to your morning routine could instantly boost your muscle growth? My mornings used to be a mess. I'd wake up late, scroll my phone, then rush out the door with whatever breakfast I could grab. My energy sucked, my workouts felt weak, and my muscles just didn't seem to recover. But after making six size packed changes to my morning, my gains drastically improved along with my energy and productivity. And the same can happen for you, starting with your wake up time. So when you work out, your muscles sustain small amounts of damage. But at night is when your body flips a switch, entering its most anabolic state to repair and grow new muscle. That's why even a single night of poor sleep has been shown to negatively affect muscle recovery. And why multiple long term studies have found that consistently poor sleep dramatically slows down muscle growth and fat loss. So even without training harder or eating more protein, just improving your sleep can get you better results. And the key to this has to do with your circadian rhythm. Your body runs on a 24 hour schedule called the circadian rhythm. When you stay in sync with daylight, going to bed earlier and waking up closer to sunrise, you help your brain regulate hormones like melatonin for sleep and cortisol for waking up. Now, melatonin is your body's natural sleep hormone. When the sun sets and your environment gets dark, melatonin production accelerates, signaling your body to wind down and prepare itself for deep restorative sleep. The more consistently you produce melatonin at the same time each night, the more effectively you'll cycle into the deep sleep stages that give your muscles the highest rates of recovery. So how do we boost melatonin? Maybe we just pop in a supplement. Actually, the best way to ramp up melatonin is by getting morning sunlight. You probably heard the advice about dimming the lights in your home and reducing screen time at night, which is important. But here's something really cool. Your nightly melatonin production actually begins in the morning. It's why high performers like Ronaldo and LeBron James wake up religiously at sunrise. Even billionaire Richard Branson sleeps with his blinds open to let natural light wake him up. When you expose your eyes to daylight early in the morning, it sends a powerful signal to your brain's internal clock to ramp up your melatonin around bedtime and to continue increasing it throughout the night. Exactly what you need for deep restorative sleep. Once you get this right, it feels like a cheat coke. Even self proclaimed night owls have been shown to benefit from aligning their sleep schedules with their body's natural rhythm. Our body simply wasn't built for late nights, it was built for daylight. But waking up this early isn't easy. Trust me, I failed horribly at first. Hustle culture told me to grind harder and sleep less, but I say just sleep a little faster. So initially I thought I could just wake up at 6am without changing my bedtime. Bad idea. Research consistently shows that for most people, seven plus hours of quality sleep is crucial. Some athletes swear by eight, nine or even 10 hours. But after some trial and error, I found that my sweet spot is eight hours. And this meant if I wanted to wake up with the sun at 6am, I needed to cut out my Netflix binges and wind down in bed by 9:30pm latest. I also set my phone across the room so when my alarm goes off, I have to fill the physically get up to turn it off instead of snoozing it while I'm in bed. Then I head outside or by the window to soak up some morning light. Even if it's cloudy out, the rays will still peek through to your eyes. But if your sun doesn't rise till later, you can still replicate this effect by investing in a light that provides at least 10,000 lux of brightness and filters out as much UV light as possible. And I'll leave a link to one I recommend in the description box down below. But once that's done, the next thing I do is weigh myself. If you know how to actually use it. A daily morning weigh in is one of the best ways to track your muscle building progress. But timing and consistency are key. When you weigh yourself at the same time every morning, right after waking up and after using the bathroom, you eliminate most of the random fluctuations in body weight. For example, my weight easily fluctuates by five to seven pounds throughout the day, depending on what I've eaten, how much water I've had, or even just how much sodium was in my last meal I but in the morning, that is my true baseline, and tracking this gives you immediate feedback. If you're trying to build muscle, you should see your morning weight slowly creep up by about half a pound per week. If it's not, you're probably not eating enough. Whereas if your goal is to lose fat while building muscle, then your weight should stay relatively stable or just drop very slightly every week. And if it's not, you're probably eating too much. But the best part about weighing yourself in the morning is that it's easy to stay consistent. There's this concept called habit stacking. Pairing a new habit with something you already do automatically. So in the morning I wake up, I use the bathroom and then I brush my teeth. All I had to do was pair brushing my teeth with weighing in and logging it