How to Build Muscle Every Morning (Full Routine)

Looking for muscle building tips? What if a few simple tweaks to your morning routine could instantly boost your muscle growth? You'll hear about the Andrew Huberman morning routine and the Brian Johnson morning routine, but what actually works? Well after making six science-backed changes to my morning routine for muscle growth (including eating the best breakfast for muscle growth), my gains drastically improved—along with my energy and productivity. And the same can happen for you once you implement these morning muscle building habits. We'll talk about fasted workouts, cold showers, post-workout meals and more!

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Timestamps:
0:00 - 0:25 : The 6 Parts Of The Morning Routine
0:26 - 3:30 : 1 - Wake Up Time
3:31 - 3:46 : Light Lamp Recommendation
3:46 - 5:13 : 2 - Proper Morning Weigh-In
5:14 - 6:59 : 3 - Morning Caffeine
7:00 - 8:07 : How to Tell If Your Sleep Is Good
8:08 - 10:06 : 4 - Morning Workout
10:07 - 13:26 : 5 - High Protein Breakfast
13:27 - 14:25 : 6 - Cold Showers?
14:26 : How to Implement The Morning Routine

Without training harder or eating more protein, one of the best muscle building tips I can give is just improving your sleep. And the key to this is waking up at sunrise and getting morning sunlight to stimulate melatonin production. But if your sun doesn’t rise til later, you can still replicate this effect by investing in a light that provides at least 10,000 lux of brightness and filters out as much UV light as possible.

Next, a daily weigh-in — right after waking up and after using the bathroom— during your morning routine is one of the best ways to track your muscle building progress. If you’re trying to build muscle, you should see your morning weight slowly creep up by about half a pound per week. Whereas if your goal is fat loss while building muscle, then your weight should stay relatively stable or drop slightly every week.

Caffeine is one of the best morning muscle building habits you can use to boost focus, mood, and even your workouts. But timing is key. I prefer to have my caffeine as early as possible. For most people, caffeine has a half-life of about six hours. So for me, shortly after waking at 6 a.m. I’ll have an Earl Grey tea (about 50 milligrams of caffeine). By 9 am, I’ll have a scoop of our Built With Science pre-workout which contains 180mg of caffeine but also an added ingredient called L-Theanine which helps smooth out the energy boost and prevents the hard crash you usually get from taking that amount of caffeine on its own. After that, I avoid caffeine.

Next, training during your morning routine for muscle growth leads to a circadian “phase advance”. If you’re used to training later in the day, you might notice that your lifts feel heavier and your performance takes a hit when you first switch to morning workouts. That’s completely normal. But the good news is, this is just temporary.

Next, a high-protein breakfast is the best breakfast for muscle growth. But how much is actually necessary? My recommendation is to aim for at least 20-30 grams of high-quality protein in your morning meal, then spread the rest of your daily intake across a few meals throughout the day. Here’s what I personally do. If I’m training first thing in the morning, I’ll have a banana with 1 scoop of my Built With Science whey protein powder. After my workout is when I have my more satiating, slow digesting meal. This is usually either oatmeal topped with half a scoop of Built With Science protein powder and greek yogurt, or a sourdough bread sandwich with 4 whole eggs.

Lastly, cold exposure. Whether it’s a cold shower or ice bath, is believed to be a game-changer for muscle recovery, metabolism, and looking really, really cool on Instagram. The bad news is that while cold exposure immediately after a workout actually does seem to help you recover quicker, it does so by blunting the full recovery process, leading to less muscle growth and strength. It also hasn’t been shown to do anything notable for fat loss. So why do so many people love it? One reason is it definitely flips your nervous system into high gear, and you feel wide awake.

For these reasons, I must admit I am a regular partaker in cold showers to naturally wake me up. But by cold showers I mean I take a really hot shower to warm up and then crank it cold for a few seconds and scream like a baby.

So here's my entire morning routine for muscle growth laid out for you.

In bed by 9:30pm, asleep by 10:00pm
Wake up at 6:00am with morning daylight
Weigh myself while brushing my teeth
Earl grey tea + 1-2 hours of deep work
Protein shake + banana + pre-workout caffeine
Workout (weights or cardio)
Post-workout high protein breakfast