Skip the Mirror

New thought about training: skip the mirror.

In gyms where mirrors are on almost every wall, in an environment where almost everyone is there to improve their looks...is that even possible??

Well, it's certainly tough, I grant you, but I think it's for the best.

Here are a few reasons I think that we'd all be better off skipping the mirror during exercise:

1) Your attention goes off of how you LOOK and more onto how you FEEL. That's totally essential for good form, because you can sense--or I should say, learn to sense--far more than you can see about what your body is doing. When there's visual information available it tends to trump all the other senses. When visual feedback isn't available, other senses kick in. So you're going to build better proprioception if you keep your eyes off the mirror.

2) You start focus on performance rather than appearance. A wise, very strong guy once said that the ugliest exercises are the best ones for you. I'm not sure I totally agree--I find something perversely beautiful about good form in even a guts-on-the-floor deadlift--but I get what he was driving at: you're not supposed to look great while you exercise. That's not the point. More mirrors, more self-consciousness. More self-consciousness, less performance. You want to be a doer in the gym, not a looker. If you're concerned about looking good outside the gym--and come on, who isn't?--then the more you focus on DOING in the gym, the better you'll look outside it.

3) You can keep your balance better. This goes under the heading of "sheer conjecture," but, hey, my blog, right? A client of mine was doing overhead lunges (that's where you lunge while holding a barbell isometrically overhead, as in the top position of a military press). I had her set up in front of the mirror and she had a hard time holding onto her balance. On her second set, she resituated herself so she couldn't see herself and presto--her balance was perfect. Mirrors, as ubiquitous as they are, are an illusion. They're disorienting. And they very well may screw up your balance subtly, as they mess with your sense of spacial relations in the room.

Perhaps that's why Narcissus lost his balance.

Certainly there are other reasons, among them, not looking like a tool who's obsessed with how great his arm veins look when he's doing curls.

Anyone else got some?

Have a good weekend!

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