Strength Training: a Meditation Tool

Time constraints are a major barrier for the majority of people looking to incorporate health and fitness behaviours.

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The number of behaviours you keep hearing about and reading about that you “should” be doing simply isn’t realistic.

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This is why it’s useful to find ways of combining health behaviours.

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Enter the resistance training and meditation combination!

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You probably know it’s a good idea to be strength training and I’m sure you’ve heard the many benefits of meditation-based protocols.

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How do these two health behaviours coincide so that we get the benefits of both?

Let’s start by looking at one form of meditation that has been studied extensively:

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Mindfulness

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Benefits of mindfulness include an improvement in anxiety-related symptoms, cognition, emotional stress, recovery, enabling awareness of positive emotions and even assisting you to be more mindful in your exercise and eating behaviours (Bigliassi & Bertuzzi, 2020).

I’m sure this is only scratching the surface but, either way, it seems to be an effective intervention for your health and fitness.

There may be issues trying to incorporate a meditation practice (such as mindfulness). These may include:

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- Time constraints

- Difficulty in sitting down to meditate/practice mindfulness

But here is a solution:

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Resistance training (with some intention) enables you to practise mindfulness.

How?

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The idea of mindfulness is the ability to be in the ‘present moment’; when the mind wanders, you’re able to bring it back to a focal point – such as your breathing, bodily sensations, sounds and so on.

Resistance training with a good amount of intent, can actually force you to be somewhat mindful.

Hutchinson & Tenenbaum, in their paper titled  ‘Attention focus during physical effort: The mediating role of task intensity’ (2007) concluded that:

“During conditions of high workload and prolonged duration, attention is focused on overwhelming physiological sensations, which dominate focal awareness. At this point an associative attention focus is almost unavoidable.”

This essentially means that you’re forced to shift your awareness internally (to things like the sensations in your muscles and your breathing rate) and are left with very little capacity to process anything else (such as past and future events).

In other words, you’re practicing mindfulness!

You won’t be focusing on past or future events and you’ll be continually forced back to focus on your bodily sensations.

The only catch is: you have to be training pretty hard!

The positive loop:

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The great news is that this feeds a positive loop.

All the practice of redirecting your attention towards your internal bodily signals may actually make the activity itself more pleasurable and also get rid of ruminating thoughts (stresses, anxieties, past/future emotions etc.)

So the training helps you practise mindfulness, which then helps you enjoy the training, and then you’re stuck in a positive loop where you’re reaping the benefits of both health behaviours.

The takeaway:

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Resistance training can be an effective way of incorporating a meditation practice without having to carve more time out of your day. You just have to do it somewhat consistently, and with a good amount of intention (train pretty hard). Training and meditation go hand in hand.

The next time you’re training, push yourself, be aware of/present with your bodily sensations, and reap the rewards of mindfulness and resistance training.

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References

1. Bigliassi M, Bertuzzi R. Exploring the Use of Meditation as a Valuable Tool to Counteract Sedentariness. Front Psychol. 2020 Feb 25;11:299. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00299. PMID: 32158418; PMCID: PMC7052308.
2. Hutchinson, Jasmin C. and Gershon Tenenbaum. “Attention focus during physical effort: The mediating role of task intensity.” Psychology of Sport and Exercise 8 (2007): 233-245.

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