4 Interesting Facts about Mind-Body Connection

The body and mind are intimately intertwined. We must always look at the bigger picture. Despite Western medicine’s attempt to further break the body up into distinct “parts,” everything is connected. Your stress at work and your shoulder pain are absolutely related. Your toxic relationship and your sinus infection is likely the result of your body’s symbiosis. Emotional stress manifests itself physically, and, conversely, physical pain impacts our emotions.

“Muscles” are just used for classification purposes, but that is not exactly how your brain works. You’re never just using one muscle at a time, and the same thing goes for your organs: nothing works in solitude, but rather, your body is a symphony.

Everything is originated in your brain. The brain is responsible for the function of all bodily functions (heart beat, digestion, respiration, etc.), and it also controls your perception. Thus, it would be foolish to consider pain without first understanding the cognitive processes behind it. 

1. Research suggests that thinking about contracting a specific muscle is beneficial for improving muscular hypertrophy. A study of 18 resistance-trained men found that "individuals can increase triceps brachii or pectarilis major muscle activity during the bench press when focusing on using the specific muscle at intensities up to 60 % of 1RM." Essentially, thinking about activating a muscle can increase its activation at lower intensities.
2. A history of injury to a certain area can perpetuate symptoms, even after your body has healed. Pain and trauma form pathways in your brain. There's an adage that says "neurons that fire together wire together." This means that if a pathway of pain becomes familiar to you, it can be difficult to dissociate the two things. Let's say you tore your UCL in your elbow throwing a baseball. You may still experience pain when throwing, even long after the tissue has healed, because your brain associates throwing with danger.
3. You can improve on a skill using mental imagery. "Vandell et. al. reported that groups of subjects who mentally practiced basketball free throws or dart throwing demonstrated improved skills similar to those who physically practiced the task. The [mental practice] and [physical practice] groups improved 23% and 24%, respectively, as compared with no improvement in a control group that did not practice either task," mentioned Warner and McNeill. That means that the group who practiced a skill using mental imagery alone had nearly the same level of improvements as did the group using physical practice!
4. Mental practice can improve balance. Fansler et. al. tested 36 elderly female subjects. Women were randomly assigned to one of three groups: non-sense+physical practice, relaxation+physical practice, or ideokinetic facilitation+physical practice. The final group "showed fewer subjects with negative change and more subjects with greater than 100% improvement." Effectively, the combination of mind-body awareness along with physical practice elicited significant improvements for the subjects. "This improvement in balance, which is a fundamental component of human movement, suggests that [ideokinetic facilitation] has promising usefulness in health care." Perhaps this study could be expanded into other areas, as well!

Wim Hof, a dutch man known as the "Ice Man" has been able to achieve incredible feats using meditative breathing. He regularly goes for dunks in freezing cold water, hikes frigid mountains in only his shorts, and has even demonstrated control over his autonomic nervous system. If you haven't heard of this guy, I recommend watching this video and reading more about him! He's a pretty incredible and inspiring man.

There's still much research to be done on the concept of mind-body connectivity. I believe that with a strong mind, we can build a strong body. We cannot achieve what the mind doesn't believe. Incorporating mental imagery into your routine might just be the change you need to break through your training plateaus!

Stress Less to Lift More

You wake-up abruptly to the sound of your alarm clock. You press snooze, and then jolt up about 5 minutes later. Then, you scramble to find clothes to wear, brush your hair, brush your teeth and race out of the house to the car. While you're driving to work, you are constantly checking the time, getting exasperated by every stop light, ever car that's going too slow on the highway, and all of the detours that send you off route. When you finally make it to your job, just on time, you gasp a sigh of relief. Now you can begin to attack your "to-do list," which seems to be never-ending. Overwhelmed, you sit at your desk and take a big sip of coffee and get to work.

Does your day closely mirror the scenario I've described above?

No, I'm not a psychic, and I haven't been watching you on a hidden camera. So many of us, regrettably, spend our days on auto-pilot. Our heart rates rise along with our blood pressure, and we constantly complain that there aren't enough hours in the day.

