For most of my life, the gym was all about the physical. Get stronger. Get faster. Get more jacked. Beast mode.
I trained for physical performance and measured results in numbers. Plates, reps, t-shirt size. I never thought about improving my mindset at the gym. I had meditation, yoga and visualizing for that. Looking back, I feel like I completely shut my mind off at the gym and pushed through the workout no matter how I felt because I was just there for the mission.
But when I started experimenting with a calm mindset in other areas of my life like work and overall mental health, I noticed a shift. I was clearer, more focused, less reactive, less stressed and slept better. So my curious self wondered: What if I experimented with calm at the gym? What would that even look like?
At first, it went against everything I thought I knew. Calm at the gym? I used to think that was for yoga and meditation, not heavy lifting. But once I tried combining deeper breathwork while stretching, a newly curated playlist and my calming scent Pause, I discovered a new level of working out. I committed to the new way of working out for a month and decided that's how I want to workout moving forward. I've always considered the gym to be beast mode so I came up with a really creative name for my new mode. Calm beast.
The name reminds me of the MMA fighters who aren't the loud obnoxious ones during the pre fight. They stay composed and block out the external noise that they have no control over. It's the person observing peacefully during a pull up competition and ends up destroying the loud attention grabbers. I've always respected those types of people and once I shifted to a more calm mindset, I understand the importance of feeling calm as much as you can. Life just feels better. And, it helps you improve a lot easier than constantly being in fight or flight mode.
Working out in a calm mindset isn't soft or passive like I imagined it to be. It’s the kind of calm where I'm locked in, tuned in and 100% present. And here’s what surprised me: the overall energy I left with was better than any of the extreme and unsustainable pre-workout sessions I had. Maybe it's because I'm sensitive to caffeine and would experience a pretty hard crash after pushing 100% at the gym on a pre-workout. Either way, I much prefer a sustained calm mindset that not only gets me through the day, but allows me to feel like I really made the most of it.
I still enjoy an absolutely chaotic lift with pre workout occasionally, but I also like a cheat meal at Taco Bell. As long as I stick to the general 80/20 rule I'm happy with myself. That would be 80% calm workouts and a healthy diet and 20% "old school" beast mode at the gym.
The gym stopped being just a place to train my body. It became a place to reconnect and to access that high-performance version, physically and mentally, of me I want to carry into everything else.
