Training early in the morning?

A lot of people do their training really early in the morning, either it's before work, Uni, or just because some of us like getting up early and actually doing something with the day. One of many nutrition "rules" out there is that eating breakfast is something you HAVE to do, and that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. If you don't have breakfast when you wake up, your metabolism will slow down, you will get fat, and die, everything is just ruined right?!  Well, I am telling you now, our bodies do NOT work like that. If you wake up not feeling hungry, guess what? Your body is telling you, "I am not hungry yet", so why should you eat then?

Anyway, I am working on a long article about debunking some nutrition myths, and it will be posted this week. I just wanted give an example of how a morning workout session without breakfast should take place. When you wake up, take a cup of coffee and tea; write down your program and goals for today's training session. Take either 20g of pure protein isolate or 20g of BCAA, and a pre-workout drink if you have one. You may want to take a small piece of fruit if you are doing a longer session with cardio etc, but it's not really necessary. Go to the gym, and finish of your workout. Since you are training "fasted" or without having eaten, your session should not be much longer than 45min. Maybe you finish your workout at 8, and then have class from 8-10. That's fine. After the workout, take another 20g of protein or BCAA. Maybe you even have one more class, from 10-12, that is also fine. When finally you have time to eat your first meal, let's call this your "post-workout" meal, it should be BIG. This is the time to eat stuff you really like, add a lot of carbohydrates as well. The picture is my post-workout meal today, didn't quite fill me up so had some more fruit after. The point is, you do NOT need to force feed yourself breakfast, or if you are in a rush, just skip breakfast, and have a big meal after training.

Morten