Impending deadlines, hectic work schedules, familial responsibilities, and other stressors, can make it hard to allow yourself to relax and just let go of all of the craziness for a bit. With a little bit of meditation, however, you'll find that your workouts will improve, you will recover faster, and your daily life might just be a bit more manageable.

To understand recovery and stress, you need a little bit of background about the central nervous system. The chart above illuminates the hierarchy of the nervous system, but for the scope of this article, I'm going to talk about the divisions of the autonomic nervous system: the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.

The parasympathetic nervous system allows us to "rest and digest." When you are relaxing or meditating, your heart rate decreases. The PNS promotes recovery from stress and healing. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the sympathetic nervous system. The SNS is known for the "fight or flight" state. If you trip on the stairs, you're going to enter the sympathetic nervous system. Your heart rate elevates, your blood pressure increases, and your breath may become shallow and infrequent.

Many of us are quite familiar with the sympathetic nervous system, as we spend our days in frequent bouts of stress and anxiety.

Now what does all of this have to do with exercise? Well, as you know, exercise will do quite a number on your body. Your connective tissues take a beating, and they need time to repair so that you can attack your subsequent workouts. If we stay in the SNS, then, you're just not going recover optimally, if at all. In fact, you may even enter a state of catabolism (breakdown of muscle proteins). There's no sense in busting your butt in the gym if you're ultimately gonna stress away all your hard work, is there?

The diagram on the left talks a bit about Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome. There are three stages: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion. Without adequate rest after repeated bouts of stress, one may reach the exhaustion stage, in which their performance regresses and they experience frequent injury. The body needs adequate rest in order to continue to train hard.

Here's an interesting study on high school swimmers: Jiang and colleagues had the athletes use meditation for recovery from intense training sessions. "Mood states, anxiety, and heart rate measures served as the dependent variables." They found that "meditation training as a mental warm down combined with a physical warm down are more effective to facilitate acute and long-term heart rate recovery, lower mood disturbance scores, decrease cognitive anxiety compared to just taking a rest after vigorous training and during the recovery period." Furthermore, "the experimental group demonstrated significantly lower scores than the control group in fatigue, depression, and anger." The meditating students had a more regulated mood, and they were recovering better from practices!

Another study, with Stults-Kolehmainen et. al. found that "in all analyses, higher stress was associated with worse recovery. Stress, whether assessed as life event stress or perceived stress, moderated the recovery trajectories of muscular function and somatic sensations in a 96-hour period after strenuous resistance exercise."

When considering the stresses felt by our body in exercise, we must also remember all of the other factors at play. If you're regularly working 70+ hour work weeks, or leading a lifestyle of stress, that will undoubtedly affect your workout recovery time. Every stressor accumulates a greater demand for recovery on the central nervous system, and dictates more time to return back to your baseline.

In my experience, meditation is a wonderful practice that can help you wind down after a tough day. Even 10-15 minutes a day will help you maintain your equilibrium and channel your inner Dalai Lama. Different types of meditation work for different people, but I prefer to just lay on my back, taking big, diaphragmatic breaths, and thinking positive thoughts. I let all of the negativity escape my mind, and remind myself not to let trivial things consume me.

Find a way to allow your brain to unwind after a tough day or tough week, and you may find yourself to be more at peace, less injured, and performing at an all time high. Allow your body to recover from all of the demands you have placed on it, so that you can get back to working out in half the amount of time!

As my father always says "don't write checks that your body can't cash!"

How to Improve Bodily Awareness and Proprioception

You've probably noticed that I find a way to weave the word "proprioception" into many of my posts. It's a beautiful word, really. Try saying it 10 times fast.

Okay, now that you've done that, I'll summarize, once again, what this word means. (I'm catering to the newer readers here.) Proprioception is your bodily awareness--your understanding of where you are in space and where your limbs are relative to your center of mass. Proprioception requires input from the vestibular system (to maintain balance) the visual system, and the musculoskeletal system.

