The Nick Bare Podcast - 010: My Morning Routine: Athlete, Entrepreneur, Dad

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

As an athlete, entrepreneur, and father, I understand the importance of a consistent morning routine. Today, I discuss the habits and rituals I've developed to set myself up for a productive day, including strategies for avoiding distractions and incorporating movement and mindfulness in those early hours. So if you're looking to improve your morning routine to help you reach your goals, this episode offers practical tips and firsthand experiences from my journey that are sure to help. Enjoy the episode! Save 10% at BPN Supps: https://bit.ly/nickbare10audio Follow for more:  IG: https://www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ YT: https://www.youtube.com/@nickbarefitness Topics: (00:00) Intro (1:45) Changes to my routine (5:55) Why you need a morning routine (9:59) My morning routine (22:05) Making sleep a priority (23:46) Limiting screen time (26:11) Delaying caffeine intake (27:47) Power of morning runs (29:40) Adapting to life circumstances (30:52) Foundation to start your day

Welcome to the Nick Bear podcast. I've spent the past decade as a CEO building an industry leading supplement brand. There's a story. There's a mission. Serving in the U.S. Army. First video in Korea. And creating a community of inspiring leaders. The mission isn't changing, but it's evolving.

So I'm excited for this next chapter. It's out of you, man. Through powerful, unfiltered conversations. You have to be careful with entrepreneurship. You can get hurt. My mission is to help you unlock your full potential and create the life you desire. This is it. I'm a different person now.

Camera's rolling, and we're on. I'm your host, Nick Bear. Enjoy the episode. Before jumping into this episode, I want to thank you for tuning in and spending your time with me. Every watch and listen truly does matter. Now, we've decided to not take on any sponsors

for this podcast because we don't want to interrupt your listening experience. But if you do want to support me, you can head over to BPNSups.com for all of your performance, endurance, and wellness supplement needs. We offer a wide range of products from amazing tasting protein powders, effective pre-workouts, green superfoods, multivitamins, sleep support, and much more.

I've spent the last decade building this brand community and product offering, and I'm extremely thankful that it has helped so many people. So if you are in need of a new supplement routine, head over to BPNSups.com and use code Nick Bear 10 to save 10% off your order. Now let's jump right into this episode. Over the past couple years and specifically the last couple months, morning routines have been a hot, hot topic. And I believe for a very useful reason, it's because morning routines, they work.

It's worked for me. It's instilled consistency and foundation. and a lot of powerful moments in my life that I've achieved and experienced through a morning routine over the last couple of years. And my morning routine has evolved and changed over time based off of my time in the business and where we were at

and how much money we were making and challenges we are experiencing and the size of BPN as a whole when I was single, my morning routine was much different than when I was engaged and married. And now my morning routine as a new father is also different. So over the course of these seasons and chapters of life, my morning routine has evolved and changed, obviously. But I've always had a morning routine. I'm a massive fan of consistency.

And if you remember Jeff Cunningham, my running coach being on the podcast months ago, he said this quote and it stuck like glue. And it was, it's better to be consistently good than occasionally great. And if I look back at the last 11 years of my life from the moment that I decided to start BPN and go into the military and scale the organization and train for all these. these challenging fitness events, I have focused on being consistently good rather than occasionally great and it is paid off in dividends. Now, over the last nine months,

my morning routine has changed and evolved. I don't want to say significantly, but it has definitely changed a little bit. And what sparked that change in my morning routine personally was having a daughter. So Charlie Grace Bear was born middle of July. And in a few days here, in two days at a time we're recording this podcast, she will be nine months old.

And there was obviously, you know, the day before she was born in the months leading up to that, I had my morning routine, which was the morning routine of Nick Bear pre-dad, pre-fifference. fatherhood. And then from the day she was born, afterwards, there was a new morning routine. In those first couple weeks after Charlie was born, we had a routine. Steph and I both did, but it was just trying to get our feet on the ground. We were just trying to grasp what this new life looked like. It was brand new. It was a massive life transition. And after a few weeks, a few months, got back into my new norm, which honestly looked pretty similar to before my daughter was born. And I'm very grateful. I was thinking about this in my morning on this morning,

