Meditation and Exercise — train your mind while you train your body

Not necessarily. Richie's response to "my jog is my meditation" is always maybe, but not necessarily. A clearer or more peaceful mind during exercise is not the deciding point. What matters is whether you are doing something intentional with your mind, training it consciously.

Cort draws the parallel to physical exercise. Doing chores and climbing stairs is good for your body, yet you would not say you did your exercise routine because you cleaned for half an hour. Exercise needs intention and a clear outcome, which is physical health.

Meditation has the same two ingredients. The intention is to train the mind, and the outcome is mental and emotional well-being. Those two together distinguish a formal practice from feeling better or different while you do something.

Richie says many people who call jogging their meditation are in flow. They are totally present and merged with the activity, but the mind is not being deployed intentionally. It is a more passive process.

Flow can occur with or without meta-awareness. In a paper the two wrote together, they named the version without it experiential fusion: absorption in an activity that is not necessarily meditation.

He uses the time he is already spending. Putting on clothes and cycling shoes leaves room to reflect, so it costs no extra minutes. He reflects on how riding benefits his health, and how being healthy and vital benefits everyone he interacts with, his work, and what he does in the world.

That gives the ride a sense of altruism, pro-sociality. He is not doing it only for himself.

When he rides alone, the reflection recycles spontaneously and he comes back to it many times. Setting the intention beforehand is what helps it return on its own. It energizes him, and he describes it as riding for humanity, which he admits sounds a little corny.

He is candid that he has no evidence it is beneficial. It feels beneficial, it motivates him to exercise, and he suspects it may even change the biological effects of the exercise.

Aerobic exercise is probably the best-validated non-drug strategy for increasing neuroplasticity. But Richie points out that plasticity is neutral. If your mind is full of toxic thoughts or you are in a toxic environment, a more plastic brain learns those influences more effectively.

Pairing the exercise-driven boost in plasticity with something wholesome and intentional for the mind is what he calls a winning combination.

Cort's plain version: exercise makes the brain more malleable, so it changes more easily. Richie names the molecule behind it, BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). It promotes new connections between neurons and the growth of new neurons, and exercise raises it in the brain.

A teeny bit. A few studies find that meditation raises plasticity-promoting molecules like BDNF, but not at a scale large enough to be confident. Blood levels of BDNF also do not necessarily reflect what is happening in the brain.

Cort's analogy for why the pairing matters: raising your capacity for change and then surrounding yourself with toxic influences is like taking steroids and sitting on the couch eating chips.

Richie says the answer is not definitively known, largely because of the limits of human studies. Some things may change immediately and others over a longer period, and it is hard to know how you would measure the difference.

From a scientific perspective, Richie has absolutely no idea, and the same goes for the ideal spacing between the two. He often talks about a science of contemplative aerobics, but calls it an aspirational goal that does not yet exist. There are more tools available today than ever to begin exploring it seriously.

One approach is to look for growth in brain structures linked to plasticity. Richie says those findings are complicated and questionable, and they are not immediate. A person has to be put in an MRI scanner, and they cannot exercise while inside it. The work is at an early stage.

Cort's experience is that changing surroundings and shifting posture make the mind naturally shift and calm, so dropping into a practice is easier than sitting perfectly still. He guesses the default mode network may quiet a little, and says he does not think much science supports that yet.

He adds that sitting still has its own value. Part of the benefit comes from being face to face with your own mind with no escape hatch.

Probably not. Richie has felt what Cort describes but suspects it differs across individuals, and that other people experience it differently. Meditation comes in many kinds and so does physical activity, which may be an important variable. One size is unlikely to fit all.

You can train your mind at the same moment you exercise your body. You may get the benefits of each, and there is at least the potential for a synergistic benefit greater than the sum of the parts. It is also easier, because you are piggybacking one wholesome activity on another you already want to do.

He never rides with headphones. His senses stay open, partly for safety, and he finds he is very attentive with little spontaneous thought. His awareness is broad on open farm-country roads and contracts when he has to cross a busy road.

On a recent 30-mile ride he slowed for a mother deer and her fawn in the University Arboretum and felt appreciation for multiple species sharing a beautiful place. What he attends to is driven by what is in front of him.

In the early 1990s he did yoga in Minneapolis and treated the movements as meditation more than exercise. He moved slowly, relaxed into each pose, and rested awareness on different parts of the body.

The strong sensations of stretching naturally grabbed his attention, which was easier than staying with something neutral like the breath. He found he was more present in yoga than in his formal mindful-breathing sessions.

Cort picks something visible in the distance, like a street sign or a big tree, that will take a minute or two to reach. Until he gets there he does one specific thing with his mind. It might be open, effortless awareness, feeling his feet hit the ground, or following his breath.

At the landmark he reboots and picks the next one. He always shifts between a light focus and something more open and expansive. He finds the rebooting keeps the practice light and playful, compared with committing to one long block.

Richie shifts his aperture repeatedly over a ride of an hour and a half. Cort uses the same trick when driving, picking a sign far ahead, and when watching a film, using the scene cuts as a reminder to come back. He also uses page breaks when reading.

Transitions like these are entry points. Everything becomes practice.

Richie calls the reboot approach interval training for the mind. Cort bets it would be more effective than sitting for 20 minutes trying to follow the breath. Both say it has been on their minds for a long time, and it is a hunch rather than a finding. Their response: let's do that study.

There is a little research, and the general finding is some added benefit: together is better than either alone. But it is skimpy and uses very small samples, a problem across meditation research. Richie says the jury is still out, though more people are paying attention and he expects serious evidence in the coming years.

Cort points to emerging research suggesting active practices are just as beneficial, at least in the early stages, as formal sitting meditation. The Healthy Minds app includes both. He says this deserves its own Dharma Lab episode.