Getting back in shape is a specific challenge that requires specific mindsets. Trust me, I’ve done it a bunch of times. Back in my twenties, I’d go hard for a year or two with something like boxing or jiu-jitsu, then be a bum for a year, then train for a half marathon or something. Lately, I’m in a much more steady, sustainable rhythm with my workouts. But back then I wanted to try a bunch of different stuff, and one thing that meant was getting back in shape—and getting in different kinds of shape—relatively often.

It’s been on my mind again recently because my older brother and I are planning to climb Mt. St. Helens this August. It’s not that tough of a climb, but it’s not that easy, either, and I’ve been in the process of helping my brother get back in shape so that the whole thing feels nice and easy.

He’s a very physical guy. We both played football a couple of years apart in high school and he was an Ultimate Frisbee champ at University of Oregon. But he’s got four kids and manages a bar, so he hasn’t had much free time to stay in shape. The goal has been to aim for our climb about 9 months from now, knowing that we’ll have limited time and a couple of chaotic schedules to work around.

As we get started on our first short trail runs, I’ve been very aware that we’re in the most delicate part of getting back in shape: the beginning. This is where you can burn out by going too fast, fizzle out by going top slow, or stall out completely by just not going. It’s where you can overwhelm yourself with possibilities, discourage yourself with comparisons, or get shut down by other peoples’ negativity.

It’s a minefield, strewn with the remains of countless false starts, negative self-images, excuses, broken promises, and unrealistic expectations. And this is why, if you want to traverse it without getting blown up, you need to treat it like the unique challenge it is and program your mindsets accordingly.

A lot of great fitness advice is about how to fly the plane once it’s up in the air. But first, you have to get the plane moving from a dead stop, accelerate down the tarmac without bumping into anyone, and make an ascent. That’s a different game.

But if you take a little time to “download and install” the right mindsets into your mental software before getting started, it’ll be a lot easier, a lot more fun, and a lot more rewarding over a long period of time.

You’ll have more confidence and the ability to embrace and achieve your fitness goals, whatever they may be. And ultimately, that will translate into more power and potency to fuel your achievement in all other areas of your life as well.

To make things a little more immediate for you, I’ve phrased the mindsets in the form of first-person statements. They’re what you’ll say to yourself. These aren’t just affirmations, though, and it’s not enough to simply repeat them to yourself. They have to take root, and you have to take action.

Mindset 1: What Type Of Person Are You?

“I’m the kind of person who can get back in shape.”

Note that I didn’t say, “I can get back in shape,” but, “I’m the kind of person who can get back in shape.” This nuance makes a big difference, and it taps into the foundation of everything: your self-image.

All your specific, individual goals are anchored to and governed by your self-image—the fundamental set of ideas and emotions you have about yourself. If the goals don’t match the self-image, it won’t matter how hard you work or how much you focus. Your “master program” will be working against you, and will eventually sabotage your efforts.

Most people’s self-images are almost entirely unconscious and contaminated with all sorts of negative and unproductive elements—but they don’t have to be. You can consciously re-program and rearrange your self-image to support your goals, and that means eliminating any ideas you may have that go against them.

For example, you may find yourself thinking something like, “I’m the kind of person who used to be in shape, and then got out of shape.” Once you identify in that way, it’s easy to focus on the “got out of shape” part, as though it somehow precludes getting back in shape now. But why not choose to focus on the “I used to be in shape” part? If you did it once, you can do it again.

That’s just one example, but the more you examine your old, crappy self-images, the more you’ll be able to examine and replace them. You can also boost your overall self-image by focusing on successes from other parts of your life, and apply them to your current goal of getting back in shape.

Maybe you got out of shape because you were focusing on other, more important things (like my brother with his job and family), and maybe you have been successful with them. Hence, you’re the kind of person who succeeds; you just happen to not have made fitness a priority until now. See the difference?

No matter the state of your self-image, you have one, and it’s at the controls for most of your behavior. But if you consciously address it, and work on making it the most productive possible, then it’ll work for you rather than against you, both in your current goals, and all your other goals in life.

Mindset 2: How Do I See My Goals?

“I will be mindful of how I talk about my goals, both to myself and others.”

In these early stages, your intent for getting back in shape exists mostly in how you think and talk about it. So, naturally, how you choose to think and talk about it is deeply important. Your self-image and goals are new and vulnerable, like a newborn baby, and they can easily be infected with negativity. At this stage, every interaction you have with yourself and other people will help shape the intent and the likelihood that you’ll follow through.

The mindsets I’m giving you cover a lot of how you’ll talk to yourself about your goal of getting back in shape. But how you talk to others maybe even more important, since you have far less control over how they respond.

Self-image is an intersubjective thing, meaning that it’s partially your creation, and partially the creation of the people around you. If other people, especially the people close to you, see you as the kind of person who cannot get back in shape, then you have a much more uphill battle. For them to see that you are that kind of person, they need to be shown.

I’m sure you surround yourself with the most wonderful people. But the fact is, some people will react negatively to your goals and try to discourage or sabotage your efforts, either directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously.

Now’s not the time to go into the psychology of why that might be, but it’s a reality you’ll probably have to anticipate dealing with. You may say to a friend, or coworker, or significant other, “Hey, I’m thinking of getting back in shape,” and then they may say something snarky, or off-handed, or dismissive, and that can be enough to make the whole thing a much bigger challenge in your own mind.

Or worse, they may give you unsolicited advice that starts to pile up and make the whole thing seem more complicated and overwhelming. You already have enough to work against within yourself. You don’t need to pile on other people’s resistances.

There’s a lot going on here, and people are complicated. They’re probably not trying to be negative, and their reaction probably doesn’t have anything to do with you. Still, you’re going to have to deal with it. Everyone’s situation is different, and the real key here is to just be mindful.

Don’t go blabbing to everyone you know, or put it all out there on social media. Keep a sealed container early on, and make it your own thing. After all, you’re doing this for you, right? There’s something extremely powerful and satisfying about having a private goal and simply doing it.

Other people will see it when you’re doing it, and they’ll be much more impressed (and much less likely to discourage) when they realize you’re just doing it instead of just talking about it.

Mindset 3: A Self-Check On Accountability

“I will give myself the right kind of accountability to reinforce my goals from the outside.”

Being mindful about who you share your goals with also means being sure to actively share them with the right people and in the right way. You want to give yourself every possible advantage and set up your environment so that it supports your efforts, and that includes other people. You just have to choose carefully.

One way to do this is to find an accountability buddy—someone with the same or similar goals. Ideally, this will be someone you can actually go workout with. Having a set time with another person is an incredibly powerful type of accountability.

For some reason, humans seem to be better at showing up for other people than we are at showing up for ourselves. You can leverage that tendency here: you’re not just helping yourself get back in shape; you’re helping someone else do it, too. And they’re helping you.

You’ll also have the added dimension of encouragement, camaraderie, and fun (as long as you make sure this is someone you actually like). Sure, you may have to move the time or cancel every once in a while, and you don’t want to become too rigid or harsh with the whole thing. But this way you’ve made it into something solid and interpersonal, and it’ll feel much more real.

Another mode of accountability is making a specific goal, like a 5k, or a half marathon, or whatever it is you feel drawn to. The key here is to have something specific, at a specific time—even better, something you have to sign up and pay for.

There’s something about that process that demonstrates a powerful intent and helps you show yourself that you mean business. I remember signing up for a half marathon when I first got into distance running. I made sure that I signed up for one that was far enough in the future that I’d have time to train properly and thoroughly.

From there, I was able to work backward from the goal and keep myself on track, far more easily than if I had said to myself vaguely, “I want to start running more.”

My brother and I are combining these two types of accountability with our St. Helens climb: we’re working towards it together, and we have a specific window of time when we’ll be doing it. You can figure out what makes the most sense for you in terms of your specific goals. But the key is to solidify your intent by connecting your goals to the world—another person, a specific goal, or both.

Mindset 4: Acknowledge Your Wins

“I will just get started, and consider every step forward a win.”

Now that you’re pointed in the right direction with your intent, get a quick win. Don’t wait until the exact right moment to get the exact right first workout. Just break the seal. Do a few push-ups. Run around the block.

Don’t be too precious about it, because the first goal is to go from holding totally still, to being in some sort of motion. Once you’re in motion, you can adjust. But the first step is to just charge through that membrane of resistance and get started. Then you will have officially moved from wanting to get back in shape to having started to get back in shape. It doesn’t have to be a huge start. It just needs to be a start.

From there, make sure to register every step forward as a win, no matter how small. Did you get outside and run at all? That’s a win. Did you eat or drink a little less the night before, anticipating the next day’s workout? That’s a win. A win is a win.

Size does not matter. Especially because later, as you gain momentum, what seems like a big workout from your current perspective will feel easier than getting these early wins. Really absorbing each and every step forward will help shift the momentum of your self-image, too. You’re moving now, you started. You are the kind of person who can make a goal and stick to it. Now it’s just a matter of turning that dial-up.

Think about a plane on the tarmac, and how much energy it takes to get it from moving totally still to moving an inch. Gradually it’ll build momentum, and before long it’ll be soaring through the air. But goal number one—the pre-condition for the entire flight—is that first inch. Get it however you can.

Don’t feel self-conscious about congratulating yourself on what might feel like a small workout. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else, or even yourself back when you were in better shape. The better you let yourself feel about your last step forward, the more incentive you’ll have for getting the next one.

There’s another element to this, too, that I’ve seen in myself many times. When I’ve been out of shape for a while, my brain seems to actually forget all the workouts and mindsets I’ve learned in the past. It’s like when you’re healthy, you can’t remember what it feels like to have the flu, and when you have the flu, you can’t remember what it feels like to be healthy.

But when I broke the seal and just got started with something, my brain and body would start to be flooded with memories. I’d remember all sorts of bodyweight exercises I used to do, sequences of exercises, techniques from boxing and jiu-jitsu, and even whole attitudes.

The point is until you get started, you’re not even playing with a full deck. Once you get moving, all your memories will kick in and help add juice to your overall plan for getting back in shape.

Mindset 5: Keep It Simple

“I’ll keep it simple and steady, and resist the urge to do too much.”

Once you’re in motion and feeling good about it, it’ll likely be tempting to start doing too much. You’re moving past the “false start” stage, but you still need to get past the “burnout” stage. The goal is to establish a steady rhythm over time that will give you a sustainable fitness regimen.

There will come a time to up your dose, but the early stages are more about consistency. Right now you have that initial burst of motivation that comes from novelty and a fresh start. But you won’t have that in a few weeks from now. At that point, you’ll have to rely on momentum and the structures you’ve created for yourself with your rhythm and your mindsets.

The most basic thing here is to avoid overtraining. This may seem obvious, but the temptation to overtrain is often strong, even (or especially) among those who “know better.” If you end up hurting yourself or getting so sore you have to take time off early on, you’ll end up having to start all over again later.

Worse, you’ll have to counteract any excitement and positive motivation you may have generated in order to get yourself to rest. Overtraining can take the form of simply doing too much, but it can also come from jumping to more advanced exercises before you’ve regained foundational strength and mobility.

Whatever form of exercise you’re doing, make sure to retrain the fundamentals before going on to anything more advanced. This can be a little humbling if you used to be comfortable with more advanced exercises, but it’ll be absolutely critical to getting past this initial threshold as you guide yourself back into shape.

It’ll also be easy to get overwhelmed with all the possible directions you can take your workouts. There are countless avenues for getting back in shape. But at least at the beginning, the key is to stay simple.

You don’t want to overwhelm your body with overtraining, but you also don’t want to overwhelm your brain with possibilities. Your life is probably already busy, and your workouts should be a sanctuary of simplicity.

Don’t give yourself the chance of being overwhelmed, because part of you is probably looking for any kind of excuse to tell you, “This is too much, you don’t have time, put it off for some other day.” It’s a cliché that your brain is a cognitive miser, but it’s true, and you have to take that into account.

As you gain momentum, you can add novelty and mix it up so you don’t let your brain get bored. But right now your goal is to get that momentum in the first place, and the best way to do that is to keep it simple and make it easy for yourself to stay consistent without having to reinvent the wheel every time you plan a workout.

Mindset 6: Build Your Foundation

“I will dedicate time to training my mindset to build the foundations for my goals.”

This is the meta-mindset you need to make sure the other mindsets work. As I’m sure you know from experience, it’s a lot easier to know what to do than to do it. It’s not always easy to reprogram your mindset. Even if you look at these descriptions and say, “Yes, this makes sense,” that conceptual acceptance is not enough to translate into real reprogramming and real change.