Proprioception can be improved through training (sport, exercise, etc.), and conversely, one may weaken these sensations with a lack of movement. Enhanced proprioception means fewer falls, better reaction time, better coordination, and an overall improvement in athleticism.

Certain substances (like alcohol) can negatively affect proprioception. You've probably seen the tests police officers give to drunk drivers to test proprioceptive response: walking in a straight line or closing the eyes while trying to touch the nose. In a normal, healthy person, these tasks are easy to complete, but without proper spatial awareness, they become increasingly challenging.

As I've mentioned, the visual system is intimately tied to the proprioceptors in your brain. In a way, vision is a crutch upon which your bodily awareness can rest. Once you take away the visual stimulus, some people may run into trouble.

You might have noticed that balancing on one leg is exponentially more difficult when you close your eyes. Try this: do 5 bodyweight squats. Now, repeat with your eyes closed. Did you notice any difference between the two sets?

Although she can't see her partner, she's responding to his actions using proprioception.

A study on ballet dancers found that training with the eyes closed can produce some pretty impressive results. [2]  Golomer et. al. studied the dependence on vision for postural control in male dancers and untrained males alike. They used something called a Rod and Frame Test to measure postural swaying. The conclusion was, "the less visual-dependent they were for the RFT, the more stable they were in dynamic balance conditions." Not surprisingly, the trained dancers were less dependent on visual feedback than were the untrained males. Perhaps there is something to be said for one's postural awareness and their dependence on visual input.

In his well-respected text "The Training of the Weightlifter," R.A. Roman also alludes to the effectiveness of eliminating or limiting the visual feedback in learning movement. [3] In teaching the Olympic lifts (the clean and jerk and the snatch), he mentions that beginners can learn these lifts quicker by lifting in the dark or blindfolded. He notes:

"the lifter remembers the joint angles best with the eyes closed and reproduces them easier, and he remembers the degree of muscular tension and the amplitude of movement in the joints. Subsequently, when the exercises are done with the eyes open, the athlete's motor sensation is preserved with great clarity, contributing to the improvement of technique."

The Russians, he found, benefitted greatly from limiting the visual feedback with lifters. If Russian weightlifters and ballet dancers were able to reap the benefits of closing their eyes, so can you! It's easy to do, and it requires absolutely no additional equipment.

To start, I recommend trying simple, bodyweight movements like a squat, single leg deadlift or push-up. Once you've gotten the hang of that, you may progress to (very light) weighted movements--it may be best to use an empty barbell initially. As you grow more comfortable, try to add some weight. I do not recommend going above 50-60% of your 1 rep maximum, as it could be dangerous and unnecessary.

Doing positional drills (like a snatch deadlift, or a jerk dip) may be especially beneficial so that you can really orient yourself and learn to shift your weight properly. Initially, you will likely feel a bit off balance or uncoordinated, but, over time, you will develop a significant amount of bodily awareness and movement control.

Many people say that when you lose one sensation, as you see in those who are blind or deaf, your other senses develop to offset the loss. You, too, can translate this concept into your own training. If you want to master movement and avoid injury, just close your eyes!

The Muscles You're Forgetting to Train

Whether your training consists of a bodybuilding split-type schedule, you're training for a sport (basketball, weightlifting, powerlifting, etc.), or you're just doing total body workouts to get stronger, you might be forgetting some of the most important muscles in your body.

When you do any type of exercise, whether you're running, jumping, performing a deadlift, or throwing, it all starts with your point of contact to the ground. Your feet are your foundation, and, therefore, training your feet, or training barefoot, will build a rock solid base of support equipped to handle any task.

Let your feet breathe!

Barefoot training has slowly started to make its way back into the mainstream media. Five-finger toe shoes or other types of minimal shoes have been touted as the "optimal" footwear for runners everywhere. I'll be the first one to admit that those toe shoes look absolutely ridiculous. Despite their horribly unfashionable nature, I do believe that barefoot training is an excellent addition to any training protocol.

