The positive impact of sports on your psyche

Most of us have experienced it for ourselves: sports don’t only make you stronger, they have numerous positive effects on your mental wellbeing. Therefore, it’s important to integrate low-impact sports such as yoga, Pilates or barre into your workout schedule in addition to high-intensity training. This ensures that you retain an optimal balance, both for your body and for your mind. Here, you can learn about the different ways workouts impact your brain chemistry, boost your mood, and help you live a more balanced life.

1. Focus on yourself

It’s no surprise that yoga continues to enjoy ever-increasing popularity: it’s with this dynamic sport that the effects on the psyche are most noticeable. In a world where things keep moving faster and faster, we often need a place where we can retreat. Taking time for yourself might be a rarity these days, but it is also extremely important. Only by focusing on yourself can you listen to what your body needs and develop a more mindful existence. In this way, you can improve your mental wellbeing and gather strength to face the stresses of daily life. Vinyasa Flow yoga, for example, improves your energy flow, ensuring that you feel refreshed and energized after training. 

2. Memory workout

Those who exercise regularly also train their brains! Not only is a workout the perfect way to offset a day sitting in the office, many sports also help improve your memory. Coordination exercises, for example, are ideal for this purpose. Workouts that combine two sports, such as TRX Pilates, demand extreme concentration and coordination. The same applies to learning new choreography in a dance class, which works a completely different area of your brain. Performing these mental gymnastics means you can head back to the office and score some points by coming up with lots of brand new ideas. 

3. The happiness factor

Numerous studies confirm it: those who regularly do sports are happier on average than those who don’t. That’s because exercise promotes the release of the “happy hormone” serotonin. It lifts your mood and ensures that you remember your workout experience positively, motivating you to keep going back and catapulting you into an upward spiral. But that’s not all that a workout can do: it can also increase your self-confidence. After a Strong Barre session, which combines a ballet warm-up with strength exercises, you’ll feel pretty proud that you’ve held out, giving your ego a needed boost.

4. Sport connections

We experienced it ourselves: the magic of group sports! At our community event in JOHN & JANE’s SOULBASE, the energy was contagious. We fought through the Strong Barre training, mastered the TRX Pilates workout, and relaxed at the end with some Vinyasa Flow yoga. With some collective motivation and the will to tackle something together, you can achieve a great deal. Plus, friendships are formed when those with common training interests come together. This makes for some good conversation topics, planning future training dates, or a healthy group dinner afterwards. You can find even more reasons for doing group sports here.

Whether for stress relief, regaining a sense of balance or mastering some new physical skills, sports doesn’t just get you fit, it helps you grow mentally. You learn things about yourself that you would have never known had you stayed on the couch. And let’s be honest: would you rather brag about indulging in a TV marathon at home or running an actual marathon? With the latter, we guarantee you’ll feel like a superhero stepping out of the Marvel universe. 😉

Titelbild: Foto © Hannes Schmidt