How to meditate (to support your fitness goals)

Could meditation really help you achieve your fitness goals?

Sometimes in health & fitness, all you need to achieve your goals is an effective workout program, at others you need to zoom out and look at things in a holistic way. This allows you to get a full idea of what your personal challenges and bottlenecks are and what tools outside of exercise and healthy eating themsleves you could use to positive effect. This is a quick guide to one of those effective tools, meditation.

Crucially, I’m writing this guide as a personal trainer, I see meditation as a practical tool and use it regularly with my online personal training clients to help remind them that mind & body are inseparable. Keeping both in excellent working order can have a significant positive effect on weight and body composition

Of course, you won’t be able to meditate yourself to six-pack abs, but the two may be more closely linked than appears at face value, which I’ll explain shortly.

Does meditation have a role to place in a holistic approach to health & fitness?

Before we dig a bit deeper, let’s take a quick look at why meditation works.

Meditation used to feel a little bit fuzzy, you should have seen some of the faces drop when I first started bringing mindfulness ideas up to engineers as part of a corporate wellness initiative, but over time it’s become more of a common practice and the health benefits are rooted in science.

Regular meditation can lower stress hormones like cortisol, lower your heart rate, and activate the body’s relaxation response. Over time, it rewires your brain through neuroplasticity for greater calm, access to the present moment, and emotional balance.

Studies show that meditation thickens the prefrontal cortex (which is the part responsible for decision-making, focus, and self-control) and calms the amygdala, the brain’s fear and stress centre. Think of it as a practical tool you could develop to help you handle pressure more effectively.

We could even say that meditation is like strength training for your mind. Just as consistent physical training makes you stronger, regular meditation makes you more resilient, focused, and adaptable. Let’s explore how you can get started.

Here is a clip from my podcast with Hollywood personal trainer David Higgins discussing his meditation practice and how it benefits his role as a top-notch fitness coach:

Adopting the right mindset to meditate

Meditation isn’t about clearing your mind of every thought. It’s about learning to observe your thoughts without becoming entangled in them. When your mind wanders, it will simply guide it back to your breath or point of focus in the room. There’s no “perfect” meditation. Simply showing up for yourself is the goal. 

Over time you’ll start to notice a shift in the way you experience the world. You’ll begin to observe your thoughts and feelings before they take hold of you. This gives you a rare sense of strength and calm. It’s like being an observer of the world who gets to choose the extent to which you want to participate. Imagine how useful that will be when dealing with difficult people, responding to setbacks and just managing the more challenging times of life.

I’ve written about some other ways to achieve this end with a comprehensive guide to developing a resilient mindset through fitness.

The various forms of meditation

Meditation is a personal practice, and there are many ways to meditate. Here are a few types of meditation to help you try a few and find what works best:

Mindfulness meditation

This involves observing your thoughts, feelings, and sensations without judgment. The goal is to stay fully present. This is an informal way to meditate with a low barrier to entry making it a great, flexible place to start.

All you need to do is sit still and focus on your breathing. Encouraging a sense of calm and presence. All you need to do is observe what you’re feeling in your body and the general sounds and features of the environment you’re in. Whenever your mind wanders, bring your attention back to the present moment.

Guided meditation

This is a great way to practice meditation as it’s led by a guide, removing guesswork and simplifying the logistics, you just pull the guided session up and follow the instructions, much like a follow-along workout. Explore the various app stores and online platforms which offer a wide range of services, you’ll find everything from stress management to seeking a boost in creativity.

If you’d like to try one I created, I have a guided meditation I led here:

Transcendental meditation (TM)

Transcendental meditation involves silently repeating a mantra, which could be a sound or word phrase given to you by a certified teacher. This type of mantra meditation aims to put the body into a restful state of alertness so that the body can rest and the mind can remain free from distraction.

Choose your word or phrase and repeat it with each inhale and exhale. Allow the word to anchor you. Transcendental meditation is more of a specific protocol and generally involves practising for a specific period of time (15-20 minutes) split between the morning and the evening.

Body scan meditation

A body scan meditation is a form of mindful awareness intended to connect mind and body, helping to induce a sense of calm and presence. It’s popular with a lot of people who exercise often as it has more of a physical component. I actually think this is a great thing to do after a workout to bridge the gap between your workout and the rest of your day.