because on my run this morning, I was thinking about this podcast. I'm very grateful. I'm very fortunate and appreciative that Charlie has almost, and probably not by choice, just by coincidence Charlie has adapted to my morning routine and I'll go through my morning routine here in a little bit but the only thing that is really changed after she was

born was I now have to change her and give her a bottle and put her back to sleep before I go for my morning run or my morning workout and we'll dive into my timeline

here in a little bit but I think there's a lot of power in having a morning routine for a few reasons. One, I see it as this foundation of your day, or at least for me, it's the foundation of my day. Everything I do after that builds off of what I accomplished and achieved in those first two hours after waking. And it allows for some personal time. in my life right now, I'm busy as the founder of a business, a high growth sports nutrition supplement company, the founder and leader in an organization, which takes up a lot of my time.

I am a new father. I am a committed husband. I have a social life outside of all those duties and responsibilities. and there isn't much alone time. There isn't much solitude and silence in my life outside of those first two hours of my day. So for me, that's one of the main reasons that I will start my morning routine as early as I have to based off of the schedule that's laid out for that day

and some backwards planning the night before because, like I said, it's a foundation of my day getting started, but it's also possibly the only two hours of the day where I'm going to be alone and able to do some deep work and have some silence and some solitude. And for me, it's my meditation. For others, it might be going for a walk at some point in the day. It might be your drive into work.

It might be yoga or hiking or whatever it is. I think we all need a little bit of just disconnection. We need some silence. And that silence and solitude can create a lot of clarity, especially in a very busy, noisy and distracted world. And then also a morning routine instills consistency. And I have learned and realized it over time that consistency is life changing. It's game changing.

I've built my career off of being consistent. I've built my life based off of being consistent. I've achieved success in the way that I define it by being consistent. And what I was thinking about in terms of consistency is consistency is not just powerful for yourself. It is not a selfish one need and desire, but it also does a lot for the people around you. What I've learned since having a daughter is being consistent does a lot for your family. It sets realistic expectations and it creates routine not only for yourself but for your friends, your family, your coworkers, your employees. It creates more predictability.

less spontaneous actions, which other people in your life can benefit from. So I believe, I truly believe that having a morning routine and being consistent and creating this foundation and also having the silence and solitude for yourself to really instill clarity and eliminate distractions, I don't think it just benefits you individually. and it's not a selfish ask or want or even need, but it's going to benefit all of the people in your life. I truly 100% believe that. So let's dive into my timeline.

I wrote it down here for you guys to make sure that I am not missing anything. And this is very realistic as of right now in my life. This is how 98% of my day start. and I used to only keep my morning routine or my strict morning routine Monday through Friday. And now there's probably like an 85% chance that I'm going to incorporate this same timeline seven days a week. I found that being a new dad and being on Charlie's schedule, if I maintain. this morning routine seven days a week, it makes things a whole lot easier in my life, in our life.

So I'm not only incorporating this morning routine money through Friday, but money through Friday plus Saturday and Sunday for most of my time. There's a really good chance that you're going to find me Saturday and Sunday morning, waking up at 5 a.m. still and going through this same timeline that I'm about to describe because it just works for our life at the moment. So I wake up at 5 a.m. Every day. I don't hit snooze.

As soon as that alarm clock goes off, and it's funny because I still to this day set an alarm for 5am, 505, 510, 515, 520. That might be some sort of OCD trait, but I always set those times on my phone, but I never snooze. As soon as that 5 o'clock alarm goes off, I am up and I am out of bed. And the first thing I do is I walk directly into the bathroom. I go to the bathroom. I urinate. And I strip naked. I strip naked.

I get on a scale and I weigh myself. And I track my weight. For me, that is not a controlling or obsessive thing. but I like having some baseline data of, you know, measuring my weight over time to see what changes are happening, how my body composition is changing based off of what I'm eating, what I'm changing, how my training is going, recovery, everything. So I weigh myself every single morning,

then I input it into an app and I track that. And the next thing I do is I go into my closet. I grab my clothes and I'm going to need for that, morning. Typically, I throw on a sweatshirt. I grab my training shorts, socks, and a shirt, and I head into the kitchen. Now, I avoid my phone, or at least I try to avoid my phone immediately after waking up. I try to avoid my phone as long as possible. Me and Steph were having a conversation one night in bed, and we were talking about how we didn't want to be on our phones right when we woke up and as we were going to sleep.