In all likelihood, you currently possess plenty of less-than-productive mindsets already taking up space in your mind that will try to override and reject the new ones. But without really retraining your mindset, the best you can hope for is a pleasant epiphany that will fizzle into nothing as soon as you stop reading.

I’ve bumped up against that barrier countless times in my youth, and you probably have, too. You may know exactly what to do, and exactly what mindset would be the most positive and productive, and yet you can’t seem to win the inner war against the mindsets you already have. They’re too deep down in there, too rooted in your unconscious mind to just wish away.

But if you work at it, you absolutely can switch out your mental software and transform your mindset. Even more to the point, you can program different mindsets for different goals as you move through life and your objectives evolve. You just have to train your mindset like you train your body. That’s how you achieve the total self-mastery that’s a prerequisite for consistent success in whatever goal happens to be in front of you.

Just Get Started

These six mindsets for getting back in shape may seem basic on the surface, and in some ways they are. But the basics, the foundations, are what people usually ignore and skip past, and then wonder later on why they crashed and burned, or never really got enough momentum to get started.

Like all mindsets, these ones will shape and direct your energies in a powerful and reliable way. But you still need to put energy into them, and you still need to anchor them deep in your mind to make sure they’re really doing their job.

Once you learn to do that—to master your own mindset—you’ll gain the fluidity and inner resources to dominate your goal of getting back in shape, and any other goal you may have in the future.

The post 6 Essential Mindsets For Getting Back In Shape appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Taken together, these strategies form a powerful, foundational mindset for massive, long-term gains, whatever your personal goals happen to be. Some of these might seem little too basic, almost offensively simple. But most opportunities for huge growth are rarely “secrets.” They’re usually hidden in plain sight, and while plenty of people “know” them, few actually put them into persistent practice, leveraging their power across time to attain genuine mastery.

1. Establish a Rhythm

There’s nothing more powerful than getting into a rhythm and sticking to it. That means deciding exactly when you’re going to train and treating it as an inviolable appointment you’ve made with yourself. Once you establish a schedule, you won’t have to waste brain power wondering when you’ll find time for your next workout, or how you’re going to sustain your efforts over time.

You know—it’s there, in your calendar. And though it may take a while to condition yourself to a rhythm, once you’ve established it, it starts to carry you along. It becomes automatic. That’s especially helpful during stressful or lazy times where all you have to fall back on is habit. We’ve all got our bad habits to contend with, but the tendency for the mind to go into autopilot is not inherently bad, as long as you’ve programmed that autopilot to be positive and productive.

2. Be Realistic

People often sabotage their efforts by forcing unrealistic expectations onto themselves, and the people with the most grandiose plans tend to accomplish the least. Don’t try to become Captain America by this time tomorrow (especially if it involves a serum). Work with the reality of your situation rather than against it.

If you know you only have twenty minutes to train on Wednesdays, then train for twenty minutes on Wednesdays instead of lamenting how little time you have. Whether in terms of duration or intensity, a light day is usually way better than a day off, especially when you’re establishing your rhythm. If you think in terms of “all or nothing,” then too often, you’re going to end up with nothing. Take the middle path. Integrate your training into your overall life and goals instead of pitting it against them.

3. Know Your Motivations

What are you training for? If you know, you’ll succeed; if you don’t, you won’t. The key here is to be honest with yourself. Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to get huge? Do you want to compete in a specific sport? Do you just want to be less likely to die at 50 from a massive coronary? Don’t be embarrassed if your true motivations feel a little vain.

If they get you to train, the result is the same as if you were training for the sake of the pure good-in-itself. And while they may evolve over time, no one else can tell you what your true, genuine motivations are or should be. Once you tap into them, you’ll find not only a golden thread through the labyrinth of possible training advice but also an endless source of raw, forceful energy and desire to achieve your true goals.

4. Be Nice to Yourself

Remember, the overall point of training is to do something positive for yourself. It’s not to please anyone else or impress anyone else, whether inside or outside your own head. You’re training because you recognize that by making some sacrifices in the present moment, and by putting in some real effort, you’re giving your future self a profound gift: not only better health and fitness, but hard evidence that you consider yourself worth taking care of.

That’s a beautiful thing, and you should celebrate it. Positive reinforcement tends to build on itself and accelerate progress much more effectively than negative reinforcement. So instead of punishing yourself when you make a mistake or miss a training session, try rewarding yourself when you do something that moves you closer to your goals. See what happens.

5. But Don’t Be Too Nice to Yourself

No matter how motivated you are to reach your goals, no matter how much you love your training, most of what it takes to accomplish anything worthwhile is pure, old-fashioned grunt work and repetition. You’re going to have to do things that you just don’t want to do. That means wrangling the lesser parts of yourself, which would rather stay in bed, eat a carton of ice cream, and watch other people work out on YouTube as “research.”

The key here is to remember that self-discipline isn’t a necessary evil that you have to submit to; it’s a superpower that can make the world submit to you. Just think of the people you know or know of who have an iron grasp on self-discipline. Think of how you think of them. Wouldn’t you rather have that kind of power, respect, and magnetism? Isn’t that better than ice cream?

6. Master Something

You may want to experiment with a variety of training approaches or sports before you settle into something, and even once you do, there will likely be a broad spectrum of degrees of mastery. The danger there is becoming a dilettante, dabbling with one thing after another without ever committing to a single approach long enough to experience a real transformation.

To combat that tendency, even as you experiment, try to find something small that you can master. Maybe it’s a series of bodyweight exercises. Maybe it’s a basic kettlebell swing. Maybe it’s a pushup. Whatever it is, however simple it is, make it an anchor in your training, something that you always do and are always getting better at, no matter what else you’re exploring.

You’ll be giving your training a solid core throughout your experimentation, and demonstrating to yourself that you’re capable of mastery, that once you find your thing, you’ll be able to take it all the way.

7. Keep Going Back to Basics

Whenever you think you’ve mastered something, especially something basic, assume that you’re wrong and start over as though you were a beginner. You’re almost guaranteed to find blind spots or ways to improve that had been hiding under your nose.

Fixing those errors and optimizing those fundamentals will usually provide more overall progress than adding something new, and will help solidify the foundation to build on by adding those additional elements when appropriate.

My first jiu-jitsu coach told me his teachers, after attaining a black belt, would start over at white belt. That kept them humble, kept them sharp, and kept them learning. Once you get the ego of mastery out of the way (not to be conflated with actual mastery itself), and replace it with a perpetual return to “beginner’s mind,” you’ll find a more secure footing for progress, and easily solve problems you otherwise may never have known even existed.

8. Think in Terms of the Long Haul

It’s a cliche but it’s true: you can easily overestimate what you can accomplish in a year, and easily underestimate what you can accomplish in three years. A lot of the tendency to give in to fitness fads comes from feeding the unrealistic fantasy that you can somehow have it all right now if you just find the right shortcut.

Sure, there are more and less effective ways to train, depending on your goals, but if you’re too caught up in looking for a shortcut or instant gratification, you’re probably coming from the wrong place, and you’ll likely end up seduced by the ultimate shortcut: doing nothing and then rationalizing it.

Worse, you’ll miss the true adventure of growth and transformation that only comes from long-term commitment to a training program that builds over time. You may not get the results you think you want right away, but in a few years, you’ll have achieved things you couldn’t even anticipate from where you are right now.

9. Get Moving and Adjust As You Go

As with most things, the real magic comes from getting moving. You can’t optimize your performance while you’re holding still. You’re going to have to start out by accepting plenty of imperfection, and then make continual adjustments as you go. The Japanese term for this kind of gradual, incremental, but continuous improvement is kaizen, and it’s a critical concept to download and install in your overall training mindset. Kaizen fosters solid, cumulative, and ultimately exponential progress over time. It also proved the conditions for the occasional massive sudden breakthrough. But it only works when you’re in motion.

A lot of people stall out or never start because they think they should somehow already be at the finish line. They get caught up in fantasies of their idealized version of themselves and then punish themselves for not being that ideal. There’s no way to win that game. Instead, drop the fantasy, and develop a mindset cooperates with reality and the basic truths that allow you to move toward mastery and achievement of your goals, gradually but powerfully, over time. Your future self will thank you for it.

The post 9 Mental Strategies to Master the Basics of Training appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

No matter what you’re trying to accomplish, you need to be able to zoom out from those countless nitty-gritty details and see how it all fits together. You need to make sure that all your goals and sub-goals harmonize and align into a single, unified, integrated whole. Without that singular coherence of vision, one goal fights against another, cancelling each other out in an internal battle that steals your power and momentum, and splits you in two. One hand reaches for the kettlebell, and the other for a desperate and undignified fistful of supermarket birthday cake. We’ve all been there, right?

The instinct toward a holistic scheme is the mind’s natural defense against overwhelm. Like all instincts, it arises spontaneously. I remember one evening in high school feeling a sudden, urgent need to zoom out and get a bird’s eye view of everything I was up to. So I drew a pie chart of all the aspects of my training at the time (football, lifting, school, music), and tried to organize it into a whole picture. Later, I found out that this kind of image, or “mandala,” is often used as an image of focus in meditation and psychological work.

There were lots of open spaces and a lack of balance to the whole thing. Of course, I was a young kid in high school, barely knew anything, and didn’t have a lot of options. But it worked as a diagnostic, anyway: those empty spaces started me searching down a path of experimentation that led to many of the more obscure and underground practices that are now central to my training.

What follows is the broad outline of my own current training mandala. It’s just one example of how you can divide up the categories, but it’s what I’ve found most useful, and what I suggest you try as the basis for your own work. I call it the Holy Trinity of Holistic Training, and as you might guess, it’s made of up three parts: physical training, mindset training, and mental toughness training.

Physical Training: The Son

If you’re on this site, you already understand the importance of physical fitness. That said, understanding its importance is just the beginning of the adventure of finding what works best for you. I’ve explored all sorts of ways and means of physical fitness over the years—football, classical weightlifting, judo, jiu jitsu, kettlebells, bodyweight exercises, distance running—before settling into what I’ve found works best for me in terms of staying motivated and getting the results I want.

Everyone has to find their own sweet spot, and that sweet spot may continue to grow and expand over time. In fact, that’s important to keep that spark alive in your love life with your training. This may seem obvious, but it’s really easy to get lost in details and end up sleepwalking your way through a workout routine that you’re only doing because you feel like you have to. Zoom out, take a look at what you’re doing, and decide if it’s exciting and productive for you. If not, experiment. Play around. See what else is out there.

Mindset Training: The Holy Ghost

Everybody knows about the importance of physical training, but mindset training is a little less common. Regardless, it’s an area where you can make enormous gains. Your mindset is your filter for how you see the world and how you see yourself. If your mindset is that you’re insecure and the world is a scary place, then all you experience is yourself as an insecure person, and the world as a scary place. You don’t see the lightning-quick filtering of your perception through your mindset that results in that experience. All you see is the result. Similarly, if your mindset is that you’re confident and the world is a safe and fun place, then you just see yourself as confident, and the world as safe and fun. Mindset is so important and so central to how you experience everything that it’s almost invisible, like water to a fish.

Of course, if you could just wish your way into a new mindset, everyone would do it. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, despite what certain “positive thinking” gurus might have you believe. You can train new mindset on a deep level, but like physical training, it works the way it works, and you have to follow certain specific rules and protocols to make it happen. Techniques like hypnosis, self-hypnosis, visualization, and experiments that affect your actual behavior can be very effective, but like with physical training, you have to find the methods that work best for you, and that get you the results you’re looking for.

Mental Toughness Training: The Father

Mental toughness is where the mental and physical come together. The root of both is in your autonomic nervous system, the most primal part of you, which regulates your stress response. If you’re relaxed most of the time, even in stressful situations, then you’re mentally tough. If you’re stressed most of the time, even in relaxed situations, then you’re not. The tendency toward either stress or relaxation expresses itself in body tension, body posture, and body language, helping determine your status as either submissive or dominant in the ever-present, if unconscious, pecking order on planet Earth.

As the meeting place of mind and body, mental toughness is an enormous, powerful lever, and training it is a must. If your nervous system is chronically stressed and tense, it’s not going to let you tinker with your mindset, and it’s going to sap your energy continually, making it hard to motivate, initiate, or sustain physical training. Again, different mental toughness training methods give different results, and some are far more powerful than others. You have to find out what works for you, but unless you’re doing something, you’re missing a massive training opportunity.

