Should You Be Incorporating Meditation in Your Training?

Incorporating Meditation In Your Training is a great ability to enhance your overall regimen. It's something that I personally feel doesn't get talked about enough. Most of the time, we discuss the physical exercise we're doing. We seldom cover how we exercise our mental strength and health. Our mental health can make or break us. If our mental health isn't intact, how can we expect to take care of our physical health?

One of the reasons I love meditation is that to me, it's a way I can exercise my mental strength and health. Let's go over meditation and its benefits for you.

What is Meditation

Meditation is a skill in which mindfulness is practiced to train attention and awareness in oneself as well to help mental clarity and calm our emotions. Meditation is a great way to keep yourself grounded and kind of have a 'reset' button on your ordinary day. 

How Can Meditation Benefit You

Meditation has many benefits to it. I won't be able to list all of them, but let's go over some of the main benefits that meditation can do to help you.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is one of the main benefits to meditation. It's the act of being in the present moment. Anything you're acting upon, you're fully in the present moment for it. This is a very important ability to have. It can help calm your thoughts and lets you focus on what's important, which is the present moment. It's easy to get stuck thinking about the past or future and that can cause us unnecessary stress. As well, the act of being mindful can help get a better control of your emotions and overall well being. Which leads to our next point...

Emotional Stability

As I mentioned before, something about mindfulness is that it can also lead to emotional stability. When you're focused on the present moment and only what is in front of you, it takes away a lot of the anxiety and other unknown factors we might usually have our minds go through. Whether you're sad, upset, or anxious about something in the past or future, being focused on the present will stabilize all those emotions and keep you at a grounded level. 

Better Attention Span

Now more than ever, we're seeing our generation's attention span decline. This is highly suspected to be related to social media and spending too much time on our phones. Even personally, over the years I noticed my attention span slowly go on the decline. Meditation can help improve your attention space overall. This can help you in many ways in life and help to continuously achieve your goals.

Can Lower Blood Pressure

High blood pressure can be attributed to stress. It's very easy to get stressed out and to sometimes even stress about things that aren't worth it. Meditation can help manage your stress level and in consequence, can also help bring down your blood pressure as well. However, if you're looking to lower your blood pressure, you should look into including more fish in your diet.

Meditation in Your Training

Now that we've gone over what meditation is and how it's beneficial, how does it fit into our training? Well like I mentioned before, we usually talk about the physical side of fitness and not enough about the mental side of fitness. Without mental health and stability, it'll be very difficult to live a healthy lifestyle and achieve your physical goals.

Within your training regimen, you should find a way to include meditation in it. This doesn't mean that at the end of your squats, you go sit and meditate, but to set time aside every day to meditate. Like physical training, you can perform sort of a progressive overload to keep getting better.

How to Incorporate Meditation in Your Training

If you can, you should set aside at least 5 minutes of meditation every day. Slowly from there, you can work up by adding more minutes to your meditation or trying to focus on different aspects of it. People work up to hours of meditating a day. I haven't achieved such a status but for me even doing 20 - 30 minutes can be a bit challenging. 

Just like how you try to workout and train every day or get some activity in for your physical health, meditation and mindfulness has a place in your every day lifestyle as well.

How to Meditate

There are plenty of resources out there to learn how to meditate. You may have even heard of guided meditation before (apps like HeadSpace) this is a great way to start getting into meditation. Here are some videos on meditation and how to get started. 

Final Thoughts

Taking care of your mental well-being is just as important as taking care of your physical well-being. I feel that meditation is a good first step to doing so if you haven't already. 

Like physical training, meditation requires training. It's something that you progressively will get better at and the better you get at it, the more benefits you will see out of it in your daily life. 

I personally use HeadSpace for guided meditation. However, you can check out the videos above to learn the basics of meditating as well. 

Photos:

• Photo by Min An from Pexels