Lion Mind Challenge #6 ‘Body Language’

This time will be the physical challenge of being aware of and controlling your body language.

I first heard about this idea in an old documentary about one of the original CrossFit athletes, Mikko Salo, and how he acted after extremely hard workouts. He would always just stand there after a workout and control his breathing in a calm manner and when questioned on why he didn’t act like most other athletes and lay on the ground he answered that he saw animals in the wild give up and accept being killed by predators with that same body language and he wasn’t going to look like that.

Fair call Mikko, can’t argue with that.

Most likely, we don’t have to worry about predators these days but he may have been on to something.

There’s some evidence to say that keeping a ‘Powerful Pose’ can increase testosterone and lower cortisol and there are other studies showing no change.

One of the most successful gyms of recent times ( CrossFit Invictus) calls the negative position ‘Postures of Defeat’ and actively work with each of their athletes to maintain positive body language at all times.

They, at Invictus, have come up with some training cues and these are what I will challenge myself with over the next week:

Chest Up

Eyes Open

 

Simple enough but I imagine will be tough to remind myself of deep in a painful workout.

RECAP

I got a solid week in the gym to work on the body language challenge and I can say that personally there was definitely a difference in my internal dialogue while I was concentrating on being in a positive posture.

It may have been due to consciously thinking about it but my voice when it got tough changed from “ughhh, I suck at this workout.” to “Let’s get another rep” or “You’ve got it, keep grinding” etc.

I did have a couple of really good days in the gym mentally this week but also had some average ones so I’m not going to say its the be all and end all but concentrating on the posture directly affected my mindset which was the goal.

This is one of those scenarios where I think I would benefit by writing “Body Language” or the main cue from the challenge “Eyes open, Chest Up” on the wall somewhere for a quick reminder when I need it in the future.

Lets get it Team !

Dice