So we did some research and we actually found a way to set this and control this in our phone. So we have iPhones. And if you go to screen time, downtime, and schedule, you can schedule when certain apps on your phone are turned off. So what we did is between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., we made all of our social media apps unavailable. Yes, if we really need to, we can break back into them and open them up and post or look at something.

But the goal is that we don't use the social media apps before 8 a.m. and after 5 p.m. At first, I had my email added into those apps as well, but I need my email accessible for work emergencies or work-related situations. So I'm not using social media right now before 8 a.m. and after 5 p.m. One thing I'm also trying not to do right now, which has been a 0% success rate up until this point. My goal is that I don't consume caffeine for the first 90 to 120 minutes after waking up. Like I said, I will reinforce not there yet. So right now, based on my current morning routine, is I walk into the caffeine. kitchen and I make myself a nice cup of coffee. And I look forward to that cup of coffee every single

morning. I really do. I make that cup of coffee and I head into my personal office, which is in the back side of the house. The goal with that cup of coffee is that I want to, one, stimulate some energy. I want to wake up a little bit, but I also want to stimulate a bowel movement. Because if you're a runner or you train and you train or you run in the morning, you know that working out or running in the morning on an empty stomach after eliminating some valves that creates some clarity on another level. You know, you go for a run, you had an unsuccessful bowel movement. You're going to get some clarity. You're going to get obviously silence, some solitude. But you go on a run after a very bowel movement. The clarity and the solitude is in another planet. And when I'm talking about

a good bowel movement, it's like you empty everything. Your colon is clear. That's a great feeling. That's one of the reasons I drink coffee in the morning. That's another reason I haven't stopped drinking coffee in the morning because I love both those stimulations. So that's the first part of the morning and I'd say that's between 5 a.m. and about 5.15. Now, Charlie, my 90-month-old daughter, is very routine as well. And it's almost like she has a garment on her wrist. And there's a timer that goes off at 5.15 a.m. because around 5.15 a.m., every single morning, she wakes up. And what I do is I go into her room, I change her diaper, I give her a small bottle, and I put her back to sleep

and then she's out for the next 90-ish minutes. Now right now she's going through a little bit of a nine-month regression where we've been having trouble getting her back to sleep after I put her down after that bottle. But for the last couple months, literally go in, change her, give her the bottle, and she's back down to sleep almost instantaneously. but I do monitor her on the nanit, the monitor,

before I go out for my workout. In case I have to go back in and put her back to sleep, I try to let Steph sleep a little bit longer just because she is more active with Charlie throughout the day at home and taking care of her and while I'm at work. Between 5.30 a.m. and, you know, 6 a.m., I'm catching up on emails. I'm doing podcast prep.

if there's something that I'm really interested in in researching at the moment, which there is typically at least one thing that I'm always interested in researching in the moment. I'm doing research or reading and watching YouTube videos on that topic, listening to podcasts on that topic, reading articles on that topic. For me, that window of time is just like some self-development, self-interest time where I'm diving into some research and sipping on that coffee and just enjoying these

silence of that first part of that morning routine. And then if it's just like the perfect morning, I sit up on that coffee right up until like 545, 550, and then bowel movement initiated. And that's why I know it's time to go run. So most mornings I'm running. I personally prefer to run in the morning, lift in the evening. I don't necessarily enjoy lifting weights or strength. training in the morning. I just don't personally prefer it. I've always been this way. I like training

around 4, 5, 6 p.m., but I love running in the morning. I don't like running in the afternoon or the evening. I love running in the morning. I love strength training in the afternoon. So around 6 a.m., I am lacing up my shoes. I'm warming up to go for a run. And that's how I spend the next hour. I'm running for the next hour. What I've been doing for the last year about is, For the first two miles that run, I'll take our one dog, Remy. And I'll run with Remy for the first two miles. I'll come back to the house, drop her off, and then I'll go and finish the rest of my run. And when I get back from that run, I have breakfast around 7 a.m.

