Train at 5am. Be done before the day starts.

Why early beats evening for most working people

Evening training has a structural problem: it's the first thing sacrificed. Work runs late, someone needs picking up, you're tired, and the session quietly becomes tomorrow's session. Then tomorrow has its own problems.

A 5am or 6am session doesn't compete with anything. Nothing gets scheduled over it, nobody asks you to stay late for it, and by the time most people are having their first coffee it's already done. The consistency difference isn't about morning people being more disciplined — it's that mornings have fewer things that can go wrong.

There's a second, less obvious benefit: the gym is genuinely quiet. You're not waiting for a squat rack or working around someone else's superset. A 45-minute session at 6am often gets more done than an hour at 6pm.

"But I'm not a morning person"

Most of my early clients weren't either. Two honest points:

• It's a scheduling change, not a personality change. The hard part is the bedtime, not the alarm. If you want to train at 5am, the thing to fix first is what time you're asleep — and I'll say so plainly rather than pretending you can run on six hours indefinitely.
• You don't have to start at 5am. The window runs to 5pm. Plenty of clients train mid-morning or early afternoon — shift workers, people who work from home, parents during school hours. Early simply means available, not compulsory.

If your sleep is already short, an earlier alarm is the wrong first move — I'd rather move your session later than trade away recovery. I've written about why sleep is part of the plan, including the study where dieters on short sleep lost 55% less of their weight as fat.

Who trains early with me

• Commuters who'd rather train before the trip into town than after it
• Parents fitting sessions in before the house wakes up, or during school hours
• Shift and hospitality workers whose "evening" isn't an evening
• Anyone who has tried evening training and watched it collapse three weeks in

Practicalities

Sessions run from Anytime Fitness on Norwood Road, about two minutes from Tulse Hill station — easy from West Norwood, Herne Hill, Dulwich, Brixton and Streatham. Weekends included. If your schedule shifts week to week, we plan around it rather than pretending it doesn't.

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