The Best Morning Routine to Help You Live a Longer Life

No wake-up time is inherently best, but what is healthier, according to the science, is getting up at roughly the same time every day. As with so much of health, it’s a matter of consistency.

“The most important aspect of sleep is regularity,” says Dr. Daniella Marchetti, a clinical health psychologist specializing in behavioral sleep medicine at Rise Science. “Going to bed every day at the same time and rising every day at the same time (regardless of how you slept that night) is the best thing someone can do to feel refreshed in the morning.”

So pick the window that works best for you: and stick to it, no matter what.

The Best Morning Gym Routine

For longevity, muscle mass is key. You don’t need to be stacked, but having a decent amount of muscle mass is both useful and very hard to achieve in older age, so starting sooner rather than later is your friend here. Morning can be a good time to get it done: the gym’s a little quieter, the crowd’s a little more focused, and you’ll go through the rest of your day with the smug satisfaction of having already done a hard thing.

“Muscle mass is much harder to build in your 60s,” says Richard Faragher, a Professor of Biogerontology (the biology of aging) at the University of Brighton. When you’re in your 20s and 30s, it’s as simple as ‘lift heavy, lift consistently, and supplement that with a [0.8 grams] of protein per [pound] of bodyweight,” Faragher says. “For a 60 year-old, they need to eat 1.5 to twice that amount of protein to build muscle. That’s really hard.”

Cardio is important too, and you’ll want to achieve a balance between lifting and running. The exact nature of that balance might depend on your goals. While gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time might be possible for some people, Faragher says that it’s generally not a sensible plan to pursue both goals at the same time. So if you want to achieve both, focus on one for a while (more lifting, more eating), and then the other (more cardio, less eating). Provided you keep using your muscles during the latter phase, you don’t need to worry too much about losing muscle. Maintaining muscle mass is much easier than gaining it.