Mental Flexibility & Neuroplasticity

Are You Strong Enough to Change Your Mind?

Brain circuitry can feel “overheated” from ceaseless internal chatter. Intense training, meditation and immersive tasks can cause the internal commentator to fall silent, giving the overworked mental loop a chance to cool down, settle and reset. Use the same mental circuits in the same patterns all the time and you burn grooves deeper and deeper. Neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to adapt to experience — asks us to challenge stale patterns, learn new skills and do recurring life tasks in purposefully new ways.

Mental Inflexibility Hardens with Age

Mental inflexibility, left unattended, increases with age. Just as the unattended body stiffens, loses function and slows, so too does the unattended Mind. One of the most clichéd aging stereotypes is that of old, wizened men and women, feeble, doddering, bent over, walking with short, shaky, unsure steps, ready to topple over — coupled with grumpiness, snappiness, pettiness, anger, and small-mindedness.

The point is not that age automatically creates decline. The point is that passivity and repetition can narrow the body and the Mind. Just as the body can be trained to retain strength, flexibility, functionality and suppleness as it ages, so too can the Mind be trained to retain mental suppleness, pliability, sharpness, alertness, and function. Optimally, you can train both at once.

Intense Training and the Internal Commentator

One surefire way to short-circuit ceaseless mental chatter, improve concentration, improve focus, and amplify mental acuity is to engage in high-intensity exercise on a repeated and regular basis. Exercise needs to be of such intensity that body and Mind must unite to cope with the severity of the task. If the exercise intensity is insufficient for that purpose, the Mind can continue to operate, holding conversations with itself as the trainee exercises: a split-screen existence, externally exercising, internally thinking about something totally different.

Moderate exercise has real value and real health benefits. Yet Gallagher-style Iron Zen is after a different state: the point where effort becomes severe enough that the body and Mind are forced to merge. Those fitness devotees that always operate far beneath their true capacity may never invoke intensities of sufficient amplitude to force a mind-body melding and an ending to split-screen existence.

An overactive Mind that babbles incessantly every waking moment becomes like every other overworked muscle: exhausted, burnt out, fried from continual overuse. Intense exercise can short-circuit the internal commentator, taking the “thinker” off-line. Simultaneously, an intense training session can unleash a physiological cascade that heightens effort, sharpens focus and alters mood. Intense training builds the body, intense training can cause Mind-Body unification, and intense training can catapult the whole effort to the next level. What’s not to like?

How does this relate to mental flexibility? Intense exercise can cause the Mind to fall silent for a while, allowing the overworked mental loop to cool down. Past a certain level of exercise intensity, the conscious Mind, the internal talker, cannot maintain a coherent internal dialogue. The difficulty of the effort causes the internal voice to shut down — of its own accord.

This last point is critical and subtle: willpower cannot be used to silence the internal commentator, as that is just another conscious act of the conscious Mind, akin to holding one’s breath. Exercise doesn’t ask the conscious Mind to please stop babbling. Intense exercise slaps the conscious Mind, the talker, across the face: WHAP! Shut up! Help us push or pull our guts out! The degree of exertion required is so herculean that the little man in our head cannot maintain his spiel.

The Post-Workout Glow and Meditational Quietude

Ironically, this unintentional quieting of the internal voice is a goal found in many classical meditational schools. The overarching target that links many schools of meditation is mental quietude: ritualized methods for achieving “the Mind of No Mind,” as a Soto Zen master might label the attainment of internal quietude. Deep meditation and the post-workout “glow state” can both be characterized by an electrified mental silence.

The five “sense gates” — see, hear, taste, touch, smell — can feel amplified in the meditational state and in the post-workout afterglow state. This is Gallagher’s experiential language, not a medical diagnosis. It is the athlete’s way of saying that consciousness changes when chatter drops away.

The goal of the advanced meditator is to experience “reality,” the “all ground,” that can only be experienced in the “gaps between thoughts.” Meditators are often impaled on the horns of a dilemma: they are using a mechanical method constructed by conscious thought to access a meditational state that is beyond words, methods and willpower.

Intense exercise sidesteps this irresolvable contradiction by attaining a meditational state incidentally, as an unexpected benefit of hardcore training. The Iron Man comes by his meditational mindset accidentally, as an unintended side consequence of extreme physical effort.

Neuroplasticity Means Doing New Things

How does all this help someone on the wrong side of sixty seeking to avoid the ever-shrinking concentric circles? How does one avoid the physical and psychological mire and stagnation that cause fossilization?

