How Sean Johnson East and Andrew East start their mornings

Let’s be honest, Olympic gold medal gymnast Shawn Johnson East and her husband, former NFL player Andrew East, are couple targets.

In addition to being a gymnast who competed for Team USA at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Sean is also a new york times Best-selling author and Yahoo Sports reporter for the 2024 Olympics. Sean and Andrew produce podcasts together and are active on Instagram sharing fun body challenges and relatable family content.

With three kids under the age of four, it’s important to have a morning routine, but each day’s schedule will definitely vary.

“It’s the morning we crave, but it doesn’t happen every day anyway,” Andrew told Well+Good. “We call our morning routine the opening routine, which has a long list of things to do with the kids and the dog. One of the things we intentionally do is schedule each of us in a timely manner to meet our requests.

We caught up with Sean and Andrew to find out how they manage their mornings and make it look so effortless.

Andrew starts the morning with a workout

Andrew usually wakes up around 5 a.m. to exercise, and also takes saunas and ice baths. We didn’t really exercise together. We allow each other the space to do this. I will start exercising later.

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Then they drink coffee together

We start the day with coffee and spend some time connecting if we can. We love our Breville coffee machine. Ideally we would have 10 minutes to sit down together and read the morning excerpt to start the day with some reflection and time to think about each other.

Next, they prepare the day’s meals

Before the chaos starts and the unpredictability of the kids sets in, we try to make breakfast and lunch for them before they wake up. We pack their lunches in Rubbermaid Brilliance food storage containers.

These containers are a great way to keep everything organized, and the fact that they are shatterproof is great when you have little ones around who think everything is a throwaway item. We made a series of videos about what they can handle and it’s awesome! We had to drop them from a great height, but they didn’t break. These containers are also leak-proof – even for pasta.

Then, it’s time for the kids to have breakfast and get ready for school

Our daughter loves the chickpea chocolate chip peanut butter muffins we get from the farmers market, and our son loves the eggs, bananas, and peanut butter. After breakfast we got the kids ready for school and packed their Stoney Clover Lane backpacks.

Now it’s Sean’s turn to exercise and have breakfast

After we finish our first round with the kids, I work out and eat breakfast. My favorite breakfast is a thick piece of sourdough bread, butter and a fried egg. I also have a trick for scrambled eggs: cottage cheese. I have been adding cottage cheese to eggs for years and these are the best.

It’s finally time to go to work

We work very hard to get work done from 9am to 4pm, or intermittently throughout the day while the kids are at activities or in school. We also try to balance our work time with our children’s time.

One thing we learned is not to do both at the same time. At first, we were trying to multitask, answer emails, and have Zoom calls with the kids, and you couldn’t be a part of it. This leads to a lot of frustration.

We are great at communicating with each other when work needs to be done because we want to spend as much time with the kids as possible. The best way to do this is to have a fluid system that we can communicate well with.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.