The key to a successful and healthy life is to start the day by doing some morning exercise. But, how to do a good morning exercise properly and safely?
In this article, we will share valuable tips to perform simple exercises and after-workout plans.
It doesn’t matter whether you are an early riser or not, don’t start your day without any exercise. Morning exercise helps you get the blood flowing through your body and pumps you up.
There is only one way to brighten up your day and mode, which is by building your muscle and shredding some fat with some exercise at home.
How to Do a Good Morning Exercise?
Let’s start with some simple stretching. All you need is to stand straight on your feet and place your hands behind the head. Engage your core to provide balance to your body and pull the shoulder back.
Breathing is vital to engage the sleeping muscles. Now inhale and hinge forwards from the hips without any involvement of your waist. You can slightly bend the knees to keep the back flat.
You must lean forward to feel the stretch in your hamstrings. Now, exhale and reverse the entire movement to stand up straight. Moreover, you can add a resistance band to the move.
It’s essential to keep a neutral spine while leaning forward. Additionally, you must push the hips back to stabilize your body.
If you feel any pain in your neck or spine, you must stop the exercise immediately and use an exogun handheld back massager to minimize the pain.
It’s essentially a percussion massage to prevent muscle spasms and for quick muscle recovery. You can use it after every morning exercise for quick recovery.
The next step is to use a light barbell by resting it across the back of your shoulders and not on your neck. You must keep a tight grip on the bar while leaning forward to not exert any pressure on your neck.
Let’s talk about the number or reps or sets. For instance, you can have three sets of ten reps if you are doing the general warmup exercise. It’s such a versatile movement that you can perform with or without weights at home.
Also read: What Are the Best Cordless Back Massagers as Powerful as a Plug-In?
Who Should Do Good Morning Exercise?
Everyone who is concerned about leading a healthy and fit life. If you want to keep in good shape and want to live an active life, you must take full advantage of good morning exercise. It’s an excellent hip hinge movement to develop hamstring strength.
The hamstrings affect not only your glutes and adductors but also your lower back.
Misconceptions about the Good Morning Exercise
Many people confuse the good morning exercise like a squat with a less-than-ideal torso posture. However, it’s certainly not the case as it may cause severe injury if you aren’t careful.
If you are stuck on your squat and deadlift, you must find a good morning exercise to develop the lower-back muscles, hamstrings, and glutes.
Benefits of the Good Morning Exercise
The good morning exercise is essentially a hip hinge where the primary movement comes from hinging the hips. It targets the posterior chain muscles and strengthens them.
You can also challenge yourself by holding a bar on your shoulders. It engages all the posterior chain and back muscles and offers spinal stabilization by preventing spinal flexion. This way, you can overcome the weakness which holds you back in deadlifts or squats.
Instead of targeting the legs, the good morning exercise focuses on the lower back, upper back, and spinal balance.
Potential Risks of Doing the Good Morning Exercise Wrong
You can achieve a proper good morning exercise posture by sitting the hips back as you do in a back square by bending the torso over or parallel.
If you don’t perform the exercise correctly, the weight on the back in the hinged position can cause severe spinal injury.
That’s why if you are a beginner, you must practice the hip hinge position, which exercises such as pull-throughs and RDLs.
Furthermore, you should avoid lifting heavy weight if you have lower back pain or a previous injury.
You can start with lighter weights or just a barbell to strengthen the weak lower back muscles and gradually increase the weight.
Moreover, you must make sure the barrel sits on the shoulders and upper back and not on your neck. This way, you’ll end up creating a longer lever with the torso and put extreme strain on your lower back. You must also grip the bar so that it doesn’t slip.
You shouldn’t focus on getting the torso horizontal to the ground. It means you can hinge even at 45 degrees or less, depending upon your hamstring flexibility and hip mobility.
However, your range indeed increases with practice.
Tips to Perform a Safe Good Morning Exercise
- It’s better to use a low-bar position across the rear delts to shift the load to your hips.
- You must activate the lats to prevent the spine from flexing.
- Don’t go parallel or lower; instead, you must stop about 15 degrees above parallel.
- It’s recommended to do the good morning exercise as a warm-up for your lower-body day.
- Focus on bending at the waist by pushing the hips back to create a safe angle for your lower back.
- You must focus on the technique by squeezing the shoulder bladers to engage the entire core.
- You should never round at either lower or upper back.
Neutral Morning Primer (NMP)
Are you ready to try out Arnold’s neural wakeup calls, which he mentioned in his book, Total Recall?
Our goal is to teach you morning exercises without any gym subscription fee. Here comes a Neural morning primer (NMP) concept, a small five to ten minutes exercise.
The NMP is designed in a strategic way to wake your nervous system and get the blood flowing throughout the body. It introduces an enormous amount of oxygen to your body, courtesy of the circuit-style bodyweight workout. Consequently, it puts your brains into productivity mode for the rest of the day.