You essentially grab an exercise or yoga mat, lie down and get into comfortable deep breathing. You then bring your attention to various parts of your body whilst bringing your attention to sensations of tightness or tingling. Gradually move down your body, through your neck, chest, upper arms, all the way down to your toes. A typical session lasts approximately 20 minutes.

Your first meditation exercise

Find a quiet space: It need not be a formal location, just find somewhere you’re pretty sure you aren’t going to be disturbed for a few minutes so you can let go of your conscious mind.

Get comfortable: You don’t need a meditation bench or anything like that. Try to maintain a good posture that helps your body feel at ease, again nothing formal, keep it intuitive and lean into what feels best. You just don’t want to be distracted by physical feelings of discomfort when you could easily avoid them in a more comfortable position.

Minimise distractions: Turn off notifications and, if possible, let those around you know you’re taking a few moments to yourself. If you’re going to establish a regular meditation practice it makes sense to let those around you know it’s something you’re taking seriously and need a bit of space and time for.

Set a timer: Initially, I suggest you only aim for 5-10 minutes of meditation, unless you’re under guidance and doing something more specific. Just like with exercise, starting light and gradually extending duration is prudent.

Decide where to focus: This could be your own breath, some form of mantra, a visual image, or even a candle flame.

Close your eyes (optional): Some people like to close their eyes, while others enjoy holding focus on a particular point, so you can choose whether you close your eyes or not.

Breathe naturally: Observe each inhale and exhale without trying to change your breath, don’t feel the need to take an artificially deep breath, just try to find a natural rhythm you can maintain.

Notice your thoughts: If your mind wanders (and it will), acknowledge the thought without judging it, and gently bring your focus back.

Meditation 101 – A few tips to get you started.

• Start small: Even a single minute that you can dedicate specifically to being mindful is a huge win.
• Be patient: Another parallel with fitness is that meditation is going to be a journey, it’s not really about getting anywhere, all the gold is found in continued practice. Progress comes with time and you’ll often feel like you have breakthroughs when you least expect it, it’s unlikely to be a linear process. This is where meditation and fitness do diverge, it’s relatively easy to predict a trajectory of weight loss for example, but meditation is likely to advance in noticeable breakthroughs.
• Embrace discomfort: The moments when you struggle are typically when the growth happens. In the early stages, you might be a little surprised about the nature and tone of the thoughts running through your mind when you start tuning into them. Don’t worry that’s normal. But do listen, they may reveal more about yourself and your life in general than you were initially looking for, which can be uncomfortable.
• Don’t judge: Keep in mind that meditation isn’t really something that you can do ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, it’s a personal practice and the real win is making time to do it, rather than what you feel like you achieved during your practice. This can be difficult at first, if you are used to very outcome-driven practices, like workouts or running goals where you either successfully get results or you don’t

Overcoming common challenges

Working as a personal trainer over the years, I’ve often observed that even in the presence of a lot of motivation to achieve a fitness goal there can still be significant resistance to get started. I’ve written quite a lot about how motivation really works in fitness and I think it applies to establishing any new habit.

For the purpose of this guide, let’s have a look at some of the most common barriers to getting started with meditation and how you might overcome them:

1. “My mind won’t stop racing”

This is perfectly normal. Meditation is about noticing your thoughts, not silencing them. Each time you return your focus to your breath, you’re building mental strength, it’s like reps for the mind.

2. “I fall asleep”

Try meditating in a seated position or earlier in the day when you’re less tired, perhaps switch up your routine to try it first thing in the morning. If you do fall asleep, be kind to yourself it’s not that you’re bad at meditation, it’s that your tired and your body has taken the opportunity to rest.

3. “I get frustrated”

Recognise that frustration itself is a part of the journey. It’s a sign you’re stepping out of your comfort zone and that’s where growth happens. Think of it like this, it’s not always going to be as simple as being calm when you actually meditate, in fact at times it’ll be the opposite. But you will gradually become calmer in your everyday life because of the presence of meditation in your life, even if some of the sessions themselves can feel like a challenge to get through.

4. “I don’t have time” 

This probably won’t be what you want to hear, but if you don’t have time for a 10-minute meditation, you’re probably unknowingly in the category of people who need it most. Think about when you may be able to win back that 10 minutes and as you make the decision keep reminding yourself that find the time is a significant act of self-care.

