Train Your Mind When You Train Your Body
Leon Bax ·
Your mind and body are constantly influencing each other. That means that while a training can target one more than the other, your mind and body can never be trained fully independently.
The mind-body package deal
Your body does not work without your mind and your mind does not work without your body – they are a package deal. For some reason though, most physical movement disciplines focus on physical aspects only. The mental aspects are often left to the sports psychologist or mental coach. Conversely, when mental training takes place, the physical aspects and applications of the mental skills in functional environments are often left to the athletes themselves or their sport-specific coaches. This scattered approach separates mental and physical aspects to let the experts do their work and keep their lives simple. We believe making life easy for coaches is a bad motivation when it comes to optimizing athletic performance! So we put the mental work inside the physical work you already do. That is not just a bright idea, it is a necessity if you want mental skill training to show up in performance — and it turns out to be the simplest arrangement as well: nothing extra to schedule, and nothing about your physical training has to change.
Eight minutes, in the cool-down
First, throwing a bunch of exercises together doesn’t get you a workout. Good progressive workouts are an essential component of any training regimen, physical or mental. Even though the term mind-body intervention is somewhat established in western medicine, mind-body training is poorly defined, and 2Mynds is a pioneer in this area.
Our mind flows are eight minutes long, and they run inside the cool-down of a session you were going to do anyway. That is the whole arrangement. You finish the physical work, your heart rate is still up and your body is still warm — and that is when the mental work is worth most, because those are the conditions you actually perform in.
Three things follow from putting it there. It is simple: there is one place the mental training goes, and you already know when that is. It adds nothing to your schedule, because the session is already in it. And it changes nothing about your physical training — the warm-up, the work and the sport stay exactly as your coach built them.
Why train the 2Mynds way?
Interestingly, there are million-dollar companies that offer hundreds of meditation exercises in various formats yet fail to provide workout plans that progress to stress. That means that it is entirely conceivable that someone who practices deep relaxation and mindfulness diligently in the morning can exhibit road rage that same afternoon, simply because the mindfulness was never trained under functional circumstances! Their meditation never progressed, so to speak, and consequently, the applicability and functionality of the skill they practiced didn’t either…
This is where we do things very differently at 2Mynds. And our reasoning is simple: mental skills are needed most when people are under pressure, so let’s make sure they are trained under pressure. The stress does not have to be manufactured, because your own training already produces it. Practically, that means you don’t do your visualizations and imagery to peaceful waterfall sounds and incense burning in the background. You do them when you have just finished, while your heart rate is still coming down and your legs still know what the session cost. That is a far more functional place to practice them.
Last but not least, there is a practical side effect. You may not be tempted to add a 10-minute meditation to your day, but eight minutes at the end of a session you have already finished is a much easier thing to say yes to. Intrigued? Come on board!
COME ON IN AND THRIVE!
Start working out your mind and body together with us! Check out our mental fitness solutions for athletes, where you can train on your own with the Flow 255® subscription, or with a coach on one of our pathways. Start your journey toward thriving today—check out our solutions!
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