Are Sports a Suitable Replacement for Your Daily Mindfulness Practice?

Do Sports = Mindfulness?

I recently heard a debate from a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher that caught my attention as it related to the question of whether playing sports or participating in physical activity can substitute a mindfulness practice.

The argument was that people who claim they get everything they need out of their physical practice are missing an inherently valuable component of more traditional mindfulness practices and that playing sports won’t carry over any benefit into an everyday situation. One of the primary concerns of the author was that the sport you are most passionate about because a vehicle of escape over time.

I look at it as a situation where there is a complementary value of participating in a physical challenge along with taking the time out to find regular stillness in your week.

The mindful value of sport primarily comes when operating a peak performance, when everything depends on your mind and body working in harmony and you reach the flow state. By meditating, you help to strengthen the mind-body connection, allowing yourself to avoid distractions to reach and maintain the flow state more often, whether in competition or casual sports practice. Vice versa, most people gravitate towards a physical practice that they have enjoyment and passion for which is another critical factor for producing a state of flow.

Playing sports and practicing mindfulness have some of the same qualities to them but they are not exactly the same thing. The statement cannot be made that all sports are mindfulness practices just as much as you cannot say that all mindfulness practices are sports. But are people who say that their meditation or mindfulness practice is found in the gym or on the field or court wrong? I think that if in their own mind they feel a mindfulness benefit from their preferred physical activity, it’s good that it is helping them, at least in the short-term.

Former Navy SEAL commander Jocko Willink talks about how the gym and training Jiu Jitsu is his mindfulness practice and it helps to serve him well. Some people really struggle with sitting still to find mindfulness and so maybe you will need to find a balance between the physical and resting types of mindfulness.

One of the statements the MBSR teacher made that cuts through the differences between sports and a more calming mindfulness practice is that many people who gravitate towards sports as their mindfulness practice end up having it as a crutch that cannot help them as much in real life or when they are injured and can’t keep playing.

This is why you don’t want to just practice sports, because you may be missing out on a valuable part of the everyday practice of mindfulness and meditation for helping you to cope with other stressors.

Physical activity is a stress in and of itself, albeit a beneficial one. By getting your blood pumping and releasing beneficial endorphins, you are also activating the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the fight or flight response in emergency situations. On the other hand, meditation and mindfulness practices turn up the parasympathetic nervous system, enhancing calm and relaxation.

The Mind-Muscle Connection and Flow

Many people gravitate towards more traditional mindfulness practices only after having found a passion for a particular sport or physical activity because there is that excitement and passion that comes with doing something that gets your heart rate up and produces endorphins. This also seems to be an entry point to mindfulness as the inherent challenge in sport, whether competing against yourself or others, is a powerful driver of flow. Once people find an activity that reliably produces the flow state, it’s hard to get them to want to stop. Flow is the ultimate destination of practicing mindfulness - finding peak present moment awareness to push the body and mind to its limit.

But it can be very difficult to maintain a flow state even when pushing yourself in a sporting environment because of the intense focus it requires. To strengthen this focus on the present moment I believe that it is absolutely essential to have a daily mindfulness practice. It’s like lifting weights - you can’t expect to get stronger by lifting weights just once; it has to be done consistently over many months and years to produce results.

Sweep The Floor

Or better yet, my favourite analogy for the need to practice consistently comes from the final chapter of Ryan Holiday’s Ego is the Enemy: you’ve got to sweep the floor.

You don’t just sweep a floor once, dust your hands off, and consider it done; you’ve got to sweep the floor regularly in order to keep it clean.

In Ego is the Enemy, Holiday is referring to practicing Stoicism when he talks about sweeping the floor but Stoicism and mindfulness have a lot in common and the analogy works well for either of the practices. Practicing mindfulness daily will bring more richness of experience to your world when playing sports or any other physical practice and that’s why you shouldn’t just do one or the other - they work better together for finding your flow.

