How Meditation Can Improve Your Physical PerformanceFitness CentersUpdated on Dec 20, 2018 View more like this | Visit MENLO PARK, CA | Contact Jessica Rafferty |
At first glance, meditation and sports seem to be totally unrelated or even opposite activities. “Go jogging, workout in a gym, ride a bicycle, or simply move every day and you will perform better after weeks of hard training.” — the web is full of such advice. All of them are indeed right, but there is one thing they are missing out.
Any kind of success is always born in mind, not body.
The world of sports is replete with examples of disabled athletes who compete with non-disabled sportsmen on equal terms. Think back to Oscar Pistorius, who also took part in 2004, 2008, and 2012 Olympic games lacking both of two legs.
The man was born with a birth defect due to which both of his feet were amputated at the age of 11. Despite this, he was determined to become known as “the fastest man with no legs”, setting numerous records on Paralympic games.
The success of Pistorius clearly shows us that the spirit always prevails, although the body may be weak. Without being focused, persistent, and highly motivated you’ll never make yourself go jogging or work up quite a sweat.
How Does Meditation Help with That?
Meditation is the only available exercise for strengthening your spirit. By adding minutes of mindfulness to your daily routine, you train your focus, eliminate oppressive emotions, and gain better control over what’s happening in your life as a whole.
Especially it can be helpful for the beginners who only start their path in sports. At square one, the most important thing is to define your goal and persistently move towards the intended target. However, newbies often lack motivation to continue and drop out of the sporting club at a mid-way point.
Some fitness clubs offer yoga and meditation classes along with canonical fitness options to cure that sore spot. If you also train other people, try to include meditation practice into the schedule of your wards.
If you are a sport trainer, it could happen that you’ve already had a fitness-related website, which you use to introduce your services to potential clients. We bet you’d like to add meditation practice to your offerings after learning about its effects. It is important to practice meditation on a regular basis and implement it to your routine. You cannot be always next to your client, and there is actually no need to. That’s when you can customize you website and add all the tips, videos, and instruction about all the training exercises and meditation as a part of it.
If you don’t know how to customize your current website, you may create a new one with the best website builder for fitness and enrich it with extra options for comprehensive training of mind and body.
3 Benefits of Meditation on Physical Performance
1. Improved Sleep Quality
Remember how long you were tossing in your bed after a hard day, replaying all the events that happened. The abundance of thoughts is the healthy sleep’s worst enemy. Meditation clarifies your mind and relaxes your body, sparing you from trouble sleeping. When you sit down and just let it go, the brain enters the recovery mode even before you go to bed.
Quality of sleep is extremely essential for sportsmen: according to FatigueScience, 1-night sleep deprivation decreases reaction up to 300%, what is comparable with alcohol impact on human’s body. The healthier is your sleep, the better you perform in sports.
2. Stress Resistance
Meditation not only reduces stress, it boosts your stress resistance in long-term. During the mindfulness session, you watch your thoughts by the eye of the observer and therefore feel less involved in your life troubles. Since tough times can’t break your spirit, you will do your best in sports regardless of any circumstances.
3. Focused Mind
Multitasking is a myth. Well, you can do two things at once, but none of them really good. Sports doesn’t tolerate compromise and requires full commitment. So when you workout, it’s better not to chat with friends, watch TV series, or read Facebook news.
Meditation is about relaxation and concentration at the same time. Spending 10 minutes per day on focusing on breath, mantra, or any other object, you boost your “focus muscle” in sports activities, too.
Bonus: Basic Meditation Practice for Athletes
Meditation technique for athletes slightly differs from the regular one. Its main purpose is to focus mind with the emphasis on body relaxation. There is a step-by-step instruction of a basic meditation you can do after the workout, before the match, or anytime you want:
1. Sit into a comfort pose, but keep your spine straight. It’s better not to lie down — you may fall asleep instead. The best pose for meditation is a lotus position, but if you can’t maintain it, you can simply cross your legs or sit in a chair with a straight back.
2. Close your eyes and concentrate on your body. Glide your inner focus through every part of it. If you reveal tension in some body parts, mentally let it go. Walk through your whole body from head to toes and make sure that you’re completely relaxed.
3. Shift your focus towards your breath. Start observing your breath without making any effort to control it. Keep watching how fresh air enters your body with every inhale, and how all worries go away with every exhale. If any thoughts persist, don’t get involved, just observe them without any judgments. If you find yourself getting engaged with thoughts, gently refocus attention on your breath again.
4. When you feel the session comes to an end, stop observing your breath and feel your body again. After that, slowly open your eyes and get back into your regular pose.
If you are a complete novice in meditation practice, 5-10 minutes of mindfulness per day will be enough. Experts recommend meditate twice a day: in the morning before having your first meal and in the evening 1-2 hours prior going to bed.
