Committed to caring in CAF: Mental, emotional preparation may translate to 'limitless' physical fitness

Published Oct. 12, 2011
By 1st Lt. Neil Samson
Air Mobility Command Public Affairs

SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. -- When most people think of physical fitness, the first thought might be to improve physical fitness by running hundreds of miles a month, trying the newest nutritional revelation or sporting the newest barefoot shoe.

However, many reports show many individuals don't take the time to improve mental strength. When physically equal, the athlete with the strongest mental fitness wins every time, statistics show. And in some cases, an athlete with stronger mental skills can produce a better performance than an athlete that is physically stronger.

Many people may also ignore the long-term benefits of strong mental health. Memory loss, slow thinking and problem solving blocks are not inevitable when people get older. The key to avoiding this inevitable change is to keep the brain physically and mentally challenged.

Studies on aging over the past 25 years from Svanborg, Sweden; Duke University: and the National Institute on Aging, Bethesda, Maryland support findings that mental and physical decline due to aging are not inevitable. Further neuroscience research has convinced the scientific community the brain is adept to further intellectual enhancement into geriatric age. The principle of neuroplasticity has neurologists augment the mind in order to improve everything from physical fitness to job performance, and even act as a deterrence to mental diseases and disorders such as Alzheimers, Parkinsons and anxiety disorder.

Dr. Ken Kosik, professor of neuroscience research at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said in a report from The Center for Cognitive Fitness and Innovative Therapies, Santa Barbara, Calif., that people forget the brain is an organ, just like the heart and lungs need exercise and sound nutrition. Kosik also said the time to focus on brain health is before the onset of mental diseases or disabilities even years in advance.

After starting running at the age of 48, Sister Madonna Buder, a Catholic nun with the Sisters for Christian Community, Spokane, Wash., now age 80, and commonly known as "The Iron Nun," is continuing to go strong and doesn't plan on stopping. Most people at her age start suffering the onset of mental diseases and disorders.

Buder is well-known in the sports community not for breaking Olympic or world records, but for testing the physical boundaries of age.

In 2005, at age 75, she became the oldest woman to ever qualify for and complete in the Hawaii Ironman World Championships, finishing a full hour before the 17-hour cut-off and besting people younger than her.

She began training more than 30 years ago after hearing a priest praise the many benefits of long distance running. Buder started in a pair of hand-me-down soft-soled tennis shoes and began mile by mile, making her way running around a nearby baseball field.

Buder said there are times while competing that she had to forget her body and use her mind, to keep her body from undergoing unnecessary suffering.

Just as daily doses of push-ups, crunches and running strengthen your upper body, improve cardiovascular endurance, and heighten lung capacity, mental exercises of visualizing your success serve as your regimen of mental pull-ups and cerebral hill repeats to improve your physical performance so that you do not undergo needless suffering.

Astronomer and scientist Dr. Carl Sagan once wrote, "Imagination will often carry us to worlds that may never exist, but without it we go nowhere."

Sagan's quote can also be applied to physical performance, and it has been well documented that thoughts and images create neuromuscular impulses, according to Colin Blakemore, professor of physiology at the University of Oxford.

This neuromuscular implication for both elite athletes and Airmen support the belief that bodies tend to do what they're told, all that's needed is to decide what to tell them. How people decide what to tell their bodies are through two distinct forms of mental imagery -- internal and external, according to Sheila Jennett, head of the department of physiology at the University of Glasglow. When someone uses mental imagery to lower their mile and a half run time, they may visualize running the track from a first-personal perspective, and subsequently they may imagine various sensations to be experienced during every lap of the run.

Using external imagery, the Airman performing their fitness assessment can possibly view themselves from an external, third-person perspective. External imagery techniques involve belief in preparation and visualization towards the ideal run time or attaining the maximum push-up repetitions.

Both forms, internal and external are used by everyone from top athletes to Airmen when comparing reports. Both types of imagery help boost focus, improve performance and learn complex skills or tweak their form.

Blake more said emotions also have a powerful effect on anyone's physical performance. A lack of emotion may produce a flat or uninspired performance, while too much emotion - such as a bad case of the nerves - may prevent a person from optimum physical fitness performance. Anyone can use mental imagery to find their optimal mental state -- either calm, quietly confident, or in other cases, brash, bold and intense. Whatever the technique used for mental imagery, repeated use of the choice of mental imagery will help that person achieve it.

Jennett adds that outcome expectancy, or the belief that people are capable of great things, is reinforced when using these mental imagery techniques.

Lt. Cmdr. Julie Chodacki, 375th Medical Group Mental Clinic, said thought "drives behavior," and the key thing to realize is to think optimistically and realistically when striving to reach goals.

Whether trying to break personal records, the perfect combination of physical conditioning, mental training, internal and external imagery, and emotional preparation may be among the best ways to help move beyond self-limitations.

(Note: This is the 15th in series of 24 stories for 2011 by Air Mobility Command Public Affairs highlighting the Comprehensive Airman Fitness culture through a "commitment of caring." Comprehensive Airman Fitness, or CAF, is built on "four pillars" of fitness -- physical, social, mental and spiritual fitness -- and five "Cs" -- caring, committing, communicating, connecting and celebrating. "Comprehensive Airman Fitness reflects our commitment to developing a holistic approach to caring for our people that equips, enables and empowers everyone to grow more physically, socially, mentally and spiritually fit," Gen. Raymond E. Johns, Jr., AMC commander said in June 2010 while addressing CAF to AMC wing commanders. "It's not another program, but rather, a means to enhance mission effectiveness by intentionally investing in one another.")