The  Science  of  Psychoneuroimmunology 
Mental attitudes to fitness

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Whilst it's important to keep our body exercising to retain a fit and healthy lifestyle, the power of the mind should not be under-estimated. Mental training and exercises can get us through the pain barrier and motivate us to stay on course for physical exercise success. Here's the reabuzz.com guide on how mental training could help improve our fitness goals.

We all hear people say, "It’s all in the mind!” or "It’s 100 per cent mental!” when they refer to athletes competing in events. So, is it? Could we run harder in that marathon or faster in that swimathon if we had the right mental training or attitude?

If we could, we wouldn’t bother running 20 miles a week and spending hours ploughing through the worst that the weather can hurl at us to train for that half marathon! We would just sit at home and think about all that hard training.

Just like physical training – is not mastered simply by doing it once. Imagine practicing for a race once or twice and then saying "the training didn’t work for me; I’ve got to try something different." No serious athlete would do that with their physical training and yet, too often, mental skills are abandoned if they don’t bring immediate results.

Anyone who are interested in creating a mental training program may want to consider including the following principles into their exercise and training:

Frequency – Practise on a regular basis. Just like physical training, we will need to practise regularly if we wish to see results. As we would lose fitness with extended inactivity, we will lose the benefits of mental training without regular practise.

Duration – Practise for a significant period (20-30 minutes per session).

Intensity – Bring an emotional content to our practises so that  we replicate (in our imagination) the race conditions.

Specificity – Develop a range of skills that can be applied to the ever-changing challenges of a running race. For example: relaxation for pre-race conditions, self control for the early stages of a race, discipline and perseverance when the race becomes physically draining. 

Progression – Improve the quality of our practices week after week.

 

Does mental training improve our exercise?

Using yoga techniques –  slows both the heart rate (to barely a few beats per minute) and oxygen consumption rate, so that we can stay under water for several minutes with only a single breath. Imagine the benefits of that kind of mental discipline in a running race: using our mind to relax a specific muscle that is repeatedly cramping towards the end of a marathon. Studies have shown that white blood cells – which fight infections – function significantly better when people were given relaxation training. Also, these blood cells were found to be four times more aggressive in fighting colds when a person had positive thoughts rather than negative thoughts about the illness.

p/s     Well, negative thoughts and emotions significantly increase muscular tension. As tense muscles do not work as efficiently as relaxed muscles, it is apparent how negative thinking could be to the detriment of a running performance. So is it all in the mind? I doubt it’s all in the mind, but as the above suggests, mental training as well as physical training could seriously improve our results. Great results come from a combination of real physical training and sound mental training.