Train your mind to train your body

The great Buddha had said, "Rule your mind or it will rule you" Discipline comes with understanding your mind. Read on to find out how. We all know that knowledge of something alone does not make us disciplined enough to follow it regularly. Even motivation helps us get a good start, but with time even motivation dries up and the same habit which was driven by motivation in the beginning, after few days becomes a daunting task. In our last blog we discussed "hacks" we can use to exercise regularly. Let us take the same example forward to understand discipline as without discipline, we can forget about persisting anything for a long time.  Watch my video on this topic by going to the link below- How the mind plays us? Let us first see what is common in all individuals. We all get loud inner mind chatter when we are about to begin our workouts. Let me give an example of myself. As a club level player and a coach, I always strive to improve my squash. I design my worko...

During this period of the Corona virus pandemic, I have spoken to many friends, students and fellow coaches. The primary complain they have from the situation as regards to their fitness is that, “there is just no motivation. So it’s very difficult to maintain regularity in exercising.” Well, that’s absolutely correct. There is no tournament coming up, no one to compete with and restrictions in moving out of the house. The uncertainty of the situation adds to the problem.  No one knows when we will be able to compete in a tournament next. It’s been well over three months since squash courts have been closed and keeping the motivation on over such a long period is becoming increasingly difficult. In such a situation, how do we continue to drive ourselves to do that very important work out every day and continue to be in a minimum acceptable shape? Here are a few tips which you can use to motivate yourself to exercise- . Get a personal fitness coach - This is the easiest way to motiv...

All of us are itching to get back to the squash courts post the corona virus pandemic. Most of us have never stayed away from the game since the time we started playing. We all know how addictive the game is, so it’s natural to miss all the action. But there are many athletes, especially young teens that may be getting into depression as their daily routine revolved so much around squash training and the courts. They ate, drank and slept squash. I happen to speak to a 14 year old squash enthusiast whose mother was upset that he was missing squash “badly”. I asked him what he was missing the most. And he replied that he was missing his training. Well, do we really have to MISS training during this time? Does squash training only mean doing drills and fitness inside the court? We all know that’s not the case. There are multiple aspects to training and unfortunately, most of these aspects are largely ignored during our regular “intense” training programs. So how do we keep our train...