Exercise can be an explosive, powerful act of working out your body. However, it’s also important to take time to work out your mind as well. Practicing mindfulness is the easiest way to do this. Mindfulness can be a calming, centering act that can be done while working out or in your day-to-day life. Making your exercise routine more mindful can have many benefits to not only your mental health but your overall well-being.
What is Mindfulness?
Before we look at how to be mindful, let’s understand what mindfulness even is. Mindfulness is the act of being fully present in an activity. Your mind is fully focused on whatever you are doing, noticing all its subtleties and nuances.
Many people think of mindfulness as just the act of mindfulness meditation, but you can be mindful while doing anything. Think of mindfulness meditation as just practice for living a mindful life. Just like lifting weights makes your muscles stronger, meditation can make your brain more cognizant.
Why Exercise Mindfully?
Mindfulness is great for mental health. It can help reduce stress, lower anxiety, improve sleep, and even lower blood pressure and risk of heart disease. When combined with exercises for mental health, you have a powerful tool.
Often, both exercise and mindfulness activities are included in comprehensive mental health treatment. They can be effective for treating mental health conditions, such as depression or anxiety. Although this isn’t always a definite solution, incorporating mindful exercise can help improve the benefits of depression and anxiety treatment and work in conjunction with many types of therapy.
Incorporating Mindfulness
So, in what ways can you include mindfulness into your routine? Let’s take a look at just a few things you can try.
Pre-Meditate
Before you even start exercising, workout your mind. Mindfulness meditation is a great warmup to any routine to help you get motivated to exercise and improve your focus on your workout. You don’t need an app or a mantra, just five minutes to sit and think about your upcoming workout.
Think about your goals for the day. What muscle groups are you working on? How should your body feel? Devote some time before you exercise to think about these questions and see how it changes your workout and your mood.
Turn off the Music
Music while working out isn’t necessarily bad! However, to make your exercise more mindful, consider turning off your playlist, skipping this week’s podcast, and just listening to the sounds of your workout.
By turning off the outside sounds, you can better focus on what you’re doing. On top of that, you can listen to the natural sounds of your workout, like the clink of the weights, or the sound of your feet on the floor.
Focus on Breath
Breathing is one of the most important aspects of mindfulness. In mindfulness meditation, you’ll often spend a good portion of your time just sitting and breathing. When exercising mindfully, you’ll want to make sure breathing is central to your workout.
Likely, you already do this to an extent. Breathing is already a crucial part of any workout. However, you should try focusing on more than just breathing in and out. Feel how the breath moves your body and how it’s different depending on which movements you’re doing. Which part of your body, be it the chest, diaphragm, or stomach, does it fill? Mindful breathing exercises can change your workout.
Purpose vs. Goals
Sometimes, purpose and goals can be confused with each other. Hopefully, if you’re working out, you are setting and tracking your goals. However, those goals are not the reason you are working out. That should be your purpose. People work out for many different reasons, like body image, getting stronger, or improved health. This purpose is useful for staying motivated while working out.
When doing each movement, you should be mindful of how it contributes to your purpose. Focus on how each step contributes to that aim. This doesn’t need to be a critical reflection, but just reminding yourself through every motion that it has a purpose will keep you more motivated, focused, and mindful throughout the process.
Wrap Up
Mindfulness has many benefits that can be intensified when combined with exercise. By working on the two together, you can make your workouts more effective, strengthen your mind, and improve your mental health.
Stay Strong Together
Jefit, named best strength app by Sports Illustrated, Esquire, GQ, Men’s Health, Greatest, Forbes Health, and many others, has a community responsible for 92,000,000 workouts to date! The app, which recently passed 10 million downloads, comes equipped with a customizable workout planner and training log. The app has ability to track data, offer audio coaching cues, and can share workouts with friends. Visit our members-only Facebook group. Connect with like-minded people, share tips, and advice to help get closer to reaching your fitness goals.