into my Built with Science plus app and boom. It's now become automatic. It takes five seconds. But that small habit compounds over time and gives me the momentum to carry out the next part of my morning routine, which which in my case is caffeine. So caffeine is one of the best tools you can use to boost focus, mood and even your workouts, which I'll talk about later. But timing it right is key. Some experts suggest delaying caffeine for 90 to 120 minutes after waking. The idea here is that your cortisol levels naturally peak about 30 to 45 minutes after waking up. So adding caffeine on top of that could overstimulate your body and lead to a mid afternoon crash, which for many people just leads to another shot of caffeine. But here's the thing. Research doesn't actually support this and in my experience I haven't personally noticed a difference. I actually prefer to have my caffeine as early as possible. That's because for most people, caffeine has a half life of about six hours. So if you have an energy drink with 200 milligrams of caffeine at 2pm, by 8pm your body still has 100 milligrams circulating in a system and by midnight you you'd still have around 50 milligrams. That's basically like drinking a cup of green tea while you're trying to fall asleep. So for me personally, shortly after waking at 6am, I'll have an Earl Gray tea which has about 50mg of caffeine, just enough to help me bang out a couple hours of deep work. And then by 9am I'll have a scoop of our Built with Science Pre workout, which contains 180mg of caffeine but also an added ingredient called aline or which helps smooth out the energy boost and prevents the hard crash you usually get from taking that amount of caffeine on its own. After that, I cuddle caffeine completely. For me personally, any caffeine after 12pm, even if it's just a green tea or diet Coke, makes it far more difficult for me to get the quality sleep I need. But while we've spent a lot of time talking about sleep quality and what affects it, we haven't yet talked about how exactly to measure it. Well, one way to measure sleep quality is to do what scientists did and track your nocturnal erections. Yes, this is a real study. Scientists actually strapped devices onto people while they slept to monitor their biological enthusiasm. And according to the data, the guys who got better sleep had better results down there, while the ones with poor sleep, let's just say things just weren't looking so great. Even biohacking YouTuber Brian Johnson. He claims that a healthy male should have three to five erections per night lasting a total of two and a half hours. I had four total erections for a duration of just over three hours. To put this in context, my nighttime erections are the length of the Titanic, the movie, not the boat. And that is better than an average 18 year old. Now, unless you're planning to monitor that somehow more realistic way to track your sleep quality is with a smart ring or band that gives you a sleep score. But honestly, you'll just know based on how you feel as you're waking up and especially during a morning workout, which is arguably the best time to get it done. So, before YouTube I used to work a standard 9 to 5 job and every day I told myself I'd work out right after work, but half of the time I'd either be too exhausted from the day and just make an excuse to skip it or something unexpected would come up. By training in the morning, you essentially guarantee it happens before life can throw you any curveballs. Plus you'll ride that post workout high for hours, which can make your day more productive and your mood more stable. But the true benefits of a morning workout actually happen at night. So a lot of people who struggle with getting good sleep, they experience a phase delay in their circadian rhythm. This is when your 24 hour internal clock is shifted a bit later, making it harder to go to bed early and harder to wake up around sunrise. But recent research has found morning exercise leads to what's known as a circadian phase advance meeting. Your internal clock actually shifts earlier and drastically improves sleep quality. And it didn't matter if participants were early birds or night owls, this effect was seen across the board. Now, if you're used to training later on the day, you might initially notice that your list feel heavier and your performance takes a hit. When you first switch to morning workouts, that's completely normal. Your body temperature and neuromuscular activation are actually a bit lower in the morning, which can make you feel sluggish. But the good news is this is just temporary. While pre workout Caffeine can actually help minimize the initial drop in performance. Your body will quickly adapt, and in a few weeks you'll likely be lifting just as much, if not more, than what you were in the afternoon, especially once your sleep schedule is dialed in. That said, if you're somebody who just genuinely prefers working out later in the day, that's perfectly fine. Any kind of morning exercise can be beneficial, even if it's just a short while. And the benefit of a morning run is it's a guaranteed way to make sure your day just can't get any worse. But either before or after your morning exercise, you want to fuel your body with a proper muscle