Why I Never Workout with Headphones Anymore
It is obvious, habitual, no-question, no-nonsense, “duh,” kind of a “why wouldn’t I?” for most people when it comes to listening to music while working out.
Music can be something to get you hyped up, keep a quick rhythm, and engage you while resting; and for longer runs there’s podcasts or audiobooks to get in some information–because otherwise, it’s just boring.
Lifting weights in silence…
Running for an hour or more with only your thoughts for company…
I mean how boring–miserable even–does that sound?
But I have a different perspective.
Listen to Your Body
Everything we do in this life is filled with engaging stimuli and our headphones often distract us from fully experiencing what is happening right now: how our bodies feel, how our minds are reacting, the sounds, sights, smells, sensation of the wind brushing lightly against sweat-glistened skin, everything!!
I ran a Marathon, 105 laps around a track, spending a little under six hours listening to nothing but the sound of my breath and the occasional bird.
I didn’t realize how psychotic this seemed to others until people asked if I listened to anything.
“Nope. Just my breath!”
“Jesus man… How did you not get bored? 105 Laps??”
Of course I did get bored. But I just watched myself get bored—it never really got in my way.
I watched my mind progress from optimism to daydreaming to boredom to fear to pain to single-minded focus to tears and finally to surrender and to bliss when I was limping in the CVS parking lot chugging orange juice and humming Billy Joel tunes so simply and unbelievably happy to not be running anymore.
And I watched my body go from warming up to flowing and light to sore to tight and then really tight to painful and finally to limping like an old man with a new hip and two torn ACL’s.
By watching all of that happen I learned a lot about my mind and my body.
My thesis here is that music, while a beautiful thing to listen to in its own right, can serve as a crutch or distraction while working out, especially when it becomes habitual, or when it becomes hard to workout without listening to anything at all.
I learned this focused way of working out–really it’s a way of being, but I’ll keep this post somewhat focused, maybe–from practicing yoga.
Moving Meditation
Once you step on to your yoga mat and class begins you’re locked into the practice and heat for 60 long minutes.
To be in a space focused on breathing and moving for that long is an enormously challenging meditation.
Your mind will wander: it will tell you it doesn’t want to be there, that it’s tired, that it wants to stop moving, and it will try to worry about that project or that ex…
But you won’t stop.
You won’t leave.
And you won’t text your ex something desperate.
Instead, you will come back to your body, back to your breath, and continue moving until class is over.
And that’s the beauty of the practice right there!
Can you suffer through sixty minutes of intense heat, physical and mental pain, and rather than escaping it, move deeper into it?
Stress Responses
When we feel stressed out, sad, angry, or worried, for many of us the first instinct is to reach for a distraction that brings comfort: social media, cigarettes, weed, coffee, sweet treats, or a friend to complain to are things that come to mind for myself.
Yoga—really any kind of workout with this mindset—can train your brain to respond differently.
It trains your mind to react to stress by breathing, listening, and moving your body through the feeling–despite the feeling.
Physical exercise and heat can release a lot of the stress that’s held in the body and give you an opportunity to be with it.
Hot yoga especially brings out a really really intense anxiety: as the body heats up and the breath quickens the heart rate spikes towards terrifying and sometimes dizzying levels.
It’s intense.
But it doesn’t need to be yoga or even hot (freezing cold works great too) to be beneficial.
You can practice this mindset of presence with any physical exercise by keeping yourself in the flow of movement, rest, and stretching, from the first warmups to the final cooldown.
Of course you will get distracted.
Simply come back again.
And again.
And again.
And again…
Techniques
In the yoga classes at Shiva Shakti they teach us two techniques to help with focus: Drishti (drih-shtee), and Ujjayi (oo-jai-ee) breath–I don’t think I would’ve been able to complete my marathon without these.
Drishti is the practice of focusing the gaze on a single point and seeing that one point clearly.
For example, while in Downward dog the point is the back edge of the yoga mat or a spot on the wall behind you. As you hold the pose, your gaze is steady on that point rather than wandering around aimlessly.
Keeping your gaze on a single point grants your mind the space to drop into the sensations happening in your body. It calms and focuses the nervous system.
The other technique, Ujjayi, or Ocean Breathing, gives our ears a sound to focus on.
This audible breath is created by constricting the back of your throat like you’re trying to fog up a mirror, but with your mouth closed.
The out-breath kind of sounds like the ocean crashing against the shore, and the in-breath like the water retreating back.
It’s this sound that you center your focus on.
It’s kind of like music, but something that we generate from within ourselves.
If you amp up the speed and depth of the breath the intensity of the workout increases, and you can slow it down when stretching or resting to relax–it's like switching from Eminem to smooth jazz.
Benefits
When you do this, when you’re able to sit in the pain, keep your gaze steady, and listen to your body and its breathing, you’ll start to create a little bit of space between you, and the sensations you experience.
Eventually you might come to the realization that the pain that used to be so scary can’t actually hurt you.
It’s just pain.
Your anger, your fear, that intense burning in your quads or lungs or core, it’s pain, yeah, but it doesn’t have to send you running or screaming for help.
Your pain doesn’t have any real power over you if you don’t let it.
When we release the need for distraction and start to drop into our bodies, then, my friends, the magic happens.
Because once it ceases to be scary, it becomes interesting.
Be Curious, My Friend
Why does my right knee hurt more than my left when I run?
If I rotate my foot in does that help? Which stretches feel more uncomfortable on my right side than my left? Which muscles feel weaker?
What’s causing the tightness in my collarbone?
Why do my legs start shaking when I shift my foot to the left in this pose?
A therapist or spiritual guide can only do you so much for you.
At a certain point you have to see that the finger they’re using to point at the moon is only that, a finger!
The same thing goes for personal trainers.
They can give you ques to align your body, motivate you to train harder, and teach you new ways to explore movement; all of this is incredibly useful and helpful and powerful, but if you want longevity and freedom and independence you have to learn to look deeper into yourself—
Because each of our bodies is super unique!
The specific combination of tennis, karate, video games, YouTube, reading, track, lifting, boxing, and hiking that I’ve done has created areas of strength, weakness, and tightness that has been fascinating to rediscover and work on.
Sometimes I do exercises that my physical therapist prescribed, and other times I get high, start stretching, and find myself in positions that I’ve never seen before but feel fucking great.
No one can teach you more about yourself than you can.
Conclusion
Once you start listening to your body you’ll learn to hear its voice.
If you habitually have sounds blasting through your ears awhile moving it’s easy to miss the subtle signals your body is sending you.
Maybe it’s a little twinge in your hip that doesn’t feel quite right, so you shift that hip back; or when you run you notice a pain in your foot so you rotate your knee in and that helps; or there’s a tension in your collarbone while at the computer, so you relax your shoulders down your back and it feels easier to problem solve, etc.
Moving the body is an art, and just like any other art, it requires constant exploration: testing the possibilities, pushing the boundaries, seeing what you like, seeing what you don’t like, and learning and learning until the day you die.
Headphones can distract you from seeing all of this.
This isn’t to say they can’t be a useful tool for working out, but maybe there’s a thing or two you can learn without them.
The only things I’ll straight up tell you to do are to play, try new things, and to listen listen listen to your body–because it’s trying to tell you something very important!
“there is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.”
― Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
Adios,
-Andy