The NMP also loosens your body to improve endorphin production to make you feel awesome about yourself. That’s why you must perform NMP first thing after getting up from your bed.
If you want to boost muscle building and increase your metabolism, you must indulge in an explosive exercise routine consisting of jump squats and lunges. Moreover, you should try explosive push-ups, tornado jumping jacks while spinning 90 to 180 degrees during the jump.
However, it’s important to include one or more dynamic stretch movements such as spiderman lunges, Bulgarian split squats, and lateral lunges.
The best thing about performing NMP is that it’s short and sweet, under 15 minutes with lesser reps. You don’t want to overdo it and get yourself tired for the rest of the day. Moreover, you should use the exogun handheld back massager for quick muscle recovery at the end of the NMP.
Lastly, you can select the targets for NMP. It means men can target their quads, abs, and shoulders, while women can focus on building the best and butt.
Other Five Morning Stretching Exercises
Other than the regular good morning exercise routine, you can also perform the five-morning stretching exercises.
Stretching awakens not only your muscles but also increases blood flow.
Prone Press-up
You can do a prone press-up to protect your back and keep it in a good position throughout the day.
- Lie flat on your stomach with hands in a push-up position.
- You must relax your back and hips and slowly press the upper body to create an arch in your back.
- You can hold the position for two seconds and then come back to the rest position.
- Repeat the exercise ten times.
Lumbar Flexion Stretch
As the name suggests, the lumbar flexion helps you to stretch your back.
- Sit on your bed’s edge with feet on the floor.
- Bend over to reach the feet with your hands.
- You can arch your back and hold the position for a count of ten.
- Go back to the original position and repeat the exercise five more times.
Neck Mobility Stretch
The neck rotation stretch is a simple way to improve the neck’s mobility.
- You can sit on a chair or on the edge of the bed with your feet touching the floor.
- Now you must rotate the neck in a circle in such a way that your ears must touch the shoulders.
- Rotate the neck slowly in a clockwise direction five times and in an anti-clockwise direction five times.
Shoulder Shrug
It’s a simple exercise in that you just shrug your shoulder up the ears ten times while remaining seated on your bed’s edge.
Morning Shoulder Stretches
If you want to keep the rotator cuff and shoulder healthy, you must do the shoulder stretches early morning.
- Stand next to your bed and lace the fingers together.
- Raise the hands above your head with palms facing upwards.
- The next step is to lift the rib cage by stretching the muscles around it.
- You must hold this stretched position for a count of ten.
- Return to the rest position and repeat five more times.
You must observe a painful sensation in your shoulders while doing the stretches. If you feel any shoulder pain, you must stop doing the exercise.
Standing Quad Stretch
This exercise allows you to stretch the quadriceps muscles present in front of the thighs.
- You must stand up and hold a stable object such as a rode.
- Now, bend one knee up and grab the ankle with one hand.
- You must hold the leg up for 15 seconds and repeat it three times each leg.
Tips on How to Do a Good Morning Exercise Properly and Safely
- You must dedicate five or ten minutes to warm up and cool down.
- Start slowly and gradually to boost your activity level and strengthen your muscles, especially if you are a beginner.
- You must consider that hard training often leads to muscle strain, stress fractures, sore joints, or inflamed ligaments.
- Always listen to your body and hold off on exercise if you feel fatigued or tired.
- However, you must perform the easy exercise to train your body with fewer reps.
- You should keep your body hydrated by drinking plenty of water or other fluids with the necessary electrolytes.
- You should choose your exercise or gym clothes and shoes accordingly. Moreover, it’s better to replace the shoes after six months if they wear out.
- In the initial phase, you must not use weights; instead, focus on strengthening the muscles to transform them into a suitable form.
- Don’t hurry in performing more reps by compromising on the technique.
- Don’t exercise in hot and humid conditions as it may lead to severe overheating or dehydration.
- You can opt for a slow pace if the temperature is more than 70F degrees.
- Always dress according to cold weather to prevent hypothermia. You can peel off layers as you warm up.
Summary of a Good Morning Exercise
- Stand straight with feet underneath the hips. The feet should be hip-width apart from one another.
- Now, you need to place the fingertips behind the ears.
- You can bend your knees slightly to provide the desired balance to your body.
- Keep the back flat by engaging the core muscles and push the hips back by lowering the torso to feel a stretch in your hamstrings.
- Take a slight pause and then return to the starting position.
- You can repeat the exercise five times initially and gradually increase the reps.
Conclusion
A good morning exercise, when appropriately done, serves as a perfect warm-up or muscle-strengthening program deepening upon your fitness goals.
Moreover, it requires lesser or no additional equipment; however, you can add weights and barbells if you want them.
However, you must follow the above tips to perform the good morning exercise safely to avoid injuries. Not only that, you must consult a doctor in case of persistent muscle pain.
