Why Meditation Is Part of My Fitness Regimen

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Behavior change is hard. Whether you're trying to be more active, adjust your default workout intensities, or eat more kale, ingrained patterns resist our good intentions. This is among the many reasons meditation is an integral part of my fitness regimen. Without working directly with the mind, behavior change tends to be an arduous and often futile task. Thankfully, the mind is malleable, and meditation is one of the most reliable ways to put that malleability to work.

Neuroplasticity is the term for how your brain constantly restructures itself in response to experience. Neuroscientists often summarize Donald Hebb's famous principle this way: neurons that fire together, wire together. Most of the time, this rewiring happens without our noticing. Live under chronic stress, and the brain's stress circuitry grows stronger. Spend years navigating the maze of London's streets, as the city's cab drivers do, and the brain regions associated with spatial memory actually enlarge.

But we aren't passive in this process. Through meditation, we can intentionally strengthen the circuits associated with awareness, compassion, and wisdom, including those that support making positive changes in our behavior.

Over the past several years, I've been in conversation with colleagues from UW–Madison's Departments of Family Medicine and Community Health, Kinesiology, and Counseling Psychology, as well as the Center for Healthy Minds, about the interface of physical activity and meditation. One theme kept surfacing: aerobic exercise appears to increase the brain's capacity for change, and easy, conversational-pace cardio (sometimes called Zone 2 or the recovery zone) may be an especially good primer for meditation.

That led to a simple hypothesis:

Meditation supports behavior change, and cardio supports your meditation.

If you'd like to explore the science behind meditation and behavior change further, "Mindfulness and Behavior Change" offers a great overview.


Schuman-Olivier, Z., Trombka, M., Lovas, D. A., Brewer, J. A., Vago, D. R., Gawande, R., ... & Fulwiler, C. (2020). Mindfulness and behavior change. Harvard review of psychiatry, 28(6), 371.

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