Create Your Own Training Mandala

At this point, you can probably see how these three elements work to complement and accelerate each other. More mental toughness means a greater ability to program your own mindset. Better mindset means (among other things) more motivation for physical training. More physical training means (among other things) more forceful energy for everything else, and the whole thing feeds itself and grows exponentially. When all the parts are working as a whole, you end up doing less to accomplish way more.

My own holy trinity is just one example of how this can all shake out. But whatever way you divide up your training, keeping a conscious, coherent meta-perspective is essential.

So here’s my homework for you: Come up with your own training mandala. Draw it out. It can be a pie chart, or just a list, but take the few minutes necessary to scratch out the basic outline right now, and then take a look and ask yourself, how does this all fit together? What’s working? What’s missing? What’s next? Don’t try to answer too quickly. Let it be an open question. Put it up somewhere you can see it, or draw it on a whiteboard. Check in with it every day, even if just for a moment. Just glance at it, let it sink into the deeper parts of your awareness, and let your intuition provide you with insights in the coming days, weeks, and years.

Remember, your training mandala is a living, breathing, dynamic organism, not static thing. It’s also a reminder that no matter how many details have to go into training effectively on any level, you’re never chopping yourself into parts and training them separately for separate ends. You’re always training yourself as a whole, unified, individual being; the center of your own personal solar system.

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Sometimes you read a single sentence and it sticks with you for life. I remember one such sentence from the early days of my own reading on meditation, mindset, and mental toughness. It came from a controversial and contrarian guru type from India who, I have to admit, I don’t put much faith in these days. But true is true, regardless of the source, and in this, I feel he was right. And if it weren’t for this sentence infesting and nesting in my brain as a young lad, who knows how much time I’d have wasted without its wisdom. In response to a novice meditator complaining of his troubles focusing in meditation, the guru had simply said that the average person has a lot of work to do before he can just sit still.

And there I was thinking that, at least outwardly, meditation was simple. Sit still and watch the breath, and watch the stress and negativity fly off forever like bats out of the belfry. What could be more simple than that? But from my own frustrating experiments, I knew he was right. The body wants to move. It’s built to move. Try not to move, and what happens? It moves. And it doesn’t help that we humans carry around tons of unnecessary tension all the time. Our nervous systems are always desperately trying to shake off that tension constantly.

In fact, that’s exactly what he was referring to. Tension causes anxiety, and anxiety causes restlessness. Ostensibly, if we were able to revert to the primal state of relaxation that we should be in all the time (barring an actual, existential threat), we’d settle into a state of deep meditative relaxation easily and effortlessly whenever we chose to be still.

The Truth Behind Tension

Is that true? Well, it’s a hypothesis, and it can be tested. You can take on the Herculean task of taming the lion of tension, cleaning out the Stygian stables of stress, and seeing if meditation doesn’t come just ever so naturally afterward. That’s what I did. I took a break from meditation for about ten years, trained deeply and extensively in Neuromuscular Release to clear out a good majority of that tension, and now I settle into a meditation like a cat settles into a nap. When your nervous system is cleared out, meditation is easy and natural, and enhances every other aspect of training and life.

That’s the long road. But taking that road also taught me that you don’t have to take a decade to start applying the essential principles of meditation to whatever it is you’re already doing. You can leverage your workouts into a kind of mindfulness meditation of their own, getting most, if not all the benefits, while costing almost zero extra time from your day. After all, you take your mind with you into the gym just the same way you take your body with you into meditation. May as well make it useful for all of you to train on multiple levels at once.

Iron Into Gold

The protocol I’m going to describe here is simple in the extreme, but don’t let that fool you. The protocol for running a marathon is simple, too (run until you finish), but the real work is in persistent effort, meeting and addressing obstacles as you go, and of course, actually doing it in the first place.

To make your workout a meditation, you’re not going to do anything differently; you’re going to pay attention to what you’re doing differently. With that said, I would suggest that you start by consecrating your new approach with a specific sacrifice: I know it’s tempting and enjoyable to listen to music or podcasts during your workout. I do it all the time. But if you want to really get your head moving in a different direction, I suggest you go on a “media fast,” at least during your actual workout hours. As much as possible, you’re going to want to be dealing with the raw material of your perception, not whatever storyline or fantasy that’s being engaged by your entertainment. There will be time for that later. But for now, consider turning your workout into sacred territory, and your body into a roving temple wherein your brain will have space to blossom to a new level of awareness. Before you can infuse it with the pure quality of attention, you have to protect it against the grossest and most obvious forces of distraction.

The Method of the Mindful Workout

Once you’ve cleared out some inner space, you’re going to start by simply putting your attention onto your senses. You can take a few minutes to do this before you start your actual workout, or you can do it as you walk into the gym, as you change, or whatever transitional activities there are for you between non-workout time and workout time. In time this will be easy, but at first, you might want to take an inventory, settling in a little bit at a time.

Start by tuning into the sounds around you, the sights, and the smells (hopefully your gym isn’t too woefully sweaty-smelling at this point). Just take a little time to notice what’s going on in your surroundings, and notice the tendency not to notice—the tendency to narrow the stream of attention inward. As you take it all in, see if you can expand your sense of awareness to contain your entire field of perception, expanding outward into it.

Now notice your body as an object within this expanded field of perception. Notice the sensations as they arise and pass away. Notice your breath. Don’t try to manipulate it in any way—just notice, and let your newly expanded attention have its root there.

This is the same kind of expanding and gathering of attention often used prior to a seated meditation. But whereas they’ll be carrying onward by sitting still and counting their breaths, you’ll be carrying on with your usual workout. Except this time, you’ll be maintaining that focused, sensory perception anchored in the breath.

Now, very simply, as you go about your workout, keep your attention on your body. If it drifts away into thought and fantasy, which it will simply notice and gently bring it back. Even if you find yourself going into a trance and snapping out of it five minutes later, again, just notice and bring the attention back to the body. Just noticing how often you drift into distraction can be an enormous benefit. The more you notice, the more you’ll catch yourself doing it, and the more you’ll be motivated to stop. As you’ll discover, being fully awake to the moment-by-moment reality of your living experience just feels a hell of a lot better than thinking about what you’re having for dinner, or why she hasn’t texted you back yet.

Don’t simply assume that because you’re doing something physical that you’re “in touch” with your body. Some of the best competitive athletes I know are deeply out of touch with their bodies, which is often reflected in overtraining and avoidable injuries. Especially if you’re training in a way that’s habitual for you, you may notice that it happens almost automatically, whether you’re paying attention or not. There is another potential benefit beyond the brain development inherent to mindfulness: you’re way more likely to notice when you let your form slip, or when your body is telling you to go easy, or that it’s ready for a higher weight. In that way, the workout serves the meditation and the meditation serves the workout.

Is This Really Meditation?

Depending on how conversant you already are with more traditional meditation techniques, this may sound a little bit like cheating. I can already hear some of the meditation purists I know groaning a bit at the suggestion that a workout can be a meditation. Then again, those purists could usually benefit from a little sweat, endorphins, and muscle mass themselves, so I’d say, it’s all about balance.

Ultimately, just about any activity can be used as a meditation. You can meditate while you run, while you lift, while you walk your dog, while you eat, while you shower. In fact, this kind of approach is not uncommon in meditation circles, where people will take up running or lifting, sometimes for the first time, in order to give themselves a physical anchor for their meditation. I know of at least one advanced meditator who took up powerlifting as a way to process some of the intense mental and emotional experiences that can happen the deeper you go with meditation.

Most of us go through our workouts, our days, and our lives in some degree of trance—not quite asleep, but never fully awake. In a way, all the instruction I can give you for making your workout a meditation can be summed up in five words: Stay awake and pay attention.

The point is to see more of reality because by seeing more of reality, you automatically become smarter, more proficient, more engaged; less hypnotized, less caught up in thought, and less indulgent in fantasy. You become not only stronger, healthier, and happier, but more real, and your workout will become a clearer oasis in your day, a sacred space of self-development, instead of just one more chore to tick off your list.

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Until you do, those tensions will be working against you, sabotaging you with stress, and making you work twice as hard with half the energy. Sure, almost everyone is equally afflicted by this full-body armor of unnecessary tension, but that’s no excuse not to take action. In fact, given the payoff, it should be at the top of the list of priorities.

As someone who’s experimented with countless methods of mind-body training, I can attest that Neuromuscular Release Work (NRW) is the most powerful technique for releasing that tension and recycling vast amounts of primal energy back through the nervous system. The result is high energy and low tension.

High dominance and low stress. Those are the two ingredients for a holistic, mind-body transformation. It’s mind and body combined, because you never have one without the other.

The whole system of NRW is as vast as any other exercise repertoire. But to give you a sense of what it’s all about, and to point you in the direction of some low-hanging fruit for getting started,

I’m going to give you an introduction through one of the bread-and-butter NRW exercises: face stretching. And though I’ll be focusing on just that one part of the body, pay attention, because if you get this, you’ll hold the thread that can unweave a whole lifetime’s worth of primal tension.

Why the Face?

If you’re like most folks, you probably don’t pay much attention to your face throughout the day. After all, you never see it, except in the mirror, and unless you accidentally wandered into an acting class and politely stayed a few minutes before slowly backing toward the door, you’ve probably never done any exercises with your face.

In all my days, I’ve never seen anyone in the gym working out their face, and when it comes to building muscle, it’s absurd to even think of it. But when it comes to releasing neuromuscular tension, the face is a veritable gold mine.

NRW works, and like everything that works, it works in a particular way. Understanding a little bit about the nuts and bolts, we can leverage that knowledge for bigger results with less effort. As always, we want to think in terms of the 80/20 rule, and in the case of deep tension release, that leads us right to the face.

There’s a hugely disproportionate amount of brain tissue dedicated to sensing and feeling the face compared to the rest of the body, and when you think about it, that makes perfect sense: If you couldn’t feel your face, especially your mouth, how long do you think you’d survive? That means tension in the face has a lot more impact on the overall felt sense of tension in the body than anywhere else. It also means that releasing tension there has a lot more impact—hence, low-hanging fruit. So, if you want to start sending your brain messages that the whole system can chill out, the face is the logical place to start.

Beyond that, there are a whopping 43 muscles in the face, and if you’re like most people, each one of them is charged up with layers of neuromuscular tension. But here’s something to keep in mind about how tension develops (and this applies to the whole body): those muscles are fused together with tension from years of habitual postures, reflexes, and expressions. For example, it may be hard for you to move the eyebrows without also moving the cheeks, or to move the jaw without also moving the shoulders.

Everyone’s patterns are different, but the result is essentially the same: layer upon layer chronically held physical and emotional attitudes, anchored by tension and stress. It also means that a little bit of tension anywhere easily becomes a lot of tension everywhere. The muscle fusion acts like a domino effect on the overall system. With its 43 muscles, the face makes for the perfect battlefield to start dismantling that fusion.

The Technique: Face Stretching

So here is a simple exercise to start switching the gears in the brain and defusing the muscles: face stretching. I’ll often have clients do it to warm up for a full NRW workout, but it also stands alone. Remember, if you want to really know what the work is about, you have to try it for yourself. The instructions may even seem deceptively simple, but if done correctly, the impact can be very dramatic.

You can sit or stand for this, but either way, make sure your whole body is as relaxed as possible. Take some time to feel your body, and try to anchor your awareness in your senses, rather than in your thoughts. Make sure the breath is deep, clam, and rhythmic. This is important; if you hold your breath, or breathe in a rapid or shallow manner, the technique will not work.

Now begin stretching the muscles of the face slowly and with tension. As you do this, make sure you’re mobilizing all the facial muscles: the forehead, the eyebrows, the eyes, the cheeks, the jaw, the lips, the tongue—everything. It doesn’t matter how you move these muscles, just that you’re moving them all, continuously, slowly, and with lots of tension. It should feel like you’re moving them and trying to stop yourself from moving them at the same time. It should feel difficult. If it’s doesn’t, add more tension to your movements until it does.

Continue the exercise for at least five minutes. It’s important to keep it up for that long to give your system time to react and adjust. As you go, make sure the breath stays deep, loose, and rhythmic, and that the rest of the body stays relaxed. Tension has a way of hiding in parts of the body you’re not paying attention to. At the end of five minutes, relax the face, take some deep breaths, and take a minute to sense and feel the face and the whole body, paying special attention to any new sensations that might arise.

