Introduction to mental fitness - path of optimal resistance
The path of least resistance is one that allows you to progress while expending the least amount of effort or energy. This is a common concept when it comes to many areas of life, such as business, negotiation or simply making choices.
However, when it comes to physical fitness, incorporating resistance in your workout is an important part of building up your fitness. This could be gradually increasing the weight in normal strength training or the steepness of the track for walking/running, but essentially they both serve the purpose of adding resistance to the workout, which improves your overall fitness much more than simply repeating or increasing the duration of the exercise.
When it comes to motivation to improve your fitness, the path of least resistance allows you to form habits more easily and maintain a routine. When it comes to techniques in your workout, the path of least resistance provides feedback on your physical form and stress load so as to not cause excessive tension on your muscles and joints.
So can we apply the same concepts to mental fitness? Should we be striving for the path of least resistance when it comes to improving our mind? I would argue that we should be trying to find the path of optimal resistance in our mental exercises, so that we don't switch off on autopilot.
Just as resistance is required to improve your physical fitness, a degree of resistance is required to build up our mental fitness. There are many aspects that we can train and exercise our mind, and we can also develop a program that gradually increases our ability to engage in mental activities. In a previous post I introduced some simple exercise to get you started with your mental fitness training:
Now I want to break the components down a little bit further in this post and show you how to find that path of optimal resistance. To recap, the three exercises involved daily activities that you can identify and do easily:
- Exercise 1: Balancing on one foot with your eyes closed
- Exercise 2: Perform an activity with one hand and switch to another
- Exercise 3: Perform a simple daily activity that engages your senses differently
For exercise one, which is actually a simple version of exercise 3, involves training your sense of balance and fine tuning your response when your are unbalanced. Having tried this on different occasions, I find this exercise very difficult to do when you are tired or distracted, so this is often a good indication of how focused or clear you mind is. However, because the balancing part with your foot involves some physical exertion, the path of optimal resistance is not to allow your legs to become too stressed and you should end this exercise when you start feeling some discomfort (definitely not when it becomes painful).
For exercise two, you are required to map the muscle memory from one hand to another with visual assistance. Assuming the task that you have chosen is not too strenuous, the path of optimal resistance is to not feel too comfortable with performing the task. If you find that this is the case, then you should increase the speed at which you are performing the task or try doing it without visual cues (i.e. close your eyes - if it is safe to do so).
For exercise three, you are required to perform a task that engages your senses at an increasing level of difficulty. This actually requires you to switch from relying on one sense more to another sense as the task becomes more difficult. The path of optimal resistance is to push yourself to the point where you need to use another sense rather than relying on the same sense more heavily.
If you have tried some of the exercise suggested, I'd love to hear some feedback about how it has helped with your mental fitness. If you are looking for some motivation to improve your mental fitness (other than what I have already talked about before), you can see how I have applied these strategies and training to make these origami models from flower petals:
https://steemit.com/art/@plushzilla/orchid-petal-origami-crane
https://steemit.com/art/@plushzilla/orchid-petal-origami-butterflies
Hey man, I like your article. I think that mental strength is extremely important. This includes also understanding yourself and who you are. What you want from life. If you are currently living the way you should.
I do not think that this encompasses all of the things that you should do to develop your brain. For instance, switching up your senses and throwing you off, that would really only work out those specific parts dealing with sensory functions.
What about emotional strength? What about intelligence?
I also highly recommend pictures!
Hi @biasnarrative - thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. As you say, mental fitness is just one of many aspects of our mind that we can train and develop. For example, body building is related to physical sculpting of the muscles and removing fat but is not related to fitness, so there are definitely more dimensions than I can understand.
What you are referring to about emotional strength and intelligence relate to the different types of intelligence (social, emotional, intellectual, spiritual and others) is something that can probably be improved as well, but I haven't been able to make the connection to the physical aspects of those areas yet.
As for pictures, I couldn't really think of anything that helps clarify what I am writing without just adding an image for the sake of having a picture in an article, but hopefully I will come across something suitable or some ideas for how to illustrate those concepts.
Try something like a picture of a brain, Like this:
Or when you talk about the one legged thing, use a picture about physical training.
I also highly recommend using headers < h.1>header</h1.> without the periods will bold and makes your test bigger. Splitting up your article makes it easier to read and comprehend for some/most people.
You are doing great man, keep it up.
Too much time spent writing on Medium.com without really having to think too much about formatting and images :p I can see the impact that images make to the post, but in the past I tend to spend too much time searching for the right image (or creating them) instead of focusing on the writing. But I think the points you have make are important and I will incorporate it in my next post :)
Hello @plushzilla excellent post you made. I wish you good luck and happy holidays my friend :)
Hope you and your wife will also have a safe and happy holiday :) I am looking forward to more numerology related posts from you next year!
thanks :)
When on tour with a band, anywhere you can find is good for fitness: