Mind and Muscle: “I’ll work it out at the gym”
“What happened?” “Wanna talk about it?” were my typical responses to whenever I saw that worried, upset expression on the face of a boyfriend I had in my early twenties. Sometimes, he’d talk, but a lot of the times he’d say: “I’ll work it out in the gym”. He would then return from the gym transformed, either saying he didn’t want to talk anymore or he talked with a calmer look on his face. I remember feeling intrigued by what was going on in that gym, fascinated by its transformative power and even somewhat jealous as I felt it was doing a better job at supporting my boyfriend than I was! Be forewarned: this is not going to be a blog on the powerful changes of brain chemistry through exercise!
In my early thirties, in a particularly anxious moment in my life, I decided to find out for myself what mysterious powers the gym had and I hired a trainer. Given the moment in my life, on the first days of training, I entered the gym to meet my trainer feeling frazzled and stressed - my brain desperately wanting to stay focused on the problems at hand, mulling them over and over in circular fashion as if revisiting the same issues for the hundredth time would magically offer a solution. I felt that sense of urgency that the gym was the last place I needed to be - wasting time while I had more important things to think about and do. However, not surprisingly, I felt better after each session. My expectation had been that it could simply offer a form of distraction and physical release from stress and the results I got in the beginning confirmed it. After the first few sessions, I decided to share my satisfaction with my trainer, only to be very surprised by her response. I told her: “I can’t thank you enough, you lead me through all these exercises, we chat between sets and I’m really enjoying it. I am following the things you say and get totally transported in our chats. We do the whole workout and I’m not even aware that I”m working out - I’m not even feeling my body! It’s great - almost as if I’m not working out! It’s a great distraction!” I was expecting my trainer to be happy with my compliment and was quite surprised at the time by her startled look and answer: “Sabina, I’m so glad you feel it’s helping, but to be completely honest - although feeling in a better mood is what we’re aiming for as well - I would actually like you to feel the exercises in your body.”
“But why?” I asked. Her answer was body “results based” as she explained that when you are working a particular muscle or group of muscles - focusing on the areas worked with your mind as you inhale through your nose as you begin the eccentric action and exhale through your mouth during the concentric action, this recruits more muscle fibers and results in a better workout for the muscles. In addition, feeling your body ensures that you push yourself enough for an effective workout as well as giving you feedback as to how your body is feeling in case you need to decrease the weight, number of repetitions or sets (how intensely you’re working out) to keep you safe. From that day forward, my trainer began training my mind to focus on my breath in conjunction with my muscles. At first I thought I was going to be sacrificing the soothing distracting effects of the workout by getting into my body. However, given that I was also there to become stronger and more fit, I agreed to give it a try. To my astonishment, this was when the real mental transformation began and I fully understood what my ex boyfriend had meant when he’d say “I’ll work it out at the gym”.
We are so used to thinking that yoga is the exercise form that connects us to the breath and the body, but I will venture to claim that in my opinion the exercise form that lends itself more readily to mindfulness is weight training! In a yoga pose you can focus on the breath and the feeling of the pose in your body - but weight training gives you a real flowing structure to practice mindfulness. The focus on different exercises targeting the different muscles - requiring a very particular method of breathing in order to effectively execute the movement, truly helps your mind to focus. There are many ways to practice mindfulness in exercise. When you paddleboard for example, you can connect to your body as you feel your feet planted on the board, the feel of your core engaging, leg muscles stabilizing you, and your arms and shoulders rhythmically moving the water and your board to the rhythm of the breath. You alternate between internally feeling your body and externally connecting with the environment (the water, the fresh air). In Zumba you connect with your body internally through the dance moves and externally as you fuse your movements to the energizing rhythms and the energy that you share with others in the room. But of all forms of exercise, it seems to me like lifting weights is the perfect structure to give you a practice that involves a particular different focus that flows as you go from one muscle to the next in connection to the breath - truly teaching you how to practice mindfulness so that you can then use it in forms of exercise where your mind is more free to pick and choose what to focus on, as well as in daily life.
I’ll leave blogging about the effects of exercise on brain chemistry to improve anxiety and depression to another time, but I just wanted to conclude that once I started working out like this in these focused workouts, with this focused intention, I found that when I was away from the gym, in my everyday life I was able to bring my mind back from worries so much more effectively. When you work out, as you’re doing a bicep curl for example, breathing in as you lower the dumbbell and breathing out as you lift it, your brain may try to inject a thought: “Oh goodness, what if I forget my words during the presentation tomorrow?!” But your mind can’t focus on it for long or else you lose the count you were on, you don’t breathe effectively and no longer find it possible to complete the repetition - basically your mind has too much pressure to manage to keep thinking of the worry and complete the exercise at the same time. Practicing mindfulness in this way becomes a fairly easy, structured way of practicing that is not as difficult as meditating or trying to practice mindfulness while holding a stationary yoga pose. As your mind practices observing thoughts pop up but needing to shift back to focusing on the task at hand - this starts to become the new habit. Your mind becomes less reactive to the thoughts. Next time when you’re trying to work on something - such as writing a presentation - and your mind starts to bring up “what if” thoughts for example, your mind will more likely fall back on the habit you’ve been practicing at the gym: back to focusing on the objectively non-threatening task at hand in the here and now!
As a certified personal trainer now, the very first thing I teach is breathing - connecting the exercises to the breath and the mind to the muscles to be worked. I started doing this at first strictly from a physical perspective: I wanted clients to ensure they used the correct form; they avoided straining, the valsalva maneuver; they could lift the optimal weight for their strength and goals. I also wanted to ensure that they could give me (in addition to my watching their body language) a subjective and fairly accurate feedback as to whether we needed to regress or progress the exercise or weight. However, to my delight they started giving me feedback of feeling physically grounded and of the mental sharpness and calmness they were experiencing after working out in this way, I was reminded of the wonderfully surprising positive psychological effects of this training! It is as much a mental training for life as it is a physical one! It is not surprising to me that research of resistance training is moving even beyond its effects on anxiety and depression and into helping clients through trauma where being able to reconnect and feel yourself in your body safely and bringing down the alarm signals from traumatic thoughts is so important. Stay tuned for a future blog on this subject!