An example of someone who fully embodies this dichotomy is Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you’ve listened to any interviews with him, particularly The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, or read his biography Total Recall, you might be familiar with how Arnold spent two intensive years practicing Transcendental Meditation to find peace of mind and hone the mind-muscle connection to improve as a bodybuilder. Arnold claims that he got everything he could out of his daily meditation practice and as a result was able to focus better in the gym and this was part of the practice that made him into the legendary bodybuilder that he was. After those two years Arnold treated meditation as a refresher that he did occasionally to reset himself.

It’s the same with floating regularly - some people love floating so much that they transform it into their weekly mindfulness practice but you still need to keep the daily mindfulness practice in place to get the most out of your float sessions.

So here’s my conclusion:

Physical activities and mindfulness might have a lot in common when it comes to present-state awareness but the similarities end there. The two practices are not the same but work synergistically to get you more deeply in touch with your mind and body and should both be incorporated regularly for living a rich life and finding your flow.

Sweet Dreams: 9 Ways You Can Sleep Better Tonight

Sleep is so important to health and performance that the next stage in the evolution of talking about sleep is that it will become a regular prescription from doctors.

When we think about sleep, the world has shifted to considering it that stretch of time where we have lost productivity from the constant grind and hustle that is preached by entrepreneurs and professionals alike. But the reality is that quality sleep is one of the most important factors for improving productivity and performance. It’s no wonder that professional athletes like LeBron James and Hafthor Bjornsson get upwards of 10 hours of sleep each night.

If you struggle to recover from heavy training or your progress isn’t as good as you expect it to be, your sleep should be one of the first places you look to make a change that will benefit you. Even if how good your workouts are isn’t a primary factor that you use to gauge how you feel, sleep quality will dramatically affect your performance at work and your mood.

In getting a quality night’s sleep, the term that is often used now is “sleep hygiene” and it refers to the different steps that you can do to make your sleeping domicile (aka the bear cave) as conducive for sleep as possible.

I find this to be particularly important as a competitive strongman athlete because for many of us our sleep isn’t great to start with due to a prevalence of sleep apnea. If you’ve gone through and made changes in the following nine steps and still don’t feel well-rested, you should consult a sleep lab to get a sleep test done to see if you’ve got sleep apnea or any other sleep disorder that can be treated. Using a CPAP for treating sleep apnea will make an immense difference in your quality of sleep, recovery, performance, and well-being.

In Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker put together the most comprehensive account for the fascinating effects of sleep. Walker outlines a multitude of sleep hygiene steps that can be taken to hit that recommended sweet spot of 8 hours of sleep each night.

A lot of it comes down to how well you prepare your nighttime ritual to prepare yourself and your bear cave for deep slumber. Here are some of the most important steps I have found to help, as well as some additional tips that may be worth checking out.

Steps to improve sleep hygiene (roughly in order based on the timeline before bed)

10+ Hours Before Bed

Avoid Caffeine - typically most people should stop around 1 pm if they aim to sleep around 10 or 11. Even if that afternoon pick-me-up doesn’t leave you feeling jittery, there may still be enough caffeine floating around in your system to impact your sleep quality and make it more difficult to fall asleep.

3 Hours Before Bed

No Strenuous Exercise - getting your heart rate pounding within a few hours of your scheduled bedtime can make it harder to relax and fall asleep. If that’s the only time you have available to workout and it’s a priority in your life, training may just have to come before sleep quality but you can also consider going to bed earlier and waking up earlier to get your workout in.

No Big Meals - Eating to the point of discomfort means your body has a lot to process and digest and can leave you feeling like you’ve got a rock pressing down while you’re trying to get comfortable for sleep. You also want to ideally time your last meal around the 3-hour mark so your stomach isn’t grumbling either as you try to fall asleep.

1-2 Hours Before Bed

Keep the Bear Cave Cool - You’ll want to start to drop the temperature in your room in the last couple of hours of the day, as one of the factors that trigger your brain that it’s time to sleep is a drop in temperature. Before we had temperature controlled houses, the temperature while sleeping in a hut or cave dropped as the sun went down and we went to sleep. It’s usually recommended that you set your room somewhere in the 65-68 F range and you’ll have to play around with this to find your own sweet spot. An additional tip you can try is sleeping with socks on. Your feet like to be a little bit warmer than the rest of your body for the best sleep possible.

