Athletes: Feel faster, calmer and happier with this morning routine
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Frustrated that things outside of your control keep sabotaging your triathlon training and positive outlook?
How you frame the first 30-90 minutes of your day will facilitate or handicap your day’s performance and positive productive mindset.
The quality of your triathlon performance and your life, is equal to the quality of your thoughts, feelings and decisions.
Having a powerful, productive and positive morning routine will help you train and prime your brain to consistently perform at your best.
Just like how you follow your training programme to become faster and stronger, a performance designed morning routine will train your brain to become more resilient and positive. Here’s what to include:
Ritual 1: Wake up and immediately start your positive process
Less than 1 minute.
This is as simple as smiling, which releases those feel-good endorphins and makes you feel happy.
And ask yourself, what am I most excited about today? Having interviewed many morning people, this is the number one question that they ask themselves.
Do NOT:
Check your email
Check social media
Watch the news
Turn on the TV
This will starts you off on the wrong foot, as we instantly distract ourselves and all outside things to influence us.
Ritual 2: Make your bed and hydrate
Less than 5 minutes
Hydrating first thing is important, as we tend to be dehydrated in the morning and it wakes up our system.
You can do this while making your bed.
Making your bed first thing in the morning gives you a quick win and provides you with a springboard of wins and positivity for the rest of your day.
And if you do end up having a shitty day, which can sometimes happen, it’s nice to come home to a made bed and shows you that you can influence your life in a positive direction, one task at a time.
As the former U.S. special operations chief and legendary Navy Admiral William McRaven said in his commencement speech at the University of Texas: “If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.”
Ritual 3: Box breathing
5-10 minutes
Box breathing is a type of meditation and we all know that’s great for reducing stress and anxiety, and boosting mood, focus and memory.
I’m an advocate of box breathing, because it’s a highly effective technique to relax the body and train the brain for concentration and focus. It’s well known that Navy Seals use this technique to keep them on form and influence their emotions positively when under stress.
Here are the 5 stages of box breathing:
1. Sit comfortably, close your eyes or softly focus on a specific spot, exhale all of your air and then inhale through your nose while counting to 4.
2. Hold your breath for the count of 4.
3. Exhale all of your air out for the count of 4.
4. Hold for the count of 4.
5. Repeat steps 1 to 4, ideally for 10 minutes.
If the count of 4 is too hard, you can take the count down to 3. If it’s too easy, you can take it up to 5, 6 or 7 etc.
Ritual 4: Gratitude practice
5 minutes
I was once walking down a high street in London with a friend. She was at that stage in her life when she wanted a family and as we passed another cafe she exclaimed:
‘OMG I can’t believe how many yummy mummy’s there are here!’
I was so surprised and said: ‘What are you talking about, there are barely any here!’
Then, all of sudden, I couldn’t help but see yummy mummies everywhere! I was shocked. I was single and only noticing how many good looking guys there were - which she completely missed!
How we see the world is a result of what we tell our brain to look out for, such as families or handsome guys.
This is usually an unconscious process, but by making it conscious and intentional, we can train our brain to show us all of the positive, abundant and helpful things in our daily life.
We can do this using a morning gratitude practice.
In the morning, simply list 10 things you’re grateful (they have to be different each day) and 5 things that would make your day great.
Ritual 5: Visualise
3-10 minutes
Your brain can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s imaginary, so when you visualise (or mentally rehearse) your day, your brain believes it to be real.
Research has shown that visualisation helps athletes' enhance their performance, which is why it’s a popular technique amount triathletes like Lucy Charles (read about Lucy’s daily ritual here).
Using visualisation as a daily practise helps you align your unconscious mind with your thoughts, feelings, beliefs and actions, to achieve your desired outcome. This means you'll behave like someone who has already achieved their goal and therefore attract it into your life.
When visualising, you MUST use really powerful, positive and productive language and engage all of your senses (feel, see, hear, smell and taste).
Ritual 6: Train
5+ minutes
If you’re an athlete whose getting frustrated by outside events making your miss your training or reduce your performance, then the morning could be a perfect time for you.
It means you’ll start your day with a big win, in a powerful mindset and know that whatever happens during the day, you’ve already got your training in.
You will always have days when unexpected things crop up and life intervenes. You don’t always have to hit all six rituals, but you can at least knock one-off in the morning and your day will already go infinitely better.
However, what’s even better, is if you’re tight for time and feel you can’t possibly tick off all six, just practice each one for 1 minute. You’d only need to wake up 5 minutes earlier to do this and you’ll thank your future self later.
