Mind over Muscle

Author: Gary Ratson

February 5, 2010

Gary Ratson`s E-Take is sponsored by Immunocal, the elite athlete nutritional supplement for muscular performance since 1996.   www.wellnesswinnipeg.com

We have all heard of the mental and physical benefits of weight training.  Weight training improves metabolism and balances physiology more significantly than aerobic exercise for disease prevention and longevity--but it’s not a competition.  Yet for all our moaning and groaning, pushing and pulling, have we ever really tasted the permanent attitude adjustment that accompanies personally experiencing mindful muscular fitness?

A simple look around the gym will reveal tremendously ineffective techniques, ridiculous distractions and avoidance, and the same old people with the same old bodies year after year.  We are just not getting the full benefits for our time and effort.  It takes a radical kind of honesty, courage, and willingness to direct all your attention to the working muscle rather than denying the blood, sweat, and tears with music videos and idle gossip.

Go ahead and pick up the nearest ten or twenty pounds of dead weight.  Now hold it in your hand and really feel the weight of it.  I mean actually engage your biceps and spend a moment dropping into the actual experience, the literal sensation of muscle tension.  You need to knowingly and intentionally feel that feeling to get the most benefit.  Lift the weight a few inches.  Again stop and hold it without shortening or lengthening the muscle.  This isometric contraction begins to burn soon enough and it this burning sensation that you want to invite, allow, and observe without any reaction, distraction, or giving up.

Slooooowly contract the muscle through the full range of motion for any exercise, literally pausing each inch not to lose sight of the sensations.  Then hold your full attention to the contracting force at the top of the motion.  While lowering the weight, allow yourself time to notice the full engagement of the muscle at each point.  This observant pace offers the burning force that is the effective experience usually reserved for the last couple repetitions.  Most of us fall into the throwing and dropping the weight so commonly seen where acceleration and gravity are doing more of the work than the muscle and the mind.  Of course, the herky-jerkiness of the rest of the body fills out the goofy picture.

Granted, muscles like to be worked in various ways and cross training with all types of exercises have their benefits.  But this very slow resistance training allows you to experience your body in new ways.  You risk injury less, recover faster, and maintain your routine longer in life by using half the weight.  You are not enslaved to the number of plates or the number of reps because the only thing that matters is concentrating on and celebrating the pain.  Eventually, you actually know for yourself the full image of the muscle shown on the machine maybe for the first time.  Certainly, you feel different than after your usual workout to recognize you have done something profound.

See now how loud music and chit-chat simply interfere with the efficiency and success of training.  One of my Integral Coaching clients was told to quit weight training due to injury and arthritis.  Assuming he knew it all with thirty plus years of training, slow resistance training gave him a safe new lease on lifelong fitness.  All other fitness advice can be maximized from a completely new and enlightened experience of your own body.

Full range of motion, proper alignment and breathing naturally become part of mindful exercise because they are a needed means to insightful ends.  Transcending the ego as strength and endurance increase is almost doable when the competitive spirit to maximize weight is replaced with minimizing speed.  Less is truly more.  Your goals are realized immediately in the moment of crunching the muscle rather than a certain measurement of the tape.

The real miracle of mindful training is less in the movement and more in precision awareness.  That witnessing ability is literally the power that stimulates muscle strength, endurance, metabolism, and tone.  Any resistance, distraction, and avoidance of the short term discomfort through I-pods and videos is lessening the impact of laser focused attention.

Realize too that the degree weight lifting can elevate emotional states and moods depends on wilfully experiencing the physical strain, itself inclusive of the mental strain.  By surrendering, inviting, and allowing the pain into your line of sight the more it finds its release.

Most importantly, it is shocking to know your body in a brand new way after so many years, a way that brings joy and inspiration to a previously mundane ritual.  Here, the burning muscle sensations are accepted as necessary challenges to help face your all your pain in life, take your responsibility, and realize your true self.  That surely gives the whole reason, meaning, and purpose for physical activity a good shot in the arm.

the_souldoc@hotmail.com  Gary Ratson is the author of The Meaning of Health - The Experience of a Lifetime http://www.trafford.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000150916

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