Good Luck with the Wall

To gain the most benefit from exercise, you must feel your heart rate, your breathing, and your muscles as they hit their limits and begin to tire. It is the awareness of your body's responses to exercise stress that help you push past today's barriers and become fitter, faster and stronger. You lose much of the psychological training benefit, as well as the skill improvements, by dissociating your mind from your exercise. Learn how to filter out all other distractions and become mindful during training. Then, enjoy the post-workout bliss. Exercise is the ultimate meditation and the direct connection to the god within you.

Dr. Kevin R. Stone is an orthopedic surgeon at The Stone Clinic and chairman of the Stone Research Foundation in San Francisco. Learn more at http://www.stoneclinic.com/

Boy oh Boy do I like this one. Long time readers will quickly recall the (infamous) day that I suggested the ‘White Wall’ session to build mental toughness and present moment focus. A fairly straight forward drill, it goes something like this:

Fill a water bottle with a 50/50 mixture of clean water and the electrolyte replacement beverage of your choice. Grab a freshly laundered terry cloth towel. Select an appropriate accompanying set list from your library and load a Power Barn Pictures video to your big screen. Mount your bike. Warm up for ten minutes. Set your power meter to 90% of your existing FTP. RIDE FOR TWENTY MINUTES WITH NO MUSIC, VIDEO, TV, OR ANY OTHER DISTRACTING MEDIA. Stare at the white wall in front of you and feel your body preform its miraculousness. Listen to your heart, lungs, legs and libido as you focus on smooth, flowing, rhythmic revolutions of efficient power output. Hear your emotional response. Should your focus wander to places of less demand, simply acknowledge and bring them back to now. Embrace the sensations of moving out of the place we call the comfort zone. Take a five minute break. REPEAT USING THE UPDATED DATA FROM YOUR FIRST SET. Upon completion of the two twenty minute sets, review and reflect on your ‘White Wall’ effort. Warm down. Hydrate, have some clean protein and rest.

Our data indicates that less than 10% of the participants are able to complete the set under the outlined protocols. This indicates, in our analysis, that we are so accustomed to the distractions of normal life, both passive and active, that to execute such a demanding workout WITHOUT THE CRUTCH OF DISTRACTION, is something we anthropologically have forgotten how to do. Or have just morphed further into the lazy and soft zones of complacency and entitlement. 

One needs not do this evil drill to move closer to cycling or fitness nirvana. One can pick an easier manner - to start. In our session this morning I asked for one song, four minutes, of focus. Of the twenty folks assembled, two were able to keep a laser-like focus on their movements and the tangential mental associations with them.

Have you tried?

Care to share?

I think we are on to something here folks. 

Good luck with the wall.