My current breakfast and supplements, right now it's about four whole eggs. These are fresh eggs from a local farm. Paster raised, cage-free. I do half a cup of egg whites for some more protein. one slice of sour dough, bread, and then a banana, and about 150 grams of blueberries. That's my breakfast right now. Supplements-wise, I take a scoop of strong greens, one scoop of strong reds, five grams of creatine monohydrate, which ours is from Creepure, two soft gels of strong omega, a capsule

of strong joints, four capsules, which is a serving of strong multivitamin, 5,000 I use of vitamin D3, and then 30 milligrams of zinc. all of those supplements other than the vitamin D and the zinc are from my company, bare performance nutrition, health and performance supplements you can trust. And that's my breakfast and supplements. So that takes up about seven to say seven 20, seven 25. And that's around the same time Charlie's waking up. Again, like I said, I feel like Charlie has adapted to my routine.

It works out pretty well when it works out. When it doesn't work out, it's a soup sandwich. We're trying to navigate that, which, again, I'll discuss after I go over my timeline. And between 7.30 a.m. in 8 a.m., I'm helping Steph get Charlie up. I'm making her breakfast. And Steph is then going to work out and train in our garage gym. So that works out really well for our relationship and our family. is that as Charlie is waking up, I'm getting back for my workout, I start making her breakfast

after I eat my breakfast, and then Steph goes into the garage and she starts doing her workout for the day. She prefers and enjoys working out in the morning. And then between 8 a.m. and 8.30, I'm getting ready for work, and I will leave for the office anywhere between 8.30 a.m. and 9.30 a.m. based off of what I have going on for the day and what additional help Steph needs, getting ready in the morning before I head out. So that is my morning routine, from waking up at 5 a.m. until leaving for the office, anywhere from 8.30 a.m. to 9.30 a.m. That timeline works really well for my family's schedule in the current moment.

Works really well for me and what I need to achieve and get done. And it creates that foundation of the day. It allows our personal time, and it instills the ability to be consistently good rather than occasionally great, not just for myself, selfishly, but for our entire family unit. One question I do get a lot of is, how much sleep do I get? Now, my view on sleep hasn't changed recently, but the way I prioritize it has. and if you've followed any of my content over a period of time, you've seen myself and the BPN team bootstrapping of business

from the ground up over the last almost 11 years now. It's been very challenging, extremely challenging, but also very rewarding. And there were moments, chapters and seasons in time, where sleep was just not a priority. This is a moment in my life where I'm now prioritizing sleep and still trying to improve. But I do get the question all the time, how much sleep do I get? So I pulled my seven-day average from my Garmin this morning. In the last seven days, I've averaged six hours and 47 minutes.

One of my goals in the future is to have that seven-day average from my Garmin be over seven hours. If I could do that, it'd be great. You know, I wake up at 5 a.m. Steph and I start making our way to bed around 9.30 p.m. We try to be asleep by 10 p.m. It doesn't always happen, but we're getting better. But, you know, as 9 p.m., 9.15, 9.30 hits, we try to stop whatever we're doing and start making our way to bed to try to get to bed by 10.

and if I would be in bed and asleep by 10, well, that's seven hours of sleep, right? It's like, that is the goal. I kind of discussed why I set my phone or why Steph and I both set our phones to this downtime schedule. And what we were just finding was I was waking up at 5 a.m.

as soon as my alarm clock would go off and I'd pull the covers over my head and I'd go through certain apps of my phone before getting out of bed. And I was going through my email, and I'll just answer some emergency emails quickly. I go through Slack, which is the communication platform that our business uses, and I'd see if any messages in Slack for the business popped up overnight. Then I would check Shopify and check sales and where they ended the night

prior and where they're at for the day so far. So I'd go through those apps immediately after waking up and maybe checking social here and there, and I knew it wasn't the right answer, and I didn't want to do that. So sometimes you need to create these controls in your life, I guess controls, but also boundaries that block you from doing certain things. So setting our phones now on these downtime schedules don't allow us to access certain apps for certain times. So that is like one of the reasons that we started doing this within our phones. And then at night too, just being more present. You know, like both Steph and I wanted to be more present after dinner and after the

workday was over and not on social and not on our phones. And again, creating boundaries and controls that don't allow you to access certain parts of your device. And if I really need to access certain things, I'll go on my desktop and my office and check an email or check social or check Slack. But we created those boundaries on our. phone for those reasons. We wanted to be more present in the morning and in the evening, and we didn't want to be attached and glued to our phones the entire day. So that has been

something new we've recently implemented it, and I highly recommend it's been powerful. It's been super powerful, and I'm loving it. It's actually created more silence and solitude for myself in the morning. My mornings have been much more powerful. with no access to parts of my phone. Now, why do I want to avoid caffeine for the first 90 minutes of the day? There's a lot of research, and Andrew Huberman from the Huberman Lab podcast is a big proponent of a lot of this research. The science explains that when we wake up, adenosine starts accumulating.