What to Look For

You just spent five minutes sending messages to the most primal part of your nervous system; now it’s time to listen. Tuning in and receiving new sensations is just as important as the exercise itself for building new pathways between the parts of the brain.

Everyone responds to NRW differently, especially early on in their practice. With the face stretching, some people just feel discomfort at first, having come into conscious contact with the depth of tension in their face possibly for the first time. That in itself is a good sign that the muscles are “waking up,” even though it may not feel so great at first. Others may feel stronger results right away—a “reset” of the system, a sense of calm and balance, an energized relaxation.

Others still may feel more dramatic releases of energy, which could take the form of buzzing, tingling, or prickling on the skin; light tremors and shaking throughout the body; or big yawns and spontaneous vocalizations. You may even feel some spontaneous mental and emotional housecleaning happening, during or after the exercise.

None of these is “right” or “wrong.” Just pay attention to what you feel, and remember, you’re doing something real, in the same way that swinging a kettlebell is doing something real. If you do it right, your body will respond, so don’t be surprised if and when it does. But also like other types of workouts, NRW takes time and consistency to deliver its greater rewards, so if you choose to experiment with this technique, do it a couple times a day for at least a week, and see where that lands you.

Get Your Game Face On

When the face relaxes, everything relaxes, because everything takes its cue from the face—not just inside you, but around you, too. Ever wonder why people were treating you odd, and then realized you were scowling without realizing it? Maybe you were just squinting in the sun, or thinking deep thoughts, but either way, people take those cues seriously, and so does your own nervous system. So take advantage of that to encourage relaxation. When you’re relaxed, you’re powerful.

You’re loose, you’re confident, you’re not getting in your own way, and you can react spontaneously and creatively to whatever is going on around you. Everything works better, and everything feels better, and the face stretching will start pushing you down that path.

But while simple face stretching is a great place to start your NRW journey, there’s much more to explore, and far deeper to go. There are countless more NRW techniques for the face alone, and many more potent practices for detonating tension and releasing primal, powerful energy throughout the nervous system.

And it takes strong techniques to achieve a true mind-body transformation. That neuromuscular tension we all carry around is no joke. It’s tough. But so is NRW, and if you’re on this site, chances are, so are you.

If you can’t get control of your thoughts, what else can you expect to control?

Get Out of Your Head and Into the Zone

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Thankfully, she never did, to my knowledge anyway. I’m sure those tapes would have been about ten percent entertaining and ninety percent mortifying, and some things are best left unrecorded. But I get the point, and I even might have gotten it then. If, in a clear and calm state of mind I were to have heard my tantrums, I would have cringed, even as a child, realizing how possessed I had been, and maybe, just maybe, that would have made me more likely to catch myself before falling into the trance again the next time.

I thought of my mom’s tape recorder threat frequently during my first false starts with mindfulness meditation, as I tried to get some sort of handle on the all-important mental side of my training. I don’t know what I expected—that I would close my eyes, put my attention on my breath, and sink effortlessly into a state of perfect inner stillness from which I could instantly drain the inner reservoir of stress and attack the challenges of the day with poise and dignity. But that ain’t what happened. Instead, I slammed straight up against the humbling inner reality of my incessant stream of thoughts. And I’m not talking about goal-oriented, deliberate, rational thoughts, either. I’m talking about a churning cesspool of worry and distraction, a whole universe of mindless activity that had been going nonstop beneath the surface for who knows how long. It felt like I was being forced to listen to a tape of myself, and it was hard to stomach.

It seems insane, but the most insane part of it is that this is normal. This is the baseline: possession by a constant stream of thought that serves no purpose, that distracts and confuses, and that drains energy in a ceaseless and pointless inner activity. And yet, for most people, this thought stream not only has total sway, it’s considered “who they are”—their beliefs, their opinions, their fears and worries, their hopes and dreams. It all seems to make sense if you don’t look at it too closely, but if you were to record even a few minutes of your own thoughts and play the, back, I can almost guarantee you’d be shocked.

When it comes to the mental game, this is the opponent, and the opponent’s in you. And if you want to train your brain for mental toughness, you can’t just let this possession continue. You can’t just drown it out and hope it disappears if you ignore it. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to wrestle the angel.

How Positive is Positive Thinking?

When venturing into this territory, it’s all too common to fall into the trap of positive thinking. You may start to notice, for example, that a large portion of your thought stream is related to self-judgment, that you beat yourself up or treat yourself harshly over perceived failures, embarrassments, or shortcomings. Or, you may find you spend a lot of time anticipating disasters, worrying about negative events that could happen, but never really do; things you can tell are unlikely but that you can’t stop thinking about. You may look at all this and label it “negative,” and from there, presume that if you could just replace these “negative” thoughts with “positive” thoughts, that all would be well.

Well, maybe. But before you start packing your bags for that Tony Robbins seminar, it may be worth taking a little bit of a closer look at what thought really is, and why it tends so strongly to be “negative.”

Thought exists to solve problems. It’s an astonishingly effective tool when used well, and it has helped us not only survive among much stronger animals who would like us to be lunch, but also ascend to the top of the food chain on a highly competitive planet. Unlike our animal ancestors, we have more options than just running away or fighting when there’s danger. We can think about a problem, see it from different angles, make connections, and come out with a solution that can solve it not only in the moment, but in the future as well. This is how we innovate and create a world that is in many ways increasingly friendly to our needs and desires, both as individuals and as a species.

In fact, we love problem solving so much that when there aren’t problems, we’ll create them and solve them for fun. You could see sports in this light: we don’t really need to score more points than the other team, but we create and agree upon a scenario in which we have to solve the strategic problem of beating them. In the process, we keep our minds sharp and our bodies strong. All good all around.

So here’s where we need to get clear: as a problem-solving device, thought has an inherent bias toward negativity, and it makes sense that it would. If you can find the problem before it finds you, you’re much more likely to survive and thrive. Thought is negative. It’s supposed to be. So while trying to turn thoughts labeled “negative” into thoughts labeled “positive” may seem like a good idea on the surface, it is in some ways like trying to make your white blood cells less destructive. Destruction is what they’re there for. It’s the job of thought to be negative, to isolate problems, and to protect you through solving them.

(Source: Bev Childress)

The Real Root of the Mental Game

So does this all mean that we should we just let our inner thought stream have its way with us? Of course not. Constant self-judgment and worry are real problems, and they need to be dealt with to develop a relaxed and dominant mindset. They just need to be dealt with realistically. The problem is not that thought is negative; the problem is that, for most people most of the time, thought is malfunctioning because it’s working overtime, all the time, trying to solve problems that don’t really exist.

The question then becomes, why does your system think there are problems when there are not? Why is it stuck in this state of constant thought, even if you’re sitting in a hammock swaying gently with the breeze? It’s not from anything outside of you, since this thought stream stays with you no matter where you go, no matter what’s going on around you, though external events certainly have impact on it. It must be from within, and if thought is itself simply a reaction, a problem-solving response, then the trigger must be coming from somewhere deeper.

And that is, in fact, exactly the case. The perpetual sense of alarm, the sense that something is always wrong and needs to be fixed, comes from the most primal level of the nervous system, where stress and tension have their root. The constant stream of thought—call it “negative” or not—is the misfiring of the nervous system, the malfunctioning of an alarm system that doesn’t seem to have an off switch.

This is why, when you start to really take a close look at your own thought stream, you’re likely in for a surprise. Not only are the thoughts arising automatically, without your involvement or consent, they’re almost entirely incoherent. You can’t reason with them any more than you can reason with a barking dog.

How Do You Turn Off the Alarm?

Of course, there is an off switch, but it’s not on the level of thought. If you want to get out of your head, you have to get into your body, into the physical nervous system, where chronic stresses and tensions live, sending your brain constant signals that there’s a vague, undefined, but urgent problem to be solved. In all my training and experimenting, Neuromuscular Release Work (NRW) is the only method that does that reliably and effectively. Once you release the damned-up energies in the body that keep you in this stranglehold of thought, your whole system starts to mutate back into its natural state. You’re permanently “in the zone,” because all “in the zone” means is ordinary functioning unimpaired by the epidemic of stress, compulsive thought, and all that goes with it.

Of course, you’ll still be able to think. You’ll still be able to solve problems—do your taxes, find your way to the airport, plan your workout and nutrition schedule. But only when there’s actually a problem to solve. No more leaky boat. No more precious energy spent on imaginary problems and idle worry. Just smooth, effortless functioning, the way it was always meant to be.

Sometimes, the best way to get over it is to stop thinking and go do it:

Get Back on the Horse

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Okay, I’m being a little harsh. But from the way things usually shake out, this is how you’d think most folks approach the great American ritual of New Year’s resolutions. I have a friend who works at 24 Hour Fitness here in downtown Portland, and she told me they put a lockdown on employee travel for January, February, and March of each year. Apparently, there are so many new gym memberships following the New Year that they can’t afford to lose any employees, even for a little while. But by the time April hits, things have levelled off again. All those good intentions have fallen by the wayside, and employees can hop on that plane to Hawaii and finally take a break.

I’m not saying that all New Year’s resolutions are bound to fail. But there’s this peculiar, almost superstitious sense that just by making the resolution on a special day like New Year’s, it will be imbued with a magical power that renders the standard rules of follow-through unnecessary. And hey, maybe there is something a little bit special about New Year’s. After all, it’s a clean slate, and people all over the Western world are lending their mental powers toward a collective belief that from now on, things can be different; that 2017 doesn’t have to be at all like 2016, except for the similarity that both will almost definitely begin with a massive hangover.

With so much information so easily available these days, we have the advantage of knowing that whatever we resolve to do, we can figure out how to do it. Want to lose weight? Get more muscle tone? Run a half marathon by summer? Start a meditation practice? You can find solid, reliable information about how to do any of those. Gone are the days when you had to pay your way on an ocean liner by shoveling coal for four months before crossing a harsh and unforgiving desert just to maybe meet a guy who might know something about yoga. Now, you can Google it.

But all this, of course, only begs the question: if we have such advantages, why do most resolutions demonstrably fail? It must be that making and keeping a resolution are separate and independent skill sets from whatever the specific resolution happens to entail. And like all skill sets, there are some fundamental principles.

The Gentle Art of Being Realistic

Last year, a friend of mine showed me her New Year’s resolutions. She had made a list. A long list. A very, very long list. It overflowed with vows about going to hot yoga, learning to cook more vegan dishes, going to the gym, starting her own business. On and on it went. It was all cool stuff, and I imagine after writing it, she sat back in self-satisfied amazement at what a cool chick she would be just as soon as she checked all these accomplishments off her list. And she was so excited about it, it was hard not to get a little excited for her, too.

But I knew right away that she would fail, and I knew why she would fail. And worse, I knew that she would blame herself, even though it really wouldn’t be her fault. And sure enough, now that the year has passed, I can confirm that she has done literally none of these things. All that’s changed is they seem just a little further out of her reach, and she hates herself just a little more.

I didn’t mention any of this to her when she showed me the list. I was polite. She’s not a student or client, and she wasn’t asking me for advice. But I wanted to say, “Pick one or two of these, and cross everything else off the list. Focus on those one or two for the whole next year, make it to the finish line, and then add something else.”

Of course, she would have felt deflated. I mean, here she was, with this great big fantasy, and she had just gotten it to feel real. But being genuinely realistic is not as simple as it sounds, especially in our instant-gratification, fantasy-fueled culture. We’ve been trained so thoroughly to live in a wish-fulfillment fantasy land through media, entertainment, and advertising that when we stub a toe, it feels like a personal affront against our private reality. But the first step in making something reality is giving up our fantasy version of it, and that can feel just like a big old bucket of cold water over the head.

On the other hand, once freed from fantasy and in reality, making small but consistent changes often has way, way more of an impact than we generally anticipate. Most importantly, it trains willpower and commitment. It turns you, bit by bit, into the kind of person that’s capable of following through, something all too many people simply take for granted about themselves. When you show yourself that you can set an intention and keep it, you add to your power, and the next commitment becomes easier.

You can always add to your list of New Year’s goals once you have momentum. But the attitude should be that once you say you’ll do something, come hell or high water, you’re going to do it. So make few promises, but keep them all. That’s how you accumulate real power.

You Can’t Get to a Positive Through a Negative

All resolutions begin as a specific intent, and that intent is made of language. Before you can hope to follow through with action, you have to make sure your language is precise. For example, “I’m going to have a great year” is basically meaningless and unactionable, whereas, “I’m going to run a marathon on October 1” allows you to make and execute a specific plan of action.