How To make meditation a daily habit

Just like in fitness, consistency is the key to getting results. Here’s how to make meditation stick:

Anchor to a Routine: Consider meditating after brushing your teeth, after a workout, or as part of a way to finish your daily lunch break. The actual anchor doesn’t matter, we’re aiming to benefit from an existing habit in your life that is already second nature to you. This massively lowers the friction on establishing the new habit because instead of starting something completely new, you’re bolting something onto an existing habit structure. It could be as simple as leaving a meditation cushion out at night so that it’s already laid out for you to use first thing in the morning. This works with exercise mats and sports shoes to help make exercise a habit too.

Leverage Technology: Use meditation apps and reminders to offer an outside form of accountability and keep you on track. For example, I often set a reminder to meditate for my online personal training clients as part of their fitness program, because I see it as an important adjacent lifestyle habit. But you can do this with a simple reminder on your phone too.

Set Realistic Goals: Start small and build up gradually. Acknowledge every session as a personal win, not for what happened during it, but that you self-prioritised enough to make it happen.

How will meditation benefit your fitness goals?

I encourage my fitness coaching clients to establish some form of mindfulness meditation practice, not because it’s directly linked to a workout or how to eat to achieve fitness goals, but because it’s been my observation that any attempt to separate mind and body is going to offer an incomplete solution, people just don’t work that way. So if mediation is a tool that has significant positive knock-on effects on health & fitness, I think we should utilise it. 

Here are some of the meditation benefits you might enjoy looking at through a health & fitness lens:

Reduced Cortisol

Let’s put mindful benefits aside for a moment, and reverse engineer an important benefit of meditation. There is a hormone that gets released when we are stressed and have actually become so synonymous with being stressed that it’s often referred to as ‘the stress hormone’ and that’s cortisol. 

As we touched on earlier, it’s a hormone that makes it harder to hold on to muscle and more likely to hold onto, or gain fat. Particularly around the abdomen. Which makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. As we evolved the most stressed thing we were likely to go through obviously excepting a direct encounter with some kind of ancient predator, would be not being able to find enough food. 

A perfect evolutionary response then, would be to have a mechanism by which we could convert existing components of the body to glucose to keep us going without carbohydrates actually coming in through nutrition, and fat could be stored or accumulated for an energy reserve, and to protect vital organs.

In the modern world, that response makes it really hard to positively improve body composition because losing muscle and gaining fat is the direct opposite of what we’re looking to achieve.

So if meditation is a vector through which we can lower cortisol, that’s going to be very positive for pretty much all of the most common fitness goals. 

Further reading: How to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time

Improved emotional regulation

One of the major long-term benefits of meditation we’ve touched on is that you start to be able to view and anticipate your emotions before you actually feel them, or rather before they have a chance to take hold of you. Particularly useful in scenarios that may previously have triggered you or made you act in ways that weren’t in your own best interest.

Through the fitness lens, this implies that when you might previously have been tempted to eat to soothe emotions or give up on an important goal you may be able to get out ahead of that decision and stay on track. You don’t gain this skill overnight, but meditation really could be one of the tools that tips the odds in your favour.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction

In 14 years as a personal trainer, I’ve observed that unless health & fitness habits are so well-engrained that they are just a part of who you are, many people have a counter-productive response to times of overwhelm and burnout, which is simply to drop their health & fitness regime altogether. On the surface, this can make sense because it can seem like just another thing to worry about, but the problem with this decision is that yes, one may get a little more time back but you would also lose all of the stress-regulating, health-boosting effects of exercise which ironically may have been one of the few things they had in place which would have helped manage the stressful time. 

That’s a pretty long-winded way to say that over time with consistent meditation you’ll start to feel a lot more positive emotion, which will help you manage, even mitigate stress, which downstream helps you make better choices in your fitness journey, which I think is the most important thing.

Moving beyond protocol 

I think there are many areas of life where following protocol to a tee really helps you develop a useful skill, and there are certainly a number of different meditation techniques you could use. However, I think true mastery often requires moving away from the beaten path and finding your own systems. It’s that way in fitness, and I think it goes for meditation too. 

The real goal, perhaps, is to make as much of life a moving meditation as we can. Whether that be at work, walking in the forest or being stuck in traffic, sometimes all we need for a significant reset. Just like working out, meditation too can become less of something we do and more of an expression of who we are. 

So whether you want to use meditation to accelerate your results in fitness, improve mental health or calm a wandering mind, I’ve seen many people including myself see a lot of benefits with consistent daily practice

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