And the longer we are awake, the more that adenosine creates larger concentrations in our body. And that helps us fall to sleep or get tired at night. What caffeine does is that it blocks adenosine. So, you know, you wake up, adenosine is low. It starts building, but you drink a coffee, you consume caffeine. That caffeine blocks the adenosine. And then when the caffeine wears off later in the afternoon, you have this surplus release and dump of adenocene. And which then you feel this crash and you feel sluggish maybe around 2 to 3 p.m. And there are days where I definitely experience this.

So the concept is that if you avoid caffeine in the first 90 to 120 minutes of the day, you are not blocking adenosine and you can avoid that afternoon crash. The afternoon crash for me isn't significant and it's not too impactful on my life and ability to work, which is one of the reasons that I'm not motivated to eliminate the coffee in the morning.

But I'd love to experiment and try it and see what changes it makes in my life and in my day. But that is the reason it is a goal of mine. Now, I've talked about this to extended lengths on multiple platforms. My morning routine, especially my run, provides silence and solitude. that's the most powerful part of my morning routine for me. I love running in the morning. I love going off on a run when it's dark. And as you're finishing up that run, the sun is rising and you get back to the house.

And, you know, you can see the dew on the grass and you can hear the birds chirping. Like right now, it's springtime here in Texas. And you can start hearing the birds chirping again. That's why I don't listen to music of my runs because, I want to really soak up the sounds and the environment and the atmosphere and, you know, hearing birds chirping on a beautiful spring morning in Texas, like this morning as the sun was rising, that can't be beat. That was just like an absolutely beautiful moment.

I get to experience this multiple times a week. So it's very powerful for me. And in my mind goes places during this morning run that, It is free of distractions and noise. And there's so much clarity in my thoughts, in my perspective, and just navigating challenges and parts of my life that I'm trying to solve for in the moment. I find a lot of these solutions during these morning runs. I find a lot of these solutions through this silence and solitude.

And that's, like I said, the most powerful part of my morning routine is that run. And that's why I keep doing it. That's why I will continue to keep doing it because it is that powerful. Now what happens when my morning routine gets disrupted, right? Like if we're traveling and we have to wake up extra early, that disrupts and changes my morning routine.

If Charlie doesn't go back to sleep after waking up at 515, that changes my morning routine. If I have work requirements and I have to be someone, where to film something or I have an early meeting that that might change my morning routine. Life happens. Things happen and I don't have a 100% success rate in my morning routine because of those reasons. But if I can control certain variables to maintain my morning routine and that consistency, I'm going to do that. Yes, my normal morning routine starts at 5 a.m., but based off of my my day's obligations and responsibilities,

I will make that happen earlier if I need to because that's how powerful this foundation is for me. That's how powerful this silence and solitude is for me. It's how powerful this consistency is, like I said, not just for me, but for my family. And I want to kind of wrap up this episode by reinforcing the fact that when we title these things,

my morning routine. the way I start my day. Yes, a morning routine is the foundation of the way you start your day. And it may feel or seem selfish from certain perspectives. But what I've kind of seen through my family is that by having a morning routine and something that I stick to, it sets consistent expectations for my wife and what she wants to do the next day. And we'll have a quick conversation the night before to ensure that I'm still going to execute my normal routine on the normal schedule so that she can plan her morning and her day

accordingly and vice versa. That's my current morning routine. That's my realistic morning routine as the founder of a business. who is still operational in the day-to-day and a leader in an organization as a father, as a husband, as an athlete from someone who prioritizes their health and performance and fitness and training, but also work and family and social life. So I wanted to share that with you guys what my normal timeline looks like and why I have decided to do. some of the things that I do in those first

couple hours of the day. So thanks for tuning in and we'll see you guys in the next episode.