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s capacity to adapt. For older adults, the practical goal is to use that adaptive capacity to preserve function, sharpen attention, maintain cognitive fitness and avoid mental sleepwalking. Neuroplasticity is consciously doing different things or doing the same things differently. The inference is that rote repetition — doing the same things over and over in the same way — can hasten the loss of cognitive liveliness. Use it or lose it.

Those that passively stay doing the same things in the same ways, year after year, decade after decade, inevitably suffer physical and psychological narrowing. Both body and Mind require new stresses, stresses of sufficient intensity to challenge brain and body. By offering Mind and body new challenges, old grooves become less worn; new grooves are established that require focus, effort, and physical and psychological intensity.

Immersive Tasks and the Gap Between Thoughts

Adherence and improvement in new challenges are antidotes to mental and physical inflexibility. Are you strong enough to change your Mind? Or are you comfortable and growing sleepier in your ever-shrinking concentric circles of mental and physical activity? Don’t fall asleep in that snowbank. Introduce some purposeful physical stress into your life, enough to short-circuit that overactive little man in your head.

Do you feel the endorphin rush post-workout? A glow state can be evidence that you trained with enough intensity to alter consciousness. Bask in the electrified post-workout glow. For the serious trainee, it can feel like an advanced meditational state.

Past intense training, take up new interests. Reinvent new ways of doing old interests. Take up tasks that generate immersion, be it cooking, working on a racecar, ship-in-a-bottle building, model building, stamp collecting, hard training, bowling, or golf. Seek tasks or acts that cause you to lose “self,” to become so immersed and concentrated that the internal talker falls quiet of his or her own accord. This is neuroplasticity personified.

Fight stagnation, fossilization, and degradation by challenging yourself mentally and physically. Don’t be a superficial surface skimmer. Don’t be a mile wide and an inch deep. Be an inch wide and a mile deep. Train hard. Get lost in immersive tasks. Don’t think so much.

Equipment Notes for Brain-Body Training and Immersive Practice

Neuroplasticity is not created by equipment. Equipment simply gives the trainee a repeatable way to introduce new stress, learn new patterns, and practice focused physical immersion.

For rhythmic conditioning that can quiet the internal commentator, readers and facilities can compare indoor rowing machines and exercise bikes. Specific examples include the Concept2 RowErg with PM5 and the Schwinn Aetherion Bike, when those tools match the trainee, room, and training goal.

For floor-based meditation, mobility, or posture work, compare foam exercise mats or a specific option such as the Aeromat Elite Workout Fitness Mat. For controlled strength work and pattern variety, facilities can compare plate-loaded leverage gym equipment, selectorized gym equipment, and the Body-Solid GFT100 dual stack functional trainer.

The tool does not create mental flexibility. The new challenge, the full attention, the disciplined repetition, and the willingness to change create mental flexibility.

Safety Note for High-Intensity Exercise, Meditation, and Mental Health

High-intensity exercise, breath-focused meditation, deep concentration practices and demanding physical training are not appropriate for every person in every condition. Scale intensity to age, health, training history, injury history, medication status, sleep, recovery, and emotional state.

Stop or seek qualified guidance for chest pain, faintness, dizziness, unusual shortness of breath, panic, confusion, numbness, sharp pain, repeated technical collapse, worsening mental distress, or any symptom that feels different from normal training discomfort.

Meditation and mindfulness can be useful practices, but they should not replace conventional medical or mental-health care. People with cardiovascular disease, neurological conditions, major depression, panic disorder, trauma history, psychosis history, pregnancy, major injury history, or significant medical conditions should seek qualified guidance when needed.

This article preserves Marty Gallagher’s RAW Brain Train perspective. It is not individualized medical, mental-health, rehabilitation, or programming advice.

Related Brain Train Reading

For more Marty Gallagher on Zen and training, read Zen Mind, Iron Body Part I. For a related article on the zone and flow state, read Flow State in Resistance Training.

RAW with Marty Gallagher, J.P. Brice, and Jim Steel Podcast.

About the Author: Marty Gallagher

As an athlete Marty Gallagher is a national and world champion in Olympic lifting and powerlifting. He was a world champion team coach in 1991 and coached Black's Gym to five national team titles. He's also coached some of the strongest men on the planet including Kirk Karwoski when he completed his world record 1,003 lb. squat. Today he teaches the US Secret Service and Tier 1 Spec Ops on how to maximize their strength in minimal time. As a writer since 1978 he’s written for Powerlifting USA, Milo, Flex Magazine, Muscle & Fitness, Prime Fitness, Washington Post, Dragon Door and now IRON COMPANY. He’s also the author of multiple books including Purposeful Primitive, Strong Medicine, Ed Coan’s book Coan, The Man, the Myth, the Method and numerous others. Read the Marty Gallagher biography here.