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 use mind-body flows to help you optimize your mental fitness. That’s not just a bright idea, it’s a necessity if you want to see an impact of mental skill training on performance!
Our mind-body flows
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, with a unique mind-body flow (MBF) approach.
The 2Mynds MBF workouts explicitly alternate mind flows with body flows. Mind flows are a sequence of exercises in which mental skills and attributes are addressed. Body flows are a sequence of exercises in which physical skills and attributes are addressed. While the purpose of the workout typically is to develop a predefined set of mental skills, we integrate body flows to generate progressing stress levels under which mental skills can be trained. All MBF workouts have a warm-up and cool-down, but the core starts with a mind flow, ensuring you can do it under calm conditions. This is followed by a body flow that will elevate your heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormones. This then sets the stage for a revisit of the mind flow, now under much more challenging (and much more functional) conditions. And there you have your mind-body flows.
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. To gradually introduce stress into the workout, there are various options, but movement is by far the most versatile and the most fun modality to use. Hence, we use mind-body flows in which we may progress movement complexity, push you to your anaerobic limits, or take your cardiovascular system to its max. Practically, that means you don’t do your visualizations and imagery to peaceful waterfall sounds and incense burning in the background. Instead, you take your visualizations from calm and controlled conditions to conditions in which your heart rate is 140 and your arms are so sore from push-up variations that a cup of coffee may feel heavy. But guess what – now you are preparing your mental skills in a much more functional way!
Last but not least, besides the physiological functionality of our approach, a nice side effect of adding progressive stress via physical training is that it’s more fun. You may not be tempted to do a 10-minute meditation, but 15 minutes of mental skill development that gets integrated into a uniquely physical flow workout may seem like a breeze! Intrigued? Come on board!
COME ON IN AND THRIVE!
Start working out your mind and body together with our solutions for mental fitness training for athletes. These solutions include our training platform, learning courses, or our pro package that combines everything and even includes a free kick-off consult!
We welcome you on board for free so you can try it out!