This spoken or written intent is the touchstone of your resolution, something you’ll return to again and again, and beyond making it precise, it’s important to make sure there aren’t any hidden negatives lurking in it. This can be a much subtler point than it seems.

Many folks make New Year’s resolutions for the wrong reasons. They wake up underneath the Christmas tree they tried to climb whilst drunk, with a soft and distended belly from all the indulgences of holiday eating, and with a grand gesture of self-loathing, declare to themselves, “Oh my God, I am disgusting.” And disgusting they may be, but that’s the wrong place to start from when making a change. It’s fundamentally reactive. Saying, “I hereby resolve to be far, far less disgusting” starts with a negative, and every time you try to take action, you’ll just remember how disgusting you think you are. You’ll grow to resent it, resist it, and ultimately remove it from your life.

Okay, that’s an exaggerated example. But the same principle can apply more subtly to more common resolutions. Consider, for example, resolving to lose twenty pounds. Once again, you’re starting with a negative, a reaction to undesirable circumstances, rather than an action toward desirable ones. And every time you move to take action, you’ll be thinking about those extra twenty pounds you have. You’ll be emphasizing the problem to yourself, along with whatever self judgment wants to come along for the ride. On the other hand, if you think of it in terms of achieving the specific weight you think is healthy, you’ll be focusing on the positive end product. You’re getting into this for the long haul, so you want to make sure your vector is pointed in the right direction.

Hidden negatives are what evoke the subtle but potent forces of self-sabotage and inner resistance. Who wants to be constantly reminded of the thing they’re trying to avoid? So, don’t think in terms of what you want less of, but what you want more of. And if this seems like too subtle a distinction, keep in mind that this kind of inquiry into your motives also opens up what is possibly the most important question you can ask yourself:

Why, exactly, are you doing what you’re doing?

Is this something you really want, or something you think you’re supposed to want? If your resolution is just a reaction to internalized “should’s,” then you’ll likely be waging a futile battle against inner forces of resentment and self-sabotage. You need to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it for all horses to be pulling in the same direction. If you know, you’ll get there. If you don’t, you won’t. And if, in examining your why, you find that the desire isn’t authentic in the first place, then for God’s sake, drop it.

Play the Long Game

Barring some unforeseen tragedy, it’s safe to assume that you’ll make it through this coming year. That means you’ll find yourself at the end of 2017, once again, facing yet another New Year, and a New Year’s resolution. And on that day a year from now, I’d say the most demoralizing thing that can happen is that you make the same resolution you made this year, with the addendum of, “Okay, but for real this time.”

Taking that long view can be sobering, but very powerful as well. That’s a full 365 days of sustaining your intent, and taking consistent action. So be realistic, and set your intent carefully and honestly. Lay a foundation so that when next year comes, you’ll be building on something, not starting again from scratch. Think of your resolution in terms of where you want to be at the end of 2017 instead of where you don’t want to be now. Play the long game, and play it well, and you’ll become more powerful, more joyful, and more real with each new year.

Thinking of signing up for a diet plan? Think again:

Changing Your Life Is Not a 45-Day Challenge

The post Why Your New Year’s Resolution Will Fail appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I’m sure you’ve heard it. You’ve probably said it yourself when someone around you is stressing out and their emotional shrapnel is flying at you. Seems like good advice, and seems simple. Of course, the first part—relax—is easier said than done. Chances are, if you’re worked up and someone tells you to relax, you’re probably not going to say, “Oh yeah, my bad, I’ll just relax, thanks for reminding me.” It’s not that simple, and we all know it, which is why it can be so annoying when someone tells you to relax, as though there’s a switch to flip. It’s like a trainer telling you to just go ahead and bench press those 400 pounds, and now you’re in the hospital and he’s hiring a lawyer. You can tell somebody, or yourself, to do something, but first they, or you, need the capacity to do it.

The second part, “take a deep breath,” gets us closer a little closer to something actionable. It’s something you can actually do when you’re stressed out or overwhelmed, and it may have some beneficial effect. You may still want to punch the person in the face who told you to do it. But if you try to do what they suggested, you’ll probably experience at least a little bit of a relief. But that simple little piece of advice, “relax and take a deep breath,” could easily go from a trite and only mildly helpful piece of advice to truly transformative formula.

If only you knew how to breathe.

Surely, you protest, if I didn’t know how to breathe I couldn’t even be alive. Well, leaving aside the question of what constitutes being really alive versus merely surviving, I have to agree that you are breathing, and are alive, at least somewhat, but if you’re like the average person, you’re breathing at a fraction of your capacity, and it’s having a disastrous effect on your physical and mental well-being, and on every aspect of your training and your life.

Your Ancient Nervous System, and How It Breathes

Breathing is the most fundamental and basic of physical activities. I say “activity” because even though it will happen automatically, it can and should also be an act that is consciously performed. Every second of every day, you’re either inhaling, exhaling, or somewhere in between. It’s the underlying rhythm of your life. So how could you be doing it wrong? To answer that, we need to first look at some of the nuts and bolts of breathing and its relationship to your ancient nervous system.

Breathing is directly linked to the autonomic nervous system, which regulates automatic functions like the heartbeat and digestion. It takes care of all the stuff that’s constantly working to keep you alive, so your conscious mind can think about other stuff, like work tomorrow, or how good a beer sounds right about now, or how you hope this part of the article won’t be too boring because that beer really does sound good and there’s at least, like, four left in the fridge.

Now listen up, because this is important: Of all those autonomic functions, breathing is the one that you can consciously control. As such, it’s helpful to think of it as a gateway between your conscious mind, and your autonomic nervous system. It’s how you can communicate with your ancient nervous system instead of just being controlled by it.

Your autonomic nervous system has two basic settings, and each has its own type of breathing. When everything is cool and safe and relaxed, it’s in the “rest and digest” setting. It’s chilling out, rebuilding itself, humming while it does the dishes, and then having a lemonade on the porch before dozing off with a golden retriever at its feet. All is well with the world.

In this “rest and digest” state, the breath is full, deep, and rhythmic. It starts deep in the belly and moves up into the chest, before falling back down with an effortless release of an exhale. The whole breath is accomplished only by the diaphragm muscle, which expands the belly, and the intercostals (the muscles between the ribs), which expand the chest. That expansion creates a natural vacuum in the lungs, which fills on their own with oxygen. The throat stays relaxed, and functions only as a pipe for the air to move through.

When everything is not cool and not relaxed, and there appears to be a clear and present danger, the autonomic nervous system switches to its “fight or flight” setting. It proceeds to freak out, diverting all its resources to a perceived emergency, fumbling with the key to the safe, dropping the shotgun shells on the floor, or diving through the nearest window, leaving a human-shaped hole in the glass as it runs through the clearing towards the woods. All is not well.

In the “fight or flight” state, the breath shifts in a very measurable and observable way, becoming more rapid, more shallow. In addition to the diaphragm and intercostals, the body begins to use the “emergency breathing muscles”: the neck, shoulders, upper chest and throat. The system is now sucking in air desperately, as it tries to navigate its way through the survival situation, and continues in this state until the situation is resolved.

Natural and Unnatural Breathing

Both of these settings—”rest and digest” and “fight or flight”—along with their types of breathing, are completely natural. They evolved over vast eons, and though they’re not exactly nuanced, they get the job done.

In fact, it’s a pretty sweet deal. We get to stay in that rest and digest state most of the time, chilling out with our deep, full breaths. Then on rare occasions, fight or flight kicks in, the emergency breathing muscles get called in as reserves for a short while, and once the emergency is resolved, we go straight back to rocking chairs, lemonade, golden retrievers, and naps.

Right?

Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work. But here’s the harsh reality: most people, most of the time, breathe shallowly, mostly into the upper chest, utilizing the emergency breathing muscles all the time. They are literally breathing in a perpetual state of primal, fight or flight anxiety. Which is to say, they don’t know how to breathe.

Tell them to take a deep breath, and they can’t do it. That’s because the tensions involved in that fight or flight breathing have hardened, over time, like carbonite around Han Solo. And breathing as though there’s an emergency, all the time, when there’s not, and sending those constant stress signals to your brain? That ain’t right. That’s unnatural. And call me crazy, but it seems like, quite possibly, the number one problem that needs solving in most people’s lives.

How to Liberate Your Breath

I mentioned before that of all the autonomic functions, breathing is the one we can consciously control. So if there’s a problem with an autonomic function, conscious breathing provides a means “talk” to that part of yourself, in its own language, and start to guide it back to a natural state. (It doesn’t understand English, despite what some “positive thinking” and “affirmation” gurus might have you believe.) This is why we all instinctively know to tell someone to take a deep breath to relax, even though chronic tensions tend to make that advice ineffectual. It’s also why there are so many types of breathing exercises.

But herein lies the problem with most forms of breathing exercises found in popular types of “body-mind” practices: usually, they’re all about controlling the breath, when the whole problem is that the breath is overly controlled in the first place. With Neuromuscular Release Work (NRW), the goal of the breathing exercises is not to control the breath, but to liberate it—to detonate the tensions so that the body can breathe fully, deeply, and naturally, all on its own, and return to a state of rest and digest, instead of staying stuck in fight or flight. The NRW breathing exercises work in a very specific way to accomplish that, and though they might resemble other breathing exercises on paper, in practice, the difference is huge.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some benefits to be had from those other breathing exercises. But I’ve worked with many students and teachers of yoga, tai chi, and chi kung who do a little NRW with me and realize for the first time that despite all their training in breath control, they’ve never really taken a deep breath. Instead of escaping the grip of emergency breathing, they had only been learning to control their breath within it.

That can be a devastating realization for someone who’s put all their eggs in the basket of a particular practice, which is why it’s so important to experiment with many different techniques before committing fully to a path. Just because it’s offered at your gym doesn’t mean it’s the only way, the best way, or even a particularly effective way. You have to rely on your own experience and experiments, and it’s far better to find out sooner than later what certain practices offer and what they lack.

But whether or not you’re going to experiment with NRW, you can start to have an impact right now by simply paying attention to your breath. (Yes, you, and yes, right now). Don’t try to manipulate it or change it for now, just shift your attention to it and observe. The first thing to notice is that you probably weren’t paying any attention to your breathing up until that moment; it was happening automatically. The second thing you’ll likely notice is that by simply putting your attention on the breath, it naturally becomes a little deeper, a little more rhythmic. Pay more attention, and you’ll start noticing where your blocks and tensions are. Pay even more attention, and you’ll probably realize you need some stronger medicine to start breaking down those blocks. When that time comes, NRW awaits you.

The Fall and the Resurrection

The crystallization of tension around the breath is something that happens gradually. When my first niece was born, I remember marveling at how free her breath was in those first few months, how perfectly rhythmic, deep, and natural. I also knew that the stresses of growing up, learning to think, and developing a personality to navigate a complex social environment would all gradually pile on tension until, in just a few years, that breath would constrict. And it has. It’s not her fault, of course; it’s just what happens.

But that doesn’t mean we have to keep the tension for a lifetime. We can take the next step and learn to put the body back into a state of primal, energized relaxation. That’s the beginning of a resurrection that has to be experienced to be fully understood and appreciated. You’re reading it here in black and white, but when you click into a full-scale, 3-D, prismacolor experience of what that kind of energized relaxation is actually like, you’ll know, and you’ll understand the depth, power, and profundity of what it really means to relax and take a deep breath.

It isn’t all sunshine and rainbows:

The Dark Side of Mindfulness

The post Don’t Forget to Breathe appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Is the much-touted “attitude of gratitude” something you want to develop as you go about training your body and mind into its peak potential? I say yes, and not just because it’s that time of year. And lest this sound like Pollyanna, I’d go so far as to say that, although gratitude is wonderful to share with those around you, it’s also one-hundred percent, unapologetically selfish.

Gratitude as a Tool for Progress

We have a whole holiday dedicated to gratitude, and to me, that means two things. For one, on some level, we all acknowledge the importance of gratitude. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t all be getting together every year, keeping the Butterball company in business. But it also means that we need a reminder. We need a whole ritual, days off, and family and friends to support us in remembering to be grateful. It doesn’t come automatically, and it doesn’t always come naturally.

Gratitude is an emotional force that few have learned how to harness. Many of us know how to use emotions like anger or pride to give juice to our workouts and in our lives, but not many of us know how to use a basic attitude of thankfulness to further our goals. It’s like the thigh bone of a beast that we haven’t yet realized we can use as a weapon, so it just sits there while we beat our chests and ineffectually throw rocks at the monkeys across the watering hole.

