Train the mind by training the body

It is midnight I am still up……

My body still aches from the jog I went on previously in the day. As I ran, my mind thought about the conditioning regiments athletes put themselves through. These regimens are often discussed as not only a conditioning of the body but of the mind as well. The fact that rigorous training builds mental toughness is almost axiomatic in the sports realm. The ancient Samurai Musashi identified that the reason warriors are fierce is because their training is fierce.

In the education realm, we would call this "toughness", persistence. Persistence is a person's ability to identify and see a task through to its completion. Many factors come into play when identifying people with high levels of persistence. One major factor contributing to persistence is an individual's level of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is one's perceived ability to control the direction their lives take. A person with a high level of efficacy will persist longer through adversity than someone with a low level of efficacy. Physical training can help to increase a person's perceived level of self-efficacy as people gain much of their perceptions about efficacy through the interpretation of physical stimuli. Training one's ability to manage, control and interpret physical stimuli through exercise will in turn influence one's ability to enhance perceived levels of agency.