Electronics out of the Bedroom - this really should be 24 hours before sleep thing because everyone who values quality sleep can agree that electronics need to be removed from the bedroom. When we watch tv in bed we tend to go to sleep later and the same thing goes for watching videos on YouTube or scrolling social media. It also ties into the next tip...

Blue lights out Before Bed - Depending on what time you go to bed relative to the cycle of the sun, this may even come before the 1-2 hour mark but blue lights should be eliminated as early in the evening as possible. Set all of your devices to Night Shift towards a warmer tone. I like to have mine automatically set to follow the sunrise/sunset cycle. This will also help to reduce eye strain if you find yourself constantly staring at the blue light. Taking it a step further, you can buy a set of blue light blocking glasses on Amazon for about 10 or 30 bucks depending on how fancy you want them to look.

In getting rid of this blue light before bed, it also means you should shut down the tv, tablet, and phone and read an actual book. If you’re in the market for switching out your light bulbs in the bedroom, you can also replace any bulbs with a colour-changing LED bulb that can shift towards a red light, like the Philips Hue. This is the ideal way to go about it. The best compromises that you can make would be to dim your existing lights and then use an offline e-reader so you aren’t being distracted with messages or phone calls when you’re trying to wind down for sleep. The backlight of a Kindle can be turned way down so that you can simply illuminate the page with your dimmed light the way you would for a hard copy.

Have a Contrast Shower or a Hot Bath - In Why We Sleep it’s suggested that you take a hot bath to prepare yourself for sleep because as you get out of the hot water, your brain will notice the dramatic temperature gradient and signal your body to prepare for sleep. I can’t stand getting so hot before sleeping so another option that many people including myself prefer is to do a contrast shower starting with hot and ending on cold. Typically this consists of alternating between 10 seconds of hot and 20 seconds of cold for a total of 8 to 10 cycles. I like that ending on cold gets you out of the shower with the temperature drop already started so you’re on your way to sleepy town. The contrast also works nicely before bed because I’ve found that simply doing cold may get you too cold which actually makes it harder to sleep.

Block EMFs in Your Home - I’m still not convinced that there’s much merit to these claims but it has been suggested that electromagnetic fields from electronic devices and WiFi routers are negatively affecting our health, including sleep quality. If you follow all of the steps above and still have a hard time getting quality sleep, you may have to “ground” yourself and eliminate EMFs. The simplest way to do this is to put all devices on airplane mode and turn off your WiFi router during the night. Plugging your router into an automatic wall timer may be the simplest way to accomplish this without having to remember to turn your WiFi router off and back on.

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Bonus Tip: Know Yourself - the Oura Ring

The Oura ring is the most comprehensive sleep and recovery tracker that I have seen on the market. With the combination of sleep tracking and heart rate variability (HRV), Oura helps you to go a step beyond just “feels” to know how well you’re recovering and how prepared you are for training each day. If you’ve been working out for any appreciable amount of time, hopefully, you are introspective enough about how you feel in order to know fairly well what your body is dictating your training should be like each day. In using the Oura ring daily for two months now, I’ve noticed that much of how I think I feel is reflected in my score each day. The ring is sensitive enough though that you can get into the very fine details about things like how well you’re sleeping based on what time you ate your last meal or even what type of foods you ate at dinner (or throughout the day). Sleep can be messed up in all sorts of ways due to the foods we eat by throwing off blood sugar and stressing the body with highly inflammatory foods or foods that we are allergic or intolerant to.

The Oura ring also gets smarter as you continue to use it and it’s able to detect your own trends better. This makes it a neat tool to use short-term but a much more valuable part of your reflection on training and recovery as you use it more regularly. I said the same thing a few years ago when I wrote more about using HRV for training.

(If you are concerned about the EMFs from this little device you can also put it on airplane mode and only take it off airplane mode when you want to upload your data).

This sort of next-level biohacking is what can take your overall sleep and well-being from whatever mediocre state it currently is into being at your own pinnacle of health. It does take more conscious effort but if at the end of the day you are living a more fulfilling life or striving towards your goals better, it can be well worth it.

Sleep Well!