There are plenty of naysayers in the minimal footwear movement: many people say that barefoot training can actually cause more harm than good. First of all, humans have been performing great feats of athleticism long before Nike was telling us to "Just Do It." In fact, we were "just doing it" with no shoes or maybe thin sandals that would protect our feet from sharp objects or hot sand. We were climbing trees, running away from wild boars, walking back to camp with livestock slumped over our shoulders, and climbing mountains without buying specialized footwear for those tasks. There are numerous civilizations today who are still doing all of those aforementioned tasks without the help of sneakers. Instead, those people have learned to harness the power of their own feet.

Now, I'll step away from the more anthropological talk and shift more into physiology. First, let's discuss the term "proprioception." I've mentioned this term in my blog before, but for those of you who don't remember, proprioception refers to "the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement," as per Wikipedia. Proprioception helps you adjust to uneven surfaces, understand how much pressure you're applying to said surface, among other things.

Shoes can limit the proprioceptors in our feet. Although your feet are proportionally small in comparison to other parts of the body, each foot has about 20 muscles, 26 bones (about 1/4 of the bones in the body), 33 joints, and over 7,500 nerve endings! Think about that: such a small part of your body includes a quarter of the bones in your body! Now, if you're cutting off the proprioceptors in your feet, you're cutting off a very sensitive and responsive area of your body.

One study done at the German Sport University of Cologne measured the activity of several muscles in and around the feet using Electomyography (EMG) while participants walked on grass barefoot, using minimal footwear and in traditional running shoes. They found that

"The use of minimal footwear was related to changes in muscle 

strength and morphology. It was demonstrated that the 

footwear increased mechanical stimuli on the tendon muscle 

units. The muscle strength capacity of those muscles which 

were more intensively used by the minimal shoe increased 

significantly. Muscles which were similar activated in both 

conditions did not respond. One can conclude that footwear 

technology impacts the mechanical loading as well as the 

biological response of the loaded tissues. "

 I have cited several other studies in the Works Cited below, if you're interested in reading more into these studies.

While many of these studies involve running/walking, I believe that barefoot training carries over into lifting as well. I will have my clients roll out their feet with a golf ball or lacrosse ball before exercise. This will improve the sensory input and also improve their range of motion. Try this: Stand with your feet together and try to touch your toes. Now roll your feet out for about 5 minutes and then retest. You will notice that you are more flexible afterwards.

I know, these look pretty freaking silly...

I will also have them do their activation/warm-ups barefoot; single leg RDLs, high skips, Bulgarian split squats, kettlebell swings, etc. can be done without shoes. Deadlifts are also an excellent exercise to try barefooted as well. You can see what you're doing with your toes: are you flexing your toes or "gripping the ground?" These actions are not ideal and should be corrected.

Now, if you want a great brand of minimal shoes that don't look absolutely obnoxious, I'd recommend the brand Inov8. Their shoes are comfortable and pretty sexy (in my opinion), and I'm absolutely obsessed with mine! There are several other minimal brands out on the market, so find a pair that you like!

If you're looking to get the most out of your training and avoid injury in the process, try taking your shoes off whenever you can. It feels pretty nice to let your feet spread out and breathe a little bit!

Put Down Your Phone and Just Lift

Last week, I went to a Globo gym (which shall remain nameless), and I saw this guy sitting on the hip adductor machine. He would do 5-6 reps, send some text messages, and then repeat. His thumbs probably got a better workout than any other part of his body. He is one of many people I see working out with their heads down and phones in hand.

How often have you caught yourself getting distracted in the gym? Maybe it's not just your phone that's distracting you, but for whatever reason, your head's just in another place; you're on autopilot going through your workout. There have been plenty of times when I didn’t necessarily think about how I was going to move the weight in front of me, but rather, I just fill my head with other extraneous thoughts; I'll approach a lift and think about my laundry list of to-do’s for the day, or let other personal matters cloud my mind. I'm present physically, but mentally, I'm in 1,000 different places.

Let me just upload my selfie to Instagram first...