This simple mind exercise may work miracles on your physical performance. After you get inspired, overcome depression, and elaborate laser-like focus with the help of meditation, nobody and nothing will be able to stop you from achieving the boldest sporting objectives!
Any kind of success is always born in mind, not body.
The world of sports is replete with examples of disabled athletes who compete with non-disabled sportsmen on equal terms. Think back to Oscar Pistorius, who also took part in 2004, 2008, and 2012 Olympic games lacking both of two legs.
The man was born with a birth defect due to which both of his feet were amputated at the age of 11. Despite this, he was determined to become known as “the fastest man with no legs”, setting numerous records on Paralympic games.
The success of Pistorius clearly shows us that the spirit always prevails, although the body may be weak. Without being focused, persistent, and highly motivated you’ll never make yourself go jogging or work up quite a sweat.
How Does Meditation Help with That?
Meditation is the only available exercise for strengthening your spirit. By adding minutes of mindfulness to your daily routine, you train your focus, eliminate oppressive emotions, and gain better control over what’s happening in your life as a whole.
Especially it can be helpful for the beginners who only start their path in sports. At square one, the most important thing is to define your goal and persistently move towards the intended target. However, newbies often lack motivation to continue and drop out of the sporting club at a mid-way point.
Some fitness clubs offer yoga and meditation classes along with canonical fitness options to cure that sore spot. If you also train other people, try to include meditation practice into the schedule of your wards.
If you are a sport trainer, it could happen that you’ve already had a fitness-related website, which you use to introduce your services to potential clients. We bet you’d like to add meditation practice to your offerings after learning about its effects. It is important to practice meditation on a regular basis and implement it to your routine. You cannot be always next to your client, and there is actually no need to. That’s when you can customize you website and add all the tips, videos, and instruction about all the training exercises and meditation as a part of it.
If you don’t know how to customize your current website, you may create a new one with the best website builder for fitness and enrich it with extra options for comprehensive training of mind and body.
3 Benefits of Meditation on Physical Performance
1. Improved Sleep Quality
Remember how long you were tossing in your bed after a hard day, replaying all the events that happened. The abundance of thoughts is the healthy sleep’s worst enemy. Meditation clarifies your mind and relaxes your body, sparing you from trouble sleeping. When you sit down and just let it go, the brain enters the recovery mode even before you go to bed.
Quality of sleep is extremely essential for sportsmen: according to FatigueScience, 1-night sleep deprivation decreases reaction up to 300%, what is comparable with alcohol impact on human’s body. The healthier is your sleep, the better you perform in sports.
2. Stress Resistance
Meditation not only reduces stress, it boosts your stress resistance in long-term. During the mindfulness session, you watch your thoughts by the eye of the observer and therefore feel less involved in your life troubles. Since tough times can’t break your spirit, you will do your best in sports regardless of any circumstances.
3. Focused Mind
Multitasking is a myth. Well, you can do two things at once, but none of them really good. Sports doesn’t tolerate compromise and requires full commitment. So when you workout, it’s better not to chat with friends, watch TV series, or read Facebook news.
Meditation is about relaxation and concentration at the same time. Spending 10 minutes per day on focusing on breath, mantra, or any other object, you boost your “focus muscle” in sports activities, too.
Bonus: Basic Meditation Practice for Athletes
Meditation technique for athletes slightly differs from the regular one. Its main purpose is to focus mind with the emphasis on body relaxation. There is a step-by-step instruction of a basic meditation you can do after the workout, before the match, or anytime you want:
1. Sit into a comfort pose, but keep your spine straight. It’s better not to lie down — you may fall asleep instead. The best pose for meditation is a lotus position, but if you can’t maintain it, you can simply cross your legs or sit in a chair with a straight back.
2. Close your eyes and concentrate on your body. Glide your inner focus through every part of it. If you reveal tension in some body parts, mentally let it go. Walk through your whole body from head to toes and make sure that you’re completely relaxed.
3. Shift your focus towards your breath. Start observing your breath without making any effort to control it. Keep watching how fresh air enters your body with every inhale, and how all worries go away with every exhale. If any thoughts persist, don’t get involved, just observe them without any judgments. If you find yourself getting engaged with thoughts, gently refocus attention on your breath again.
4. When you feel the session comes to an end, stop observing your breath and feel your body again. After that, slowly open your eyes and get back into your regular pose.
If you are a complete novice in meditation practice, 5-10 minutes of mindfulness per day will be enough. Experts recommend meditate twice a day: in the morning before having your first meal and in the evening 1-2 hours prior going to bed.
This simple mind exercise may work miracles on your physical performance. After you get inspired, overcome depression, and elaborate laser-like focus with the help of meditation, nobody and nothing will be able to stop you from achieving the boldest sporting objectives!
