Or, why you should pay attention to what you’re doing.

It’s easy to get caught in a rhythm when you’re doing an exercise. Whether it’s a martial art drill, or a set of squats, as soon as you settle into a pattern your body seems to go off on autopilot, and your mind starts to wander. Ideally, you want to avoid that.

Old time strongmen like Eugen Sandow, Georg Hackenschmidt, and Maxick may have disagreed on a number of principles, but they were all in agreement on this: focus on what you are doing, and how you are doing it.  Their arguments for this varied – some said that it resulted in a better circulation to the interested areas, others that the attention resulted in better muscular control and effort. We’re no doctors, so we can’t really judge the validity of any of these claims. That these men managed to make their exercise work, however, is a certainty.

Form, Form, Form

Whatever other benefits paying attention may have, there’s the matter of knowing you’re doing an exercise correctly. Taking squats again as an example, it’s easy to fall into a pattern where you’re bouncing up and down rather than engaging your quads. That is still better than sitting in a chair, but it’s not a squat.

By paying attention to your body, you can make sure that you are actually making an effort with the parts of your body you thought you were using, regulating your breathing, and making sure that you’re doing the exercise as perfectly as possible. That’s how you get the most bang for your buck.

The effect is quite amplified when you’re using weights. In this case it becomes even more important, since there’s a greater potential for injury. The time you’re lifting a hard, heavy object over your head is really not the best time to be distracted.

The Skill Factor

When it comes to skills – and make no mistake, almost every exercise has a skill component – focusing is essential if you want to develop it. In his book Solo Training, Loren Christensen says that to make a technique your own, you must practice it repeatedly, past the point of boredom until you figure out exactly how to do it by the book, and start seeing other ways you can do it. You can only do that by paying attention.

It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to learn a block and punch combination or a handstand, you want to be there with your head.

Make it important

Sometimes, people don’t get distracted while doing an exercise; they prepare their distractions before going into an exercise. This is especially the case with low intensity, highly repetitive exercises; that’s why you see things like training bikes or treadmills with built in monitors, and why people listen to podcasts while exercising.

Now, this is not only unsafe, but it also puts you into the mindset that exercise is a pain that you need to be distracted from. That kind of attitude won’t let you put 100% into anything. It will make you believe that exercise is something that you should avoid as much as possible.

Learn to appreciate what you are doing, and if you absolutely loathe it, find something else to do! Doing an exercise you like and focusing while you do it will pay off much better than breezing through a load of lighter ones while doing a crossword. Focus on what you are doing. Make it important. It will build your motivation over time, rather than keeping your interest around the “meh” level.

If you can absorb the information from a podcast while minding what you are doing, then the exercise is probably way below your level!

Bonus perk: if you’re focused, chances are you’ll waste a lot less time. So you’ll probably be able to pack more effort into the same amount of time, or get done sooner!

Image credits

Header image: Wu (Public domain)