I submit to you that gratitude can be harnessed in common, everyday situations to help you navigate your way through your workouts, on good days and bad—to help get you in the zone and keep you there. It’s a force like any other, and if you know how, you can make it work for you. And as Bluto said to Flounder in Animal House, it don’t cost nothin’.

When Things Are Going Your Way

Imagine it’s one of those rare perfect days, when you have one of those rare perfect workouts. It’s sunny, but not too hot. Your favorite shorts and t-shirt are both fresh out of the dryer. Your music sounds better than usual in your earbuds as you proceed into what happens to be your favorite day in your cycle at the gym. You’re hitting it hard, feeling the swell, the endorphins, your heart-rate going up, the sweat breaking, and you think yourself, yes, this is why I do it. And what’s this? A new personal best, without even trying all that hard. Absolutely nothing or no one can stop you. And everyone notices it, too. All eyes in the gym are on you, and you could get phone numbers and dates just by looking at people. Hold up a particular brand of deodorant, and they’d line up to buy it. For whatever reason, today is your day. You’re in the zone, and you know it.

I’m sure you’ve found yourself in that state of grace from time to time. Some days are just perfect. Some workouts are perfect. I don’t know exactly how that works or why, but I do know that your mind will probably take it way too seriously, become way too big headed, and be genuinely surprised when the perfection ends unceremoniously a few hours later with a stubbed toe, an argument with a spouse, or finding out Jamba Juice is out of spirulina or whatever.

But the point is, those perfect workouts do happen. And that can be the easiest time to pivot into gratitude, if you can manage to get over yourself. Sure, you can just let your ego take credit for everything good in the world, but if you do that, you’re also going to blame yourself when things go wrong. And things will always go wrong, eventually.

Being grateful when things are going well seems easy, until you remember it isn’t about your ego. [Photo credit: Precision CrossFit]

The key to maintaining that state of flow is shifting from the attitude of “I’m so wonderful,” to “thank you.” To be clear, I’m not talking about addressing yourself to any sort of higher power, unless that happens to be your thing. And I don’t mean addressing your gratitude to your parents, your high school coach that really “got” you, the kids who made your shoes, or any other specific persons. The most effective attitude of gratitude is non-specific. It’s a feeling, an emanation outward, a simple acknowledgement that countless forces had to align to make your perfect day happen, and that your perfect day is fleeting, so you’d better appreciate it while it’s happening.

If you can settle into that feeling, something beautiful happens. You relax. You don’t need to grasp at the good stuff and get anxious about making sure it never goes away, or run around trying to make sure everyone knows how wonderful you are. That just gives away your power, puts a leak in the boat, and short-circuits the flow you found yourself graced with. Unless you can relax into it and accept it without attachment, even good stuff can become a curse. So next time you’re having a day like that, try an experiment. Resist the urge to take a picture and post about it on Instagram, or whatever you do to show off. Instead, take a deep breath, sink into the feeling, say “thank you” (to no one in specific), and keep doing what you’re doing. See what happens. You’ll likely find you have more power, more energy, and a greater depth and breadth of deep relaxation. The state of flow will last longer, and over time, become more accessible.

When the Cards Are Stacked Against You

We all have perfect days, but we all have terrible ones, too, when all forces seem to be working against us. You oversleep and have to rush your morning. It’s raining, hard, and your only clean gym clothes are your too-short, too-blue shorts and the faded, cutoff Bob Marley t-shirt you can’t remember why you ever bought. One of your earbuds is busted, so you can’t even find refuge in your favorite motivation playlist. You’re tired, your form is poor, and everyone’s looking at you like it’s your first day picking up something heavy. And it’s leg day of all days, and no one really likes leg day, do they? You have to grit your teeth just to get through a workout that should be easy.

Maybe yesterday was one of your perfect days, and suddenly here you are, back at the beginning of the maze. When things were going well, it seemed like that’s how it would be from now on. You figured out life, once and for all, right? When things are going terribly, it also seems like things will be that way forever. But neither state is permanent, and neither one is worth focusing on. More importantly, both states are transparent to gratitude.

It may seem easier to tap into gratitude when things align in your favor, but maybe not. It may just make your head even bigger. In fact, bad days can be an even more powerful portal into gratitude and flow. After all, your ego has already taken a big knock. What do you have to fall back on? What can you look toward that you can be grateful for, and what inner resources might emerge when you stop whining and start looking? With that simple inner gesture, you can do a mental one-eighty, and not only break the “bad day” trance, but discover new insights and abilities you may have had locked away in a corner of your mind and never even suspected.

For one thing, it’s a great opportunity to see that maybe you’re not so in control as you thought you were, and not in a bad way. Trying to have nothing but perfect days, as a way to protect your delicate vanity, is no way to train mental toughness. It’s fear-based, and ultimately futile. Mental toughness doesn’t mean everything is always great; it means you are unphased, strong, powerful and relaxed no matter what is going on around you. I’ve even deliberately worn clothes to the gym that I thought looked ridiculous, just to force the issue for myself. There are plenty of little tricks you can do to undermine your fearful little ego in all its hiding places, and force yourself to develop an indestructible inner equanimity, no matter what’s going on around you.

In the process of daily ups and downs, gratitude is the great equalizer. It reminds you that whatever is going on right now isn’t the whole of reality. And because of that, those bad days are as much of a blessing as the good ones, maybe more so, because they force you to dig deeper. And that, in turn, is all the more reason to be grateful for them. The process compounds itself. When you start to see there’s always a reason to be thankful, you see that bad days are in the flow, too, and that it’s really just you interpreting them as bad. More little portals open into the zone, and you start to realize you can get there from anywhere.

Gratitude is the great equalizer, allowing you to see good days and bad as all part of the flow. [Photo credit: J Perez Imagery]

Hardest When You Need It the Most

I suppose you could take a look at these examples and say, hey, this is pretty mundane, everyday stuff. What about when I lose a loved one? When I get into a car accident? When I get married, or receive a Nobel prize for discovering a new chemical element in my home laboratory? I would say that all the same principles apply to those extreme situations. But those are rare, and should they happen, they’ll likely put you into a sort of altered state anyway. A mother can lift a car up to save her infant child in a temporary mania of superhuman strength, but we wouldn’t call that strength training. I’m talking about cultivating an everyday gratitude that you can develop and make permanent, not a once-a-year or when-crazy-shit-happens gratitude.

Gratitude takes practice, like everything else worth developing. The most important thing is to remember to do it, and that can be hardest when you’re hypnotized by a bad day, which incidentally, is when you need it the most. But also like every other trait, the more you practice it, the easier it gets. And if you start by being mindful of it when it’s easy, it’ll be more accessible when it isn’t.

Like most aspects of mental training, the problem of gratitude mostly comes down to resistance. It’s not so much being grateful as it is getting rid of all the stuff in the way of being grateful, clearing out the mental and emotional junk so you can start programming yourself, and not just allowing yourself to be programmed by whatever is going on around you, a slave to circumstance.

For most of us, there’s plenty of that junk in the way. That’s why when it comes to any kind of mental training, I say start at the root. Hit the inner enemy where it lives: in the deep, chronic tensions and stresses that you carry around with you everywhere you go. That’s the stuff that gets triggered and activated on a bad day, and makes it seem so hard to be grateful. It’s also what tempts you into a limited, ego-clad response to good things happening, which also short-circuits gratitude. Clean the window of your perception, and you’ll find you never left the flow. It’s always been there, all around you, all the time, and always will be, if you have the eyes to see.

Getting the most from the body requires conditioning the mind:

The Performance State: How to Develop Athlete Self-Awareness

The post The Thanks Giving Zone Boosts Performance appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I’ll never forget a story a friend told me back in college, when we were taking Judo classes together. It may have been apocrypha, or made up on the spot, or even from a movie I never saw—this friend was known for spinning some yarns—but I don’t care. I like it just the way he told it.

Back in feudal Japan, when Samurai roamed the countryside, a couple master swordsmen found themselves squaring off to fight. These guys were both masters, and the fact that they were both still alive attested to that. For them, a fight meant a fight to the death, and that death could happen in a single stroke. Given the stakes, they each knew they couldn’t just rely on their own strengths. They had to rely on the other’s weaknesses.

So they took their positions, each one eyeing down the other, waiting for an opening; watching for the slightest distraction, the smallest hint of weakness that would invite an attack. But it never happened. They stood there, swords drawn, and kept standing there, until finally the sun went down. Neither of them ever gave an opening. So they both just went home. No one won. No one lost. The fight never happened.

I’m not sure what went on after that. Maybe they settled their dispute over checkers later, or just became pals. The point is, they didn’t even need to compete to find out the other couldn’t be beat. The whole battle took place before it started.

It reminds me of a saying from the great (and historically real) Samurai swordsman, Miyamoto Musashi: “If you can make your opponent flinch, you’ve already won.” Neither of the two Samurai ever flinched; they both had unshakable, invincible mindsets. But that’s the rare exception. Most of the time, someone does flinch, and when they lose, we say they died by the other’s sword.

But what that story teaches is the invisible reality underneath appearances: the loser died by his own mind.

The Battle Is Everywhere

This sort of battle for mental dominance happens all the time, on all different scales, in everyone’s lives, not just these possibly fictional Samurai. It happens at work, in traffic, in athletic competition, in negotiating your kids’ bedtime. It happens between a public speaker and his audience, a performer and his crowd, on dates, and in job interviews. It even happens during solo workouts, when two voices in your head square off, one saying you can’t do it, and the other saying you can. However subtle it may be, and however much we may prefer to ignore it, it’s there. Wherever two or more gather, a primal battle for dominance is with them.

And if the Samurai story sounds sort of strange, it’s because of how rare a stalemate like that is. Usually, the winner and loser—the dominant mind and the submissive mind—are decided in a split second’s time. And once the roles are cast, it’s extraordinarily difficult to change the script. Alpha and Beta positions are set, and the rest of the interaction is framed and determined by that power differential.

So how do we win that mental game? How do we show up so that we’ve already won, and not get caught off guard, flinch, and feel that blade, metaphoric or otherwise, sink into out flesh? In my experience, it comes down to a combination of what I’ll call preparation, intent, and letting go.

Winner and loser are often decided in a split second. How do you arrive at that second better prepared than your opponent?

Own Your Preparation

This one probably seems obvious, and in a way it is. You have to be prepared, well-trained, and well rehearsed. I suppose it’s possible one of those Samurais could have beat the other, even if he was less prepared. A better-trained competitor can drop the ball on the mental side and get beat. But it’s not the kind of thing you want to bank on. So job one is to thoroughly prepare.

Lots of people attribute their wins to proper preparation. But countless people who’ve failed thought they were prepared, too, and probably were, in one sense. It’s entirely possible—and probably not uncommon—to be disciplined and diligent in getting ready, but never let yourself trust that you are ready. No matter how much preparation you do, you can keep spinning out in your mind about all the things that could happen, frantically trying to put out imaginary fires in your head all the way up to, and even during performance.

That’s the difference between preparing and actually being prepared. Being prepared means getting to the point where you can forget about all the preparation you’ve done, because you trust that it’s done. You can do all the training in the world, but if it doesn’t translate into trust and confidence in yourself, you’re never going to be able to relax. If you can’t relax, you can’t improvise, or respond intelligently to the actual situation as it unfolds in real time. You’re opening yourself up to huge vulnerabilities, either from the outside, or from your own internal psych-outs. You’re going to freeze up, and you’re going to flinch.

It’s necessary to be prepared, but it’s not sufficient. You can be a world-class expert in whatever it is you do, and still fail to take the dominant position. There are many talented, capable people out there who never made anything happen because they couldn’t translate their preparation into a win. And that brings us to the next ingredient: intent.

The Intent to Win

Few people play to win. Most play not to lose. And if you start out like that, you’re placing yourself in the inferior position from the get go. You’re on your heels, and it’s up to luck or the mercy of those around you not to steamroll right over you. If you don’t set a solid intent to dominate and win, you might as well bow, bend your head to the blade, and beg the other guy to get it over with fast.

By intent, I don’t just mean a verbal affirmation or a visualization. Those can help to anchor intent, but if they’re not impregnated by a raw, emotional force, they become empty rituals at best, and self-indulgent fantasies at worst. Real intent is a feeling. More than that, it’s a feeling of certainty. It’s not, “I hope this will happen,” or “I want this to happen,” though desire is an important ingredient. It’s a deep, unshakable certainty that this will happen.