building breakfast. Your muscles are in a constant tug of war between breaking down and building up. Ideally, we want to tip the scales in favor of muscle growth, but here's the issue. When you go a long time without eating protein, muscle breakdown actually starts to outpace muscle repair. So while getting seven to eight hours of quality sleep is great, once you wake up it means you've gone a long time without protein, potentially putting your body into every gym Bro's Worst Nightmare A Catabolic State I actually had a friend in high school who was so paranoid about this that he'd set an alarm at 3am every single night just to chug a protein shake. Was it overkill? Probably. But was he jacked Also? Yes. And it turns out there's research that in some ways supports this. Scientists tested two groups of lifters. Both ate the same amount of total daily protein, but one group spread their protein evenly across breakfast, lunch and dinner. The other group ate most of their protein at dinner with very little at breakfast. While both groups got stronger, the high protein breakfast group actually saw slightly bigger gains in strength and lean muscle mass. So skipping or even skimping on your breakfast could mean leaving muscle gains on the table. But you often see celebrities like the Rock and Mark Wahlberg devouring massive protein rich breakfast. I had five eggs, I had a pork chop, wild smoked salmon, some Greek yogurt. You start adding it up and you realize this dude is pushing over a hundred grams of protein before most people even wake up. But doesn't this just go to waste? For years, gym bros believed anything over 30 grams of protein in one meal just can't be used by the body. Luckily, scientists recently put this to the test. They compared 25 grams versus 100 grams of protein in a single meal. Surprisingly, muscle protein synthesis kept increasing. So even at 100 grams in a single meal, your body can still use the extra protein to build muscle. But this study also shows that eating four times as much protein in a single meal provided just a 30% boost in protein synthesis. So my recommendation is to aim for at least 20 to 30 grams of high quality protein in your morning meal, then spread the rest of your daily intake across a few meals throughout the day. But what if you're somebody who prefers working out fasted and doesn't like eating anything before the workout? While that is fine, you have to pay attention to your hunger levels. Research has shown that if you're hungry going into a workout, your performance suffers. So if that's you, consider a small snack. And if not, then just make sure that you have a high protein meal within an hour after your workout. But here's what I personally do so if I'm training first thing in the morning, I'll have a banana with one scoop of my Built with Science whey protein powder. Including what's in the protein powder, there's only five ingredients in my entire breakfast and 29 grams of fast digestion protein. That's it. It allows my stomach to quickly digest the food and give me an immediate boost of energy. After my workout is when I have my more satiating slow digested meal. And this is usually either oatmeal topped with half a scoop of Vital signs protein powder and Greek yogurt or a sourdough bread sandwich with four whole eggs. But you may have noticed that nowhere in my routine did I talk about the water temperature of my showers. Cold exposure, whether it's a cold shower or ice bath, is believed to be a game changer for muscle recovery, metabolism and looking really, really cool on Instagram. The bad news is that while cold exposure immediately after a workout actually does seem to help you recover quicker, it does so by blunting the full recovery process leading to less muscle growth and strength. It also hasn't been shown to do anything notable for fat loss. So why do so many people love it? One reason is it definitely flips your nervous system into high gear. Heart rate spikes, adrenaline and dopamine shoot up and you feel wide awake. For these reasons, I must admit I am an occasional partaker in cold showers to naturally wake me up. But by cold showers I mean I take a really hot shower to warm me up and then I crank it cold for a few seconds and scream like a baby. That's enough. That's enough. So here's my entire morning routine laid out for you. There's no need to be a biohacking supervillain waking up at 4am for now try even just one of the things I talked about, but more importantly, tweak it to see what actually works for you and your lifestyle. But if you'd like some more personalized help getting started, my new Built With Science plus app will take care of all the guesswork for you. It'll create your daily checklist, your weekly workouts, and your nutrition plan based on your goal. It's even got a meal scanner where you can just snap your breakfast and it'll estimate and log all the ingredients and calories for you, just like countless others have. Simply follow what it tells you every day and I guarantee you'll get amazing results. You can sign up for two weeks free today over at builtwithscience.com and then give this video. Watch next for a full body workout routine you can get started with today to maximize muscle growth. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
