FOR BETTER AND MORE ENJOYABLE EXERCISE, Part 3

DO MINDFULNESS EXERCISES

“The more a thing knows its own mind, the more living it becomes.” – Samuel Butler

As assumed by some, physical activities that are needed for daily living and for work are not considered exercise. Exercise is an extra physical activity that is planned, structured and repeated to achieve certain objectives in life, like improving and maintaining one’s physical and mental health, and reducing the risk of age related chronic degenerative illnesses.

Mindfulness exercise makes exercise more enjoyable, relaxing and durable.

Mindfulness is an ancient Buddhist religious meditation concept that requires clearing the mind off all existing thoughts and worries, concentrating only to get in touch with your inner spirit, with your Creator. Solace, calm and joy always follow mindful meditation.

Mindfulness exercise is an exercise discipline that borrows the idea of meditation from Buddhism, and after clearing the mind off all thoughts and worries, applies to the present task at hand - the exercise activities. There should be no multitasking, no thinking about something else, no listening to music from a headset. Multitasking divides the attention among multiple tasks, and nothing is perfectly achievable.

The principle of mindfulness exercise starts with paying full attention to your breathing. We all know that our existence depends on life giving oxygen (O2) into the air, we breathe. Therefore, we should always exercise in wide open spaces like parks, seashores and forests, not on polluted city streets with heavy traffic. We should always breathe through our nose and not our mouths for a couple of important reasons. Because the air we breathe in is filtered by the hair in our nasal passages, humidified and warmed before reaching our lungs. In addition, we have our smell sense receptors located in our nose. We should smell fresh air, not exercise in foul smelling places. And friendly microbiome population in our nasal passages are like friendly microbiomes in our lungs, but not in our mouth.

We should concentrate on our diaphragmatic breathing by paying attention and feeling our diaphragm is contracting and moving downwards to expand our lungs to create a negative atmospheric pressure thereby help to fill our lungs with fresh air, and relaxing, moving upwards to push deoxygenated air out.

Our bodies have their own natural rhythms. It will tell us how much O2 we need, how fast and deep we should breathe, depending on the intensity and the duration of our exercise.

Then we should turn our attention to our heart. Exercise increases the heart rate to speed up the circulation and increases the volume of the blood to our hardworking organs during the exercise. We should notice if there is any discomfort, palpitation, chest pain and dizziness which should make us stop exercising and seeing our doctor before resuming our exercise.

Then we should pay attention to our locomotion, our musculoskeletal system, noticing how our body moves with ease, which muscle group and joints contract and moving forward and relaxing in synchrony with the other side.

Practicing mindfulness exercises should also involve guided positive imagery. We should imagine that exercise induced rapid and lifegiving blood circulation would bring all needed ingredients to heal, to repair and to make all our internal organs stronger, clear our mind off all the negative thoughts and worries, and wash out the waste products in our body. The power of positive thinking and imagery should never be forgotten.

Afterwards should turn our attention from our inner world to the outside world and nature for which we are a part of. We should notice the greenery, the trees, the flowers, flying and singing birds and listen to the bird songs which could be meditative music to our ears. We should notice manmade structures versus nature made, ever changing and living structures.

We should feel the ground under our feet, the pulling of gravity especially walking uphill. We should notice fellow walkers and wave to them hello, with a smiling face.

At the end of our workout, we should give ourselves a pat on the back for a job well done.

In summary, many observational studies provide compelling evidence that regular exercise provides and improves our physical and mental health, help control our weight, our blood sugar, reduce the risk of chronic illnesses, make our muscles and joints stronger and improve our ability and confidence to everything better in life.

So, I would like to ask - what are you waiting for?