For one thing, that puts your victory firmly in the realm of possibility. After all, if you don’t really believe something’s possible, how are you going to make it happen? If you find yourself having a hard time setting a strong intent, that’s a valuable opportunity to inquire into whatever is blocking you. It’s critical to root those blocks out, or at least become aware of them. Your intent will have a hard time taking root if the soil is already overgrown with fears, doubts, and apprehensions.

When you truly succeed in setting your intent, there’s an unmistakable “click” that happens. There’s no longer a question in your mind; the matter is settled. It should feel like going out and actually doing what you’ve intended is just a formality.

When intent is properly set, seemingly miraculous things can occur. Your mind can find ways to succeed that it wouldn’t if it were even the slightest bit unsure of itself. And like preparation, intent has to be so total that once you’ve set it, you can forget about it, trusting it to do its job. Because the final and possibly most important ingredient here is the ability to clear your mind of contents and let go into an inspired performance.

There is no time in a fight to worry about all the possibilities.

The Hardest Step: Letting Go

Once you’ve done everything you can on the level of preparation and intent, it’s time to get out of the way and let them do their work for you. Because although you’re prepared and certain of your win, you don’t know exactly how that win is going to come about. You need to be mentally open, aware, and totally responsive to what’s going on in front of you. You need to be in the moment.

If you’ve prepared properly, you don’t need to be thinking about your performance; if you’ve set your intent, you don’t need to worry about willing your victory. You’ve done everything you can on those two fronts, to the point where you can trust yourself, and now you can forget about both. Those Samurai were both able to not die that day because their minds were empty. They were both completely tuned in to what was actually going on in front of their faces, not lost in ideas or anticipations about what might happen in the next second.

This kind of letting go is a radical inner maneuver, and it can be the most challenging and counterintuitive part of the formula. It means letting go even of your attachment to winning. After all, that attachment doesn’t actually help anything. All it does is breed anxiety and a fear of losing. No matter how much you want the win, there has to be some part of you that is placid and indifferent, watching the whole thing as though from a distance.

When it’s time to perform, desiring a win or fearing a loss can only take up mental space and pull you out of the moment.

Most of us have probably chanced our way into this state of letting go at some point. When we do, we call it being in the zone, or the flow. Things just seem to happen effortlessly, your body moves itself, and your performance exceeds what you thought you were capable of. While it can sometimes seem like an almost mystical state, as though some foreign power has momentarily blessed you with its presence, it’s really just what happens when you get out of your own way. It’s not weird that it happens; it’s weird that it doesn’t happen more often.

Once you’ve prepared properly, set an unshakable intent, and then let go of all attachments and preconceptions, you’ve arrived at an invincible mindset. Like the Samurai, you may not beat the other guy, but he’s definitely not going to beat you. Worst case scenario, you both go home when the sun goes down and practice calligraphy, or whatever Samurai do in their spare time.

How to Get There From Here

As I mentioned, these battles for mental dominance take place all the time, all around you. They can be playful, or they can be deadly serious, but they’re always happening, and they’re certainly happening when anything important is on the line. There’s not space here to give all the countless examples from even a single, ordinary day, but I’m sure you can reflect and see how the principles I’ve outlined above apply to countless situations, big and small. Start looking for them, and you’ll start seeing even more.

In a way, each of these three elements can be seen as offshoots of one thing: mental toughness, a quality which I define very simply as high dominance and low stress. When you’ve got mental toughness dialed in, then it’s easy to win the game before it starts. Unfortunately, too few people take the time to train their minds in a serious way.

There may be a few ways to train mental toughness, but the surefire bullet for me and my clients over the years has been Neuromuscular Release Work (NRW). Since the main obstacle to setting an invincible mindset is basic fear, tension and anxiety, NRW attacks those inner opponents where they live: the brain and the body. Once you win that inner battle with your own primal self, the rest comes easy.

Mental toughness lies at the root of every game we play and every battle we fight, inner and outer. It’s why those Samurai lived to fight another day. And though it may not win you every single battle out there in the world, it’ll win you a lot, and most importantly, it’ll make certain you never beat yourself before you start.

Preparation doesn’t just happen in the gym:

How to Mentally Rehearse Your Weightlifting Competition

The post Get a Samurai Mindset: Unshakable and Invincible appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I see him everywhere: the man cursed by stress. Though his face and name may change, the story is always the same. Today he’s standing in line at Starbucks, a line that overflows out the door onto the shopping mall floor, all the way to the cell phone kiosk and the distressingly large ad for a distressingly large cinnamon roll.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and it’s dawning on all these shoppers that the weekend is almost over. Just one last jolt of caffeine to carry them through the drive home, the unpacking, the dinner and TV, and the disappointment that it all went by so quickly again.

Right now, our man is the middle of the line. His two kids—four and seven years old, I’d guess—circle around him in what can only be a sugar-fueled frenzy. His face is frozen in a barely contained expression of impatience and frustration while his wife, loaded to capacity with shopping bags, gives him a sour look. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I can feel the passive aggression as thick and sickly as the smell wafting from the Cinnabon behind me.

I see the curse of stress coursing through him. It’s in his posture: his sunken chest, his slumped shoulders, and his locked knees taking tiny steps forward as the line moves almost imperceptibly. It looks like he’s almost holding his breath, inhaling rarely, like a drowning man getting his head above water for just a moment before sinking back down into the black. He smiles timidly and mutters meek apologies as shoppers walk past him, trying to get through the line that cuts across the flow of foot traffic.

In front of him in the line stands the specter of his future: an old man, hunched over further than seems possible, as though the weight of world had finally crushed him. But our man can’t see he’s headed there, too. His vision is too myopic, too distracted and consumed by the stresses of the moment. It’s like he’s watching his life on TV with his face right up against the screen, unable to get in and change the script.

The Universal Curse of Stress

It’s a curse as old as man himself. Stress. Tension. And at the root of it, a primal, animal fear, a vestige from a distant past, a fight-or-flight response gone haywire and made chronic, as though some terrible danger lurking just out of sight could pounce and strike at any second.

But nothing is pouncing. Nothing is striking. He’s surrounded by the din of a crowded mall filled with plenty of food, plenty of shelter, plenty of people, plenty of everything. His bags overflow with stuff he probably doesn’t even need. He and his family are safe. But in the night of his primal mind, a nameless, formless dread hangs like a mist.

Maybe on some level he’s aware of the curse. Maybe he has some self-help books in his Barnes and Noble bag, books that will gather dust on his shelf, or that he’ll read through once for a small sense of vicarious relief, and then forget about forever. But more likely, he’s grown so used to this chronic stress that it’s become almost invisible, far in the background, like a heavy curtain swaying slowly behind a stage.

Looking at him, I can only wonder if he knows that this is it. This isn’t a practice round, or a dress rehearsal. This is his life. And it’s slipping away a minute at a time while he worries about his phone plan and his car payments and whether they’ll make his pumpkin caramel latte right this time.

I see him everywhere, this man cursed by stress. I used to see him in myself, years ago, before I took action to break the curse. And once in a blue moon, he’ll return in brief flashes to haunt my mirror again as a reminder and a warning.

Maybe he haunts yours, too.

The same neurological response that used to let us deal with saber-toothed tigers is now triggered by credit card bills.

The Origins of the Curse

One of the coaches I trained—a former corporate consultant who quit that world because of the overwhelming stress—calls this curse “civilization disease,” and something about that phrase rings true. There are those who romanticize the time before civilization, as though it were pure Eden before the agricultural revolution, when we started building walls and guarding surpluses against invaders. And maybe those really were the good old days. We’ll never really know for sure.

But we can find a clue by taking a look at animals in the wild; those lucky creatures untouched by the curse of stress. Sure, they have to fight for their survival, but after a potentially traumatic event, they shake it off. Literally, their bodies go through convulsions where the stress is discharged from their nervous systems. They’re then able to return to a relaxed state of “rest and digest,” and reset their neuromuscular systems entirely.

We humans, on the other hand, tend to hang onto stress for a lifetime, never discharging. We get stuck between gears: rarely fully in flight-or-fight mode, but never entirely out of it. We can speculate about why that is, but the important thing is that somewhere along the way, our natural, primal mechanism for discharging stress got disrupted.

That means the stress doesn’t come from the outside, but from within, and hits you with the same signals in your brain you’d be getting if that credit card bill were an actual saber-toothed tiger. But since there’s no saber-toothed tiger to run away from or fight, the body and brain get stuck. The primal life force becomes stifled, and with nowhere else to go, it turns against you.

That accumulation of stress and tension is particularly pronounced in people who have undergone traumas, and for them the process of dismantling must proceed very carefully, at least at first. But the simple act of being born and growing up, even for the average person in a loving environment, can be at least mildly traumatic. And when tension continues to build upon itself without ever discharging, all those little incidents can add up to as much inner pressure as a full-blown trauma. We are all, in a way, traumatized by chronic stress. We’re the walking wounded, and we don’t even know it.

How to Break the Curse, Once and for All

To get back to a natural state—or more likely, to get there for the first time—you need to break the dam of tensions in the body, and let the water find its own level. But by the time you’ve reached adulthood, or even adolescence, these inner resistances are so deeply entrenched, you need some strong medicine to crack them open. That’s where Neuromuscular Release Work (NRW) comes in.

If that man in the mall were to find his way past the distractions of the day to find me and my work, I’d start him off on a steady diet of daily NRW exercises. Nothing too heavy at first, but enough to start cracking into the surface levels of tension, and to get him into a daily rhythm. Most importantly, I’d start getting him out of his head and into his body, where the real battle always takes place.

That may start out feeling uncomfortable for him. After all, he hasn’t been solidly in his body for years, even if he happens to be physically fit in a traditional sense. There’s nothing unusual about that: the body’s natural response to the chronic discomfort of the stress state is to numb out. Those daily exercises would gradually re-sensitize his system, while also draining tensions from the areas that hold the most low-hanging fruit: the shoulders, the face, and the breath.

Then once a week, I’d guide him through longer, full NRW sessions, including a very specific type of breathing; exercises that dig into deep tensions all over the body, and a mindfulness meditation to help broaden the scope of his conscious awareness. Some of the exercises would be gentler, and others more cathartic and aggressive. It all depends on him, and how his body responds moment by moment. These sessions will hit a lot harder than the daily exercises, and his system will need time to recover and adjust, as it does after any kind of workout, so I’d make sure he doesn’t go too far too fast.

And when the dam truly breaks, his body will wake up and participate, helping shake off the tension on its own, like the animals in the wild. But since that process hasn’t happened in him for a while, there’s going to be a big backlog of tension to discharge. As that occurs, he’ll likely feel some new sensations and bursts of energy. This is nothing esoteric, just the natural energy of the nervous system releasing itself from his blocks, though it might feel almost supernatural at first if he never knew such a thing was possible. I’d make sure he knows it’s perfectly normal, and to get used to it. Because the fact is, his system wants to get back to its natural state, to shake off the stranglehold of tension. All we have to do is get all the junk out of the way and let the nervous system do its thing.

Your body doesn’t want to stay in a stressed state, but you have to learn how to let go of it.

As it does, his body will begin to adjust itself into a more natural, primal posture. His spine will lengthen and align, and his muscles will relax more deeply than he thought possible. And though this movement is really just returning to his natural state, he will experience it as almost a miracle, having been exiled from himself for so long.

All of this will likely precipitate some big shifts in his attitudes, and his life. Crystallized patterns of behavior will start to break loose, and in all likelihood, people around him will notice it before he does. He’ll just look around one day and say, “Huh, didn’t there used to be some sort of problem? Something I used to stress about?” He won’t even remember. All that will be in its place is a pleasant absence, an empty space of mental freedom and flexibility.

And when that starts to happen, he can throw all those self-help books in the fire, because what they try to get you to imitate, he now possesses for himself. The floodgates of his primal life force have opened, the usurper of stress has been dethroned, and the curse has been broken.

Life After Stress

I realize I may have seemed a little harsh describing the guy in the Starbucks line. For most people, he may just seem like an ordinary guy doing ordinary things, wandering through life in an ordinary trance. And of course, I’m sure he has plenty of wonderful things in his life and his relationships. It’s not all bad, even if you are accursed.

