Tag Archives: mindfulness

TopRow boat on the Thames

Rowing : mindfulness on the river


It’s the killer all-body cardio workout: 60 minutes in the boat = 700 calories burned. Boom! But who knew that rowing would also be the ultimate in mindfulness practice?

I’ve been learning to row on the Thames at Putney with TopRow since the spring, and am loving it not just for the fitness boost but also for the mental benefits.

Rowing as part of a crew is the ultimate team effort. Full-focus on the mechanics is essential, and it’s that concentration that forces all other thoughts out of your mind.

Mindfulness with every stroke

Every stroke, I am aware of how my body is moving, whether I am in synch with the rower in front, how my weight is balanced and the rhythm of my breathing.

I am thinking about the positioning of my hands on the oars, keeping wrist twist to a minimum as my fingers swivel the oar to square the blade before it enters the water, engaging my quads and glutes throughout the stroke, making the optimum stretch forward through my arms and then back to ensure a smooth, effective movement through the water.

Stay relaxed, don’t tense shoulders, jaw or neck. Lean, heave, slide, stretch. Breathe steadily throughout the stroke to maintain tempo and concentration.

Utterly absorbing

Closing my eyes, I hear the creak of the boat, the slide of our seats, the clunk of the oars in the rowlocks as they switch from vertical to horizontal and back again, followed by the gentle splash as they drop in the water. I feel the smooth motion of the hull in the water or perhaps a slight jerking or wobble if we don’t get the timing quite right.

The epitome of mindfulness, blind rowing is an exercise that amplifies the feel of our movements on the motion of the boat and is just one of a number of exercises our TopRow coach has employed to help finetune our technique.

Let your mind wander and it can be just moments before you fall out of time with the rest of the crew, miss a catch or fail to square up the blade just early enough to make for an efficient stroke. Rowing is utterly absorbing.

The Thames at Putney
The Thames at Putney

When I signed up for my first TopRow course, I expected to spend time on the water enjoying the view, observing birdlife and maybe even chatting. But an hour on the Thames from Putney, upriver past Hammersmith Bridge and back is more often than not a prolonged period of physicality and silent concentration. Conversation can be a distraction, so we save it for rest/coaching periods, or when we are rigging/de-rigging the boat.

Striving for correct form on every stroke, requires utmost concentration. I love it.

What is mindful eating?

Goji and blueberries

How many berries are too many?

Mindfulness is massive at the moment, but can you harness it to solve the specific problems of your relationship with food?

That’s what I wanted to discover during an Introduction to Mindful Eating seminar run by the London-based Mindfulness Project. So how does it work?

Think about the last time you scoffed a whole packet of doughnuts, or an entire baguette, or a family-sized bag of sweets. How did you feel afterwards: guilty? A bit sick? Disappointed in yourself? Maybe even worse than that.

The point about Mindful Eating is that it encourages you to be compassionate about your behaviour around food rather than beating yourself up over what you might think of as  your ‘naughty’ eating habits.

In Mindful Eating, there are no bad or good foods, no calorie counting or portion control. It focuses instead on teaching you to be aware of what you are eating, helping you learn to make choices, and embrace your food issues rather than turn away from them.

So you ate more biscuits than you feel you should have done? Explore how you felt while you were eating them, how you felt after eating them, and how you are going to approach a packet of biscuits next time you feel the urge.

In this way, you will begin to create your own unique relationship with food – and learn that you can be in control of what, when and how much you eat. Applying the principles of mindfulness to your eating habits is all about recognising and thus harnessing what course leader Dr Cinzia Pazzolesi calls ‘the automaticity of eating’.

‘The mind is like a puppy,’ she explains. ‘It is easily distracted.’ So the key to Mindful Eating is to train your mind to focus ‘above the chatter’ so you can jumpstart yourself out of automatic pilot mode whereby you hoover up every crisp in the packet, then wonder where they all went.

During the free one-hour seminar, we tried simple meditation techniques designed to help put us back in touch with the reasons why we eat, and learned how to become more aware of the smell, feel and taste of the food we choose to consume.

Recognising the mechanisms of your eating is a way to help you decide whether to have one cookie/piece of chocolate/strawberry or go for a second or third. And that is why Mindful Eating is an ongoing choice rather than a diet or eating plan that lasts for a finite period of time after which you need to re-train your normal eating habits. Mindful Eating itself can become your norm.

The Mindfulness Project runs four-week Mindful Eating Courses, teaching techniques to help end mindless/stress-related/emotional/binge eating as well as help you free yourself from being painfully judgmental about your attitude to food, eating and your weight.

Find out more about Mindful Eating and other Mindfulness courses at www.londonmindful.com