What’s the One Workout You Should Do Every Day?
Learn the exact routine for that one single workout Get-Fit Guy Ben Greenfield does every day.
Ben Greenfield
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What’s the One Workout You Should Do Every Day?
I’m simply not a guy who leaps out of bed in the morning to charge up a mountain, do a Crossfit Workout of the Day, hammer on my bicycle, or throw a barbell on my back.
Instead, as you can read about in My Exact Morning Routine Unveiled Step-By-Step, I’m a big proponent of engaging in morning activities that don’t involve running from an imaginary lion and instead involve activating the parasympathetic, “rest-and-digest” branch of your autonomic nervous system.
This practice sets the standard for the entire rest of your day to be less stressful and more productive, and, as I discussed in my recent Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast episode on how to hack your nervous system allows you to do things like decrease salivary cortisol, do more subconscious deep diaphragmatic breathing, and produce more focused alpha brain waves during the rest of your day. So I typically save any hard workouts for the later afternoon to early evening, when body temperature peaks, reaction time peaks, and post-workout protein synthesis peaks.
These days, nearly every morning, my parasympathetic nervous system, relaxation-inducing and stress-relieving activity of choice is a thirty minute sauna workout in this infrared sauna that I “biohacked” in my basement, and I’m going to give you the exact sauna routine I do everyday.
By the way, even if you don’t own a sauna, you can do this same morning workout in your living room, basement, backyard, or in the sauna at a health club. All you need is your body weight, and the self control to engage in deep breathing and focused movement for thirty minutes each morning.
The Benefits of the Sauna
Let’s start with why I choose to use the sauna so much. In the article Ten Scientifically Proven Reasons I Am Addicted To A Daily Sauna, I delve into the nitty-gritty details and research, and here’s a synopsis of sauna benefits I describe in that article:
Increased lifespan with lower risk of sudden cardiac death and fatal coronary heart disease.
Skin-based detoxification of heavy metals and environmental chemicals
Increased growth hormone production and muscle fiber recovery
Arthritis relief and lower muscle soreness/joint pain
Increased lean muscle mass and increased fat oxidation
Rise in white blood cell count and immune system integrity
Increased capillary circulation to skin for color, tone and skin repair
Relief of insomnia and enhanced deep sleep
Increased red blood cell production and endurance performance
Increased stress resilience from heat shock protein production
In addition, here’s a synopsis of what my former podcast guest Dr. Rhonda Patrick has to say in Are Saunas The Next Big Performance Enhancing Drug?
Enhance endurance by increasing nutrient delivery to muscles thereby reducing the depletion of glycogen stores
Reducing heart rate and reducing core temperature during workload
Increase muscle hypertrophy by preventing protein degradation
Cause induction of heat shock proteins and a hormetic response (which has also been shown to increase longevity in lower organisms)
Cause a massive release of growth hormone
Improving insulin sensitivity
Increases the storage and release of norepinephrine, which improves attention and focus
Increases prolactin, which causes your brain to function faster by enhancing myelination and helps to repair damaged neurons
Increases BDNF, which causes the growth of new brain cells, improves the ability for you to retain new information, and ameliorates certain types of depression and anxiety
Causes a robust increase in dynorphin, which results in your body becoming more sensitive to the ensuing endorphins
So if you’re not already hitting a sauna at least once a week, you may want to consider doing it. And I’m really not joking, I’m now using the sauna every single day of the week for thirty minutes. But rather than staring at the wall or reading magazines, I get the most bang for the buck out of my sauna routine by doing the workout you’re about to discover.
My Morning Sauna Workout
Every morning I wake up, check my heart rate variability for five minutes while I journal and read, then I get out of bed, wander downstairs to the kitchen, and put on the coffee on. While the coffee is brewing, I do some easy stretching and foam rolling. I then drink my cup of coffee while reading blog posts, research articles, and anything else relatively non-stressful. Then I go down to the basement and turn on the sauna to pre-heat it. While the sauna is pre-heating, I use the restroom.
Then, I perform the following three times through, either doing deep nasal breathing or using an elevation training mask for the entire routine:
-One Full Yoga Sun Salutation Series
-20 Hindu Squats
-One Full Yoga Sun Salutation Series
-20 Hindu Pushups
-One Full Yoga Sun Salutation Series
-60 second Boat Pose
-60 second Wheel Pose
-10 Lateral Lunges Right Leg
-10 Lateral Lunges Left Leg
-60 seconds of The Founder Exercise (from this book by Dr. Eric Goodman)
When completed three times through, all the steps above take approximately thirty minutes. To hyperoxygenate my body and get a final dump of blood vessel expanding nitric oxide into my system, I finish with fifty deep, rapid, hyperoxygenation breaths (described in detail here) and a five to ten-minute cold shower or cold pool soak.
When I finish this morning sauna routine, my body feels mobile, pain-free, full of energy, and “charged up” for the day.
Final Thoughts
Here are a few final helpful notes for you.
First, I don’t use a steam room and here’s why: I can never be sure of the quality of the water I’m sucking in. As I delve into in this post on “The Scary Facts About Gyms“, a wet sauna ensures you are breathing in flouride, chlorine, birth control pills, pharmaceuticals and anything else that happens to be in the water supply of the gym unless they are using a very good central water filter in that gym, which is usually not the case. However, if you put one in your own house and you can control any mold or fungi, it’s not a bad option (although you do miss out on all the benefits of infrared).
Second, whenever possible, after I finish this routine I take an icy cold shower or (if I can find the time) a 5-10 minute soak in the cold pool outside my house.
Third, you can get some benefits from overdressing and exercising, but it’s not as good. If you can get pretty darn hot while exercising, then you can definitely reap the benefits of heat shock protein production, blood flow, nitric oxide production, etc. But here’s the issue (and why I choose the sauna): that can be far more stressful and conducive to overtraining than a relaxing (albeit hot) sauna session.
What do you think? Do you plan on giving this a try? Do you have your own sauna routine to share, or questions about mine? Join the conversation at Facebook getfitguy.
About the Author
Ben Greenfield received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from University of Idaho in sports science and exercise physiology; personal training and strength and conditioning certifications from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA); a sports nutrition certification from the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN), an advanced bicycle fitting certification from Serotta. He has over 11 years’ experience in coaching professional, collegiate, and recreational athletes from all sports, and as helped hundreds of clients achieve weight loss and fitness success.