Sit Down and STFU

I am so excited I can barely contain myself. As I write this it is the 8th of January meaning there is only 5 days until we are game on. If you haven’t already, please review the last several posts which outline both the diet and the workouts as well as some of the helpful tips we will need. There will be more articles leading up to and, of course, after the start date. Please keep in mind, I am not writing out the larger book this year. Instead of that, everything from the phase workouts and diets to tips on lifting to the underlying philosophy in the program will be coming out on this site. It is required reading. I said in the beginning, this is not a for profit program…you do not owe any money. What you do owe, however, is your full and undivided efforts and attention. We are going to make you into gods or corpses.

Today we are going to add an important part to the workouts: Meditation. Before you roll your eyes at

3x Mr O winner and huge proponent of meditation Frank Zane called it his Mind Gym

me, just read through. Here in phase one it will be easy. Five minutes per day I want you to meditate. That time will increase as we go on, but here in phase one we are just getting started so 5 minutes will suffice. In this short article we will talk about what meditation is, how to go about doing it and why it is important.

So what is meditation? If you strip away the other nonsense which various world religions have put into it and bring it down to its bare bones, meditation is simply the act of getting your mind to stop the internal dialogue that runs through our head all the fucking time and drives us nuts. Actually, internal dialogues, plural, might actually be a better way to put it. I don’t know about you guys and what you have in your head, but I have a whole cast of characters that wont shut the fuck up ranging from the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 commenting on everything to the Marx Brothers whispering how I should deal with people to a narration by James Earl Jones and Arnold’s voice constantly calling me fat and worthless. There are about a half dozen others as well. Getting them to stop is difficult, but has some amazing benefits.

Frank Zane called the mind a “story factory” and says that getting the story to stop will allow not only for mental acuity and a better mind muscle connection, but for the body to be able to, for lack of a better term, use all of its resources at healing and growth. For the time we put aside to meditate, the idea is to find the empty space in between our thoughts and find a way to exist there. With practice it should become easier and we will be able to extend the time.

So how do we do this? Well, there are several ways and I encourage you to try each until you find the one that

Kai Greene, who is also a proponent of high rep / light weight routines and fierce mental focus on the muscle, is also a big fan using the power of the mind. One thing he does, which we will be doing this season, is spend 5 full minutes on the treadmill just before jumping into his workout basically walking slowly, hood up, just focusing on the workout you are about to do. I will mention this again, but it is important to get this down.

works best for you. None of the ways matter in the way that it doesn’t matter which hammer you use as long as it drives the nail. We want to drive the nail. The hammer is inconsequential. The first way is vocalizations. This is the standard sitting around chanting “ooohmmm” or whatnot. Again, what it is you chant doesn’t matter. The idea of the vocalization is that the chant should take just enough focus to take you away from your internal dialogue, but not so much that your meditation stops being about escaping your thought and becomes more about the chant itself. I personally have had no luck with vocalizations, but people all around the world have been using them for a very long time so it must work for someone.

The next method is that of focused breathing. The idea for focused breathing is to focus on the normally involuntary act of drawing breath thus distracting you from the internal noise. Inhale slowly and deeply and think “one” and then exhale slowly and completely and think “two.” Also, when inhaling you want to focus on bringing the air into your belly and not into your chest. In the same way that we want to remove muscle memory from our day to day normal actions, we are going to be looking to really take our breaths with intention essentially creating a mind muscle connection with the act of drawing and exhaling breath.

I see Team WB Fitness as a group of Warrior Monks. Laugh if you want, but I take it seriously and because I take it seriously I can make it real….at least for me.

Yet another method of meditation is what is called “Present-Moment Focus.” In this method rather than chanting or focusing on breathing you are focusing on some external stimulus. Some people might use the flickering flame of a candle. Another common method is to touch your fingertips together and just really focus on the feeling there. Remember, your goal is to remove the stories, the panning, the memories and all active thinking from your mind so these external focuses should be sharp almost until you don’t even realize how long you have sat there. If any method has worked for me this is it.

You can also try what is called “progressive relaxation.” With progressive relaxation you do a series of 5-10 set contractions of your muscles while sitting comfortable. So you might go arm, forehead, neck, shoulder, chest, etc in a particular order.

Of course when it comes to repetitive motion meditation we here at Team WBF highly recommend the Atlantean Sword

The final one I will mention to you is repetitive motion through muscle memory. Remember, during our workout we are trying to avoid a break in mind muscle connection by avoiding muscle memory. In fact, we are trying to do with with our every day tasks all day. This is another reason meditation is so important. It is here, in our meditative period, that we finally let go of the mind muscle connection. Remember, holding it all day, in and outside of the gym, will be exhausting. It is here that we let it go. So just like in the rest of our activity we want to avoid muscle memory, this is the time or passively accept it. There are many forms of this. Tai Chi, yoga, various stretches. Pretty much anything that you can do that distracts you and that you can do without actually focusing on it.

So there you have it folks. Meditation in a nut shell. Now I don’t know if all the claims made by Frank Zane and other meditation gurus from all walks of life are true. I don’t know if it will lower your risk of over training and lower your cortosol levels. I don’t know if it will imporve organ functions an dhelp with fat burning or help with your focus. But I do know that we are going to be creating a very hard connection between our body and mind and taking a little time to escape that will be of some benefit. So, for now, here in phase one, your homework is to do 5 full minutes of daily meditation. If you are the type that can do it for longer, go for it. This is and area I am very much a weakling in and so I am going to try, over the course of the program to build up to 30 minutes.