How to Create a Mind / Body Connection Through Exercise

How can exercise improve your mindfulness? Learn about the Mind / Body connection and its importance to modern learning in the Blended Learning Hub. All resources available at the free Learner level: bit.ly/2mtSazG

Hey guys! It’s Amy Kilburn from Sunrise Fitness in Standish, Maine, and today I will talk to you guys about how establishing a regular workout routine, and getting exercise regularly can help strengthen your mind-body connection. So what’s really happening when you’re working out? Well the first thing that’s happening is on more of a subconscious level and its call proprioception. So that is how your body knows where its body parts are – your arms or your legs – in relation to each other while you’re moving. So this is what stops you from tripping over your own feet while you’re walking, ideally. So by working out and doing exercise more regularly, this strengthens your proprioceptive skills which in return is strengthening that mind-body connection, but just on a subconscious level because you are not really ever thinking, “Okay, where’s my right arm? Where is my left arm?” So what is also happening when you’re exercising regularly, is you start to learn feedback on your form. So this could be from a trainer, or a friend that you work out with, or by watching yourself in the mirror when you’re working out, and eventually it works its way to just feeling. So someone might be saying that your form is either good or bad on a specific exercise, and you learn from that and try to make it better the next time. So by doing this, you’re strengthening that mind-body connection again to the point where you eventually can feel what is right, which would be good form, and what is feeling wrong, which would be bad form. So it’s connecting, “Okay, this feels a certain way,” and then it’s going to your brain and saying, “This is either right or wrong” and you can improve on it for the next time. Also what’s happening while you’re exercising is you’re learning to tune in to how you’re feeling .So you might realize one day that your squats feel kind of easy, and that you could increase your weight. Or maybe you’re a runner and you can run a little longer or a little faster. This also works the other way, where someday you may tune in, and you’re running and you may say that something feels too hard, or that maybe it feels a little injured, you might need to back off or use a little lighter weight. So all of these things are strengthening that connection between your mind and your body. And it’s your body’s way of communicating and telling you different things that are happening, and then it sends a message, and your brain receives this message, and then it can decide what its next step is on how to improve your form, or how to go a little faster, or lay off for a little bit. So these things all also require you to be present in the moment. So it’s strengthening that ability for you to stay focused on what you’re doing, the task at hand in that moment. Working out requires you to pay attention to your body. How does something feel? How is this making your body react? And it requires that attention, so this brings us back to the present moment. So how does this help someone that sits at a desk all day long? So what this does is it makes you more aware, more naturally. You don’t have to think every few hours, “Okay. How am I feeling?” It just kind of comes to you, and you’re aware just because you’re used to paying attention, whether it be subconsciously or consciously. So your body tries to communicate with you in many ways when you’ve been siting for too long. So some ways that I’ve come up with to share with you guys that you can start to look out for is if your body gets antsy. So if you’re tapping your leg on your foot, you’re clicking your pen, or moving around in your chair, that might be one way of saying, your body saying it has a little bit of extra energy that it needs to get out. Now might be good time to get up, stretch, take a bathroom break or a lunch break, something like that. Another way is that your body becomes, or may become, stiff or have pain somewhere. So this could be a headache, your eyes may feel strained, back pain, hip pain, wrist pain from clicking on the mouse or typing, shoulder pain from having bad posture. A simple way of knowing that you’ve been sitting too long is if you’re hungry or thirsty, which is a simple way of your body saying it just needs to eat or drink, and not be sitting in front of a computer right now. And the last thing is that if you can’t focus. If you can’t focus on the task at hand, and your brain is going in a thousand different directions, that might be a great time to do a stretch. Connect that mind and body again. Get them back on the same page, so that you can do your job more effectively, and get things done how you want to get them done.