I’ve found that when I’m able to truly center myself and completely consume my thoughts only with the barbell in front of me, my performance improves instantly. The garbage training sessions are usually the ones in which we let our outside lives consume us; we miss lifts when we think about work or social stressors rather than our next set of squats. I've made it a point to put my phone away as soon as I step foot in the gym, and, as a result, I can truly dedicate myself to the moment.

If you’ve ever attempted the snatch before, whether it was for fun or competition, you know just how demanding of a movement it can be. Everything must fall perfectly into place to complete the lift successfully: your set-up position must be on point, your hips have to meet the bar at the right time, and your body then must receive the bar and lock it out overhead in an instant. If you lose focus for an instant, letting stressful thoughts fill your head, you're almost definitely going to miss the lift. However, if you approach the bar calmly, and you trust that your body knows what to do and when to do it, you have a much stronger chance of success.

When you watch elite athletes in any sport, or masters of any craft, one trait that separates them from the average person is their laser beam focus. Tiger Woods enters the putting green with extreme concentration. You can see that every movement he makes is very calculated and deliberate. During training, we have to filter out all of the excess crap in our heads and pay attention to our lifts.

Success in lifting (or really, damn near everything), requires absolute tunnel vision. Get rid of all of the clutter in your mind, if only for just an hour, and zoom in on that one, single thought. If you want to set PRs, you have to make sure you’re focused first.

Mind and Body Awareness

It is amazing to me how out of touch we have become with our own bodies. The phrase "somatic intelligence" refers to our sense of mind and body, and how they connect with one another. We are so overwhelmed by other trivial day-to-day tasks, that those two elements are completely disconnected. In my opinion, your body is (or should be) your number one priority no matter what.

A few cues I give a lot are "squeeze your butt" or "keep your core tight." They sound pretty simple and straight forward, right? You'd be surprised at how many people either don't understand those cues, or are simply unable to execute them properly. In an ideal world, I shouldn't have to remind someone to squeeze his butt during a lift—it should be automatic. Unfortunately, we live in a world today where we are almost always sitting, frequently stressing, and barely focusing. For many of us, we are more concerned with errands, work-related tasks and our social lives that we literally forget how to move our own butts.

Look at any gymnast or dancer: he or she has an amazing sense of control. Every single movement and contraction is intentional. Gymnasts understand how to "stay tight" when they need to, and dancers know how to absorb force when they land on their toes, while the overwhelming majority of people I've met do not. I watch people walk with lead feet on the ground, stomping up the stairs, and I see athletes who deadlift heavy weights without a properly braced midline.

What does all of this mean? Our minds and are bodies are now more disconnected than ever. I believe that many injuries or aches have to do with our lack of awareness. I can show you what a proper squat should look like, but the trickier part is to make you understand how a proper squat should feel. My goal is to make you aware of what parts of your bodies are working and when.

For someone who is still new to the gym (and even for experienced gym-goers), learning how to create that kind of tension is difficult. When we are seated at a desk, our shoulders are rounded forward, are necks are looking down, are glutes are turned off and our cores are on vacation. Take that person into a gym and they're going to carryover those same habits to their lifts, unless someone teaches them how to engage their muscles properly.

I believe that, at least for a while, everyone should have a coach or a trainer. I don't care if you've been working out for 10 years, it's always important to have someone else watching you. I sure as hell have other people to critique me, and it's extremely helpful. We can't always watch ourselves, even if there is a mirror in front of us. Just like you would have an editor proofread your article before submitting it into a local newspaper, you should make sure someone is watching you lift weights. If you want to avoid injury and see results, you need someone else's help. If a coach is too expensive, you should, at the very least take a video of yourself; I can guarantee you'll see some things on video you didn't notice beforehand.

The most important thing, however, is to be aware. The next time you do any movement, whether it's a lunge or a clean, take notice. What is contracting? Where do you feel the burn? Is there any pain with that movement? Are you breathing? Pay attention to these things and you'll be surprised of what your body will tell you.