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A Mindfulness Technique to Use While Exercising
It’s a Win-Win
My main form of exercise for decades was running and playing tennis. Unfortunately, that resulted in three surgeries, two hip and one achilles tear, and a ton of calf muscle pulls and back spasms.
So about five years ago I jettisoned running and cut down on the tennis in favor of the joint-friendly road biking and swimming as my go-to cardio workouts. While biking and swimming are fantastic for my heart, joints and overall mental health (the endorphins they produce always seem to slay any anxiety or depression fog I may have), they do carry one drawback: My mind wanders like crazy on the bike and in the pool.
And I’m a regular meditator. I missed maybe five days of meditation in 2020. I’m also a devoted practitioner of mindfulness in my daily life.
45 minutes in the Bahamas
But man, put me on a bike or in a pool for 45 minutes and I am gone. Thinking about article ideas. What I want to make for dinner that night. The storming of the U.S. Capitol. You name it, my mind wanders there.
After years of going to La-La Land on the bike or in the pool, I finally decided to do something about it. It took a total of 2.5 seconds to come up with a solution, which is about 1.5 seconds longer than it should have taken.
