You are working hard at the gym and paying attention to your diet, so what is missing from your fitness regime?
Recent research shows reaching meditation has significant benefits for your fitness regime and not just for elite athletes. Meditation can improve your fitness results and help you reach your goals faster in four ways, but first let’s start with what is meditation?
Meditation is observation of the present moment, usually focusing on breath or body to gain deeper self-awareness. It can be simply sitting and focusing on your thoughts without judgment, or it could be focused breathing throughout a workout. Meditation is similar to a muscle, it requires practice and training to grow stronger.
Four reasons to adopt regular meditation to increase your fitness results.
1. Increased Mental Strength and Focus
Mental strength and focus have a significant impact on fitness results, arguably more so than your gym regime. Just like any other muscle in your body, to strengthen your brain it requires regular exercise. Research shows we can intentionally change our brain through attention and concentration practices, such as meditation.
This process is called neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to reorganise itself by forming new neural connections.
With roughly 60,000 thoughts running through our heads each day, meditation allows a deeper understanding and control of these thoughts.
This control aids in enhanced mental focus and strength, which in turn can reduce our mind from ruminating. Meditation helps develop a better understanding of our mind and body.
This mental strength can help overcome fear and doubt to push through the final miles of a marathon, or create a new personal best at the gym.
The ability to refocus while training, will increase your results. Especially in competition, mental focus helps overcome nerves and jitters to focus on the task at hand.
2. Injury Prevention
Regular meditation can help prevent injury through heightened awareness and mental focus. By focusing on the present moment, especially during a workout you are more conscious of your body, and each movement.
This focus on body and breath, reduces your risk of injury during a workout, as you are more aware of correct form throughout each movement and likewise you are more likely to engage proper breathing techniques.
Furthermore, a deeper understanding and respect for your body will assist in rest and recovery time.
During exercise, your body releases the stress hormone cortisol which in higher levels can inhibit muscle growth. Meditation assists in controlling and maintaining cortisol production, by equipping you with mental focus and strength to better deal with stressful situations. Excess cortisol can result in injuries due to fatigue and overtraining.
A balanced training regime which incorporates High and low intensity workouts, as well as meditation is the best way to maintain cortisol levels and prevent injuries.
3. Increased Performance
Meditation improves performance through stress reduction, improved focus and concentration, better sleep patterns and faster recovery times. Relaxation through meditation helps reduce stress levels, allowing you to stay calm, and positive even in stressful situations. This allows you to train and compete at a higher level, despite eternal situations which may distract you.
Meditation can utilise visualisation to increase endurance and improve performance.
By imagining achieving a specific goal, such as lifting a new personal best or completing a marathon, meditation helps train the mind and therefore the body to perform faster and for longer. Breathing techniques used in meditation can help you refocus and reenergise to help push through mental and physical barriers during endurance training or racing.
Meditation can help improve quality of sleep as well as sleeping patterns, both of which are crucial to improved performance as well as injury prevention as the body needs enough rest to recuperate from exercise properly.
A lack of sleep has been linked to a number of negative effects which can significantly affect your fitness results.
Regular meditation helps increase overall fitness results through increased mental strength, concentration and recovery.
4. Faster Recovery
The results you gain from your workout sessions are strictly limited by the recovery time you allow your body. By meditating to reach a highly relaxed state, your body is able to recover faster from exercise, hence reaping better results. Allowing a period of time to stop and reflect inwardly, lowers your heart rate, breathing and nervous system.
This practice helps you better understand your physiological state and therefore feel calmer and more grounded. Meditation is an excellent way to change your mindset about the necessity of recovery within your fitness regime, the quicker your body can properly recovery from a workout, the faster you will see results and be able to reach new fitness goals.
Sleep plays a vital role in rest and recovery, especially for high level athletes. Meditation significantly improves sleep quality which not only improves performance but also reduces your recovery time.
As part of your fitness regime, meditation needs to be a regular exercise to truly reap the benefits both mentally and physically. Even beginning with 5 minutes a day, you will begin to see changes across all areas of your life. Meditation works to reduce stress levels, improve concentration and focus, lower blood pressure, promote faster recovery and prevent injuries to improve your overall health and wellbeing.
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