That’s the funny thing about breaking free of chronic stress. When you’re in it, it just seems normal. After all, it’s the quicksand everybody’s stuck in, and we all drearily commiserate about how stressful our lives are, what a big problem it is, but without ever taking seriously the idea that we could make actual, meaningful change. In a backwards sort of way, stress itself has become our safety blanket. Our tension actually protects us from the vulnerability and high voltage of life lived raw and direct.

Of course, once you get used to life beyond stress, it ceases to feel vulnerable and high voltage. It just becomes the new normal. Crossing the bridge may demand some adjustment, but once you’ve made it across, you can’t imagine you ever lived like you did. You start to see that the so-called normal state of being is not the natural state, and that the natural state of high energy, ease, and flow is desperately rare, not only in our society, but in our world. And once you see it, you can’t un-see it.

While it’s not your fault to be stricken by the curse of stress, it is your responsibility to do something about it. The solutions are there if you seek them out. They may not be the most obvious or in-plain-sight, like the self-help books at the shopping mall bookstore, but they’re out there. Seek and ye shall find.

We all start in pretty much the same place with all this, and there are crossroads where we get to choose between the safe and the scary—the warm, gooey sleep of unconsciousness, and the dizzying exhilaration of true freedom. And if our man does decide to break his addiction to stress? He’ll find he’s inherited far more than he could have imagined. The next time I see him at the mall, he’ll be smiling a natural, authentic smile, standing tall, firm, and relaxed, not because he temporarily outran whatever hellhound of worry happened to be chasing him that hour, but because he won the battle once and for all. And now, maybe for the first time he can remember, the curse is broken.

Releasing Stress Doesn’t Have to Involve Sitting Still:

The Art of Mindful Movement

The post The Curse of Stress, and How to Break It appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

But there’s a dark side to everything, and failure to acknowledge and anticipate the starker potentials in mindfulness are a big reason many people’s practices hit a wall long before opening their deeper transformative potentials.

What do you do when your mindfulness practice inevitably brings those starker inner realities to the surface? [Photo courtesy: J Perez Imagery]

The Problem with Mindfulness

There’s a honeymoon period when you start to expand your awareness and deepen your attention through mindfulness. You realize, “Wow, I’ve never really tasted that protein shake before! I never really felt these shorts! I can honest-to-god feel my feet inside my shoes!” Your whole inner landscape gets drenched with an enhanced sensory awareness that’s always been there, but that you’d somehow never quite paid attention to before. You’re in the moment, in the flow, in the zone.

But before long, that expanding awareness slams right into all the stuff you’ve been trying not to pay attention to: your inner critic, your self-judgement, your worry, your insecurity. All the little habits and rationalizations you let yourself get away with; all the memories that make you wince; all the unacknowledged, unresolved stuff churning away in the background of your mind; the whole ocean of inner storms that’s just waiting to be stirred up.

And when it does get stirred up—which, if your practice is effective, it will—it’s all too common for a beginner to skitter back into unconsciousness, shut the sensory gateway back down to a more manageable slice of reality, and forget the whole thing ever happened. It’s like the soreness and suffering in the early stages of an exercise program. If you haven’t worked out for most of your life, there’s likely going to be a pretty rough transition period. And if you’re not aware of that ahead of time, the shock can be enough to short-circuit your efforts before you get even close to the good stuff.

That’s why it’s so important to set realistic expectations about what might come up during your mindfulness practice. You’ll have to retrain yourself, bit by bit, to recognize discomfort as a positive indication that you’re one step closer to a breakthrough. If you recognize it when you see it, you’ll be less likely to try to block it out, and more likely to see it for what it is: a sign, albeit an uncomfortable one, that the process is working.

One Awareness, Multiple Levels

In order to anticipate the challenges that come with a mindfulness practice, it can be useful to separate your experience into different levels: mind, body, and emotions.

There is some basis for separating your experience into these categories, as the brain can be divided into its three main areas: the brainstem, which mostly governs the body; the limbic system, which deals primarily with memory and emotion; and the neocortex, which deals with language and abstract thought. But we’re not dealing with brain science here. We’re dealing with the raw data of your own direct perceptual experience—that’s the main material for mindfulness, not interpretations. And as long as you recognize that these different levels are just for convenience, you’re unlikely to get stuck in a rigid belief system that might limit your practice later on.

Of course, these different levels are not really separate. They overlap, they influence each other, and the lines between them blur. That’s one thing you realize if you stick with a mindfulness practice long enough: although it begins as a chaos of conflicting desires, thoughts, and sensations, you’re still a single entity, expressing yourself in a variety of ways. Getting to a deep state of integration and wholeness in your moment-to-moment experience is one of the great payoffs of mindfulness. All of your energies align, multiplying and assisting each other’s power, instead of warping your inner experience into a battlefield of contradictory impulses.

One Awareness, Multiple Levels: The Body

Each of these levels—mind, body, and emotions—has its own unique potential to show you things you’d rather not see, and to put the brakes on your mindfulness practice if you let it. We’ll start with the body, since that’s the most solid anchor in your awareness. Unless you’re asleep or dreaming of being a firefly or something, your body is always right there in your field of perception, easy to focus on. But despite its constant presence, there are many ways to be deeply and distressingly out of touch with your body, and just because you’re fit and healthy doesn’t mean you’re off the hook here.

As you start to tune in more and more to the signals the body is actually sending you (and not just evaluating it based on the reflection in the mirror, or metrics like weight or body fat), you may be in for some surprises. You may discover pains that you’ve been ignoring, though they’ve been there for years. You may suddenly become aware that you’re pushing yourself too hard in your training, or not hard enough. You may detect layers of tension you’d never really paid attention to, wrapping you like a mummy from head to toe. You may find that you’re unable to take a deep a breath, or that your breathing is fitful and shallow.

You may also have some pleasant surprises. As capacity for mindfulness deepens, it’s common for people to notice sensations like tingling in the skin, electricity in the spine, or feelings of nonspecific “energies” moving through the body in sometimes very surprising ways. These sensations can be not just fascinating and informative, but extremely pleasurable, though they’re usually hiding under a big pile of chronic tension and habitual unconsciousness.

Becoming aware of the more distressing bodily sensations can often be enough to dissipate their discomfort significantly. It’s natural to want to tune out discomfort, but if the body is trying to get your attention, the more you ignore it, the more it’s likely to act up. If you let it know you’re listening, it doesn’t have to yell as loud.

One Awareness, Multiple Levels: The Emotions

The same goes for emotions. We live in a culture with a long history of denying emotional realities, as though simply gritting and bearing every storm with stoic silence is the only way to get through tough times. It’s up to you whether you want to share your emotional experience with others, but if you’re not at least honest with yourself about what you feel on this level, it’s bound to become a stagnant swamp of unprocessed energies and arrested development.

Emotions aren’t a problem if they’re allowed to flow. But again, starting out, that can be tough, as you start to realize that you really are pissed off in traffic, that you really do get sad when that one song comes on, or that you really do feel a little bit of satisfaction when other people fail. And underneath those denied surface emotions are the great tides of unprocessed feelings from throughout your whole life, including early childhood, before you had any idea why you were feeling what you were feeling, or how to handle it. That stuff doesn’t just go away, and becoming increasingly mindful of your emotions can start out feeling like cleaning the world’s largest garage, filled with a lifetime worth of junk.

Beyond dealing with that backlog, the simple intensity of raw emotion can be enough to put a beginner back on his or her heels. But the more you become aware of your emotions in all their intensity, the less you become identified with them, and the less power they have over you. Paradoxically, it’s unconsciousness of emotions that leads to emotional compulsion.

One Awareness, Multiple Levels: Your Thoughts

Getting that kind of distance from your own inner experience is the name of the game with mindfulness, and nowhere is it more important than when you start looking at the third level: your thoughts.

We tend to assume that our thoughts are “ours,” but just a little peek under the hood reveals an almost entirely automatic process of perpetual rumination that goes on without your consent, or even your participation. It can be quite a shock to see that you’re not really thinking most of the time, but that your thoughts are simply happening to you. On this level, the great temptation is to get sucked into a perpetual stalemated negotiation with your thoughts. But as mindfulness will show you, you can never win that game, and ultimately, the content of your thoughts is irrelevant anyway. The only important thing is to get some distance from them, stop identifying with them, and stop feeding into their fickle tyranny.

That’s the beautiful thing about mindfulness: all you’re doing is noticing and becoming aware of your sensations, emotions, and thoughts, and that’s all you have to do. You don’t need to “fix” them or change them, and you certainly don’t need to judge them, or judge yourself for hosting them. Through the simple act of increasing and deepening awareness, most of those inner knots come untied all by themselves.

We want to see ourselves as strong, confident, intelligent, poised—never insecure, anxious, or dopey. [Photo credit: J Perez Imagery]

One Awareness, Multiple Levels: The Eye of Awareness

As long as we’re talking about levels, we may as well at least touch on this, because this is where all mindfulness practices end up if taken all the way: the final, invisible level of pure, unconditioned awareness. It’s hard to practice mindfulness earnestly and consistently without eventually asking this question: “If I’m observing the mind, the body, and the emotions, then who am ‘I’? Who is the one doing the observing? Who is aware?”

The answer inevitably is that you are the awareness itself.

This is the deeper level, the level that contains all of the content of your sensations, emotions, or thoughts, but is untouched by any of it. It is pristine, detached, and unaffected by even the most extreme negative experiences. And the more that you develop your mindfulness, the more your consciousness will rest at this level.

Of course, it’s one thing to understand that intellectually, and another to make it your living experience. To do that, you have to be disciplined in your practice, and work through all the challenges along the way. But remembering this baseline awareness can make the transition a lot easier. Looking at all the stark, unpleasant inner realities makes us so queasy because it tends to threaten our self-image. We want to see ourselves as strong, confident, intelligent, poised—never insecure, anxious, or dopey, which we inevitably are, at least some of the time.

Self-image is so easily threatened because it’s never really real. It’s only an idea. It’s not really who you are. And when you trade your self-image for reality, you’re always trading up. It probably won’t feel like it at first. It’ll probably feel humiliating to admit to yourself you’re not the idealized self you try so hard to be. But once that initial wince of humiliation passes, you’re left with a far greater virtue of humility.

The great irony is that a false self-image of strength and confidence is extremely vulnerable, and requires constant protection, rationalization, and self-deception to maintain as plausible. Humility, on the other hand, is effortless, and actually provides what self-image attempts to provide: a thick skin. Once you get real, reality is no longer a threat, and nothing can rattle your cage. That’s how mindfulness and humility lead to a foundation of mental toughness far more powerful than any you could create by forging a “positive” self-image and then trying to force yourself into its mold.

The Poison Is the Medicine

There are varying levels of “heat” that you can apply to your mindfulness practice, depending on how deep you want to take it, and how quickly. You can introduce more aggressive means, like Neuromuscular Release Work (NRW), my own preferred method, which includes a type of mindfulness meditation along with its more physical practices. With NRW, you get from point A to point B as quickly as possible by doing exercises that purge the blocks in the nervous system. When you do an inner power cleanse, you have no choice but to look at the stuff you’ve been ignoring—the good, the bad, and the ugly. But once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Or, you can go for a softer, more gradual approach, as with most traditional styles of mindfulness. My only caveat there is that you have to be truly vigilant and honest with yourself, or you risk simply spinning your wheels with surface observations and never truly challenging yourself. It’s all too easy to fool yourself and rationalize looking the other way when the shadow starts to descend.

But though there are many paths, there’s ultimately one destination, and regardless of which path you choose, sooner or later you’re going to have to face yourself. If you stick with your mindfulness practice, you will come across these challenges, sooner or later. Just remember, those challenges aren’t just unpleasant side effects. They’re the point. And by moving through them, you turn their poison into a medicine that will transform you, mind, body, and spirit.

So how do you move through them? What do you do when your mindfulness practice inevitably brings those starker inner realities to the surface?

Simply continue the protocol: welcome them, observe them, and allow them to just be there without reacting or resisting, however uncomfortable that may be at first. Because if you resist them, you’ll just make them more insistent. It’s like trying to push a beach ball underwater. Don’t fight them, and don’t run away from them. Just let them be there, in the full light of awareness, without judgement, rationalization, or identification. After a while, they’ll die of your indifference, and you’ll have conquered another big chunk of inner territory.

Easier said than done? Yup. But that’s why they call it a practice.

Become more mindful:

Meditation for Meatheads

Become more mindful with your athletes:

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The post The Dark Side of Mindfulness appeared first on Breaking Muscle.