How Sports and Physical Activity Build Mindfulness and Mental Resilience
Imagine this, I’m in the middle of my CrossFit workout, with metal clinking, grunts echoing, and the sand is in unmentionable places. And for some reason, that day’s workout was awful. Not the usual “burpees-are-hell” kind of awful, I just felt off. I started CrossFit about three months into my deployment. For five straight weeks, it became my rhythm: deadlifts, burpees, sweat, repeat. In between my doing my duty of paper pushing and the daily sound of bombs going off, CrossFit had become my tiny pocket of sanity. My moving meditation, before I even knew what a meditation was. But not that day. That day, CrossFit felt like walking through sand with boots on. I wasn’t working out; I was going through the motions. Looking back, yeah, the burpees were hell, but that always passed. I’d curse, breathe, recover, and show up again the next day. How often do our bodies try to tell us the truth, “you’re overwhelmed, overworked, and overstimulated, you need REST!”, and we don’t listen?
Because of CrossFit, I began to learn the different ways my body responded to stress. I didn’t only pickup CrossFit, I picked up Yoga. I learned about my limits, and when it was okay to safely push past them. Knowing when to lean in, when to lean back, and respecting when I’ve reached my max would later become life lessons that my 23-year-old self would take with her long after deployment. Sports don’t just train and strengthen our bodies; they build mindfulness and mental resilience. This isn’t just my experience; one study by Stoyanova and her team of experts (2025) found this spread out across different sports and experience levels.
"Knowing when to lean in, when to lean back, and respecting when I’ve reached my max would later become life lessons that my 23-year-old self would take with her long after deployment."
So, if you haven’t noticed by now, this story isn’t only about CrossFit and those damn burpees, it’s about how physical activity, exercise, and sports can become a vehicle to mindfulness and mental resilience. Mindfulness means to pay attention or focus on what’s happening in the present moment, because I was more aware (focused) of my breathing and body, by making sure that my form was right I was practicing mindfulness! Within that hour, nothing outside of CrossFit really mattered. I was in a flow state, an active meditation if you will. At the time, I didn’t know I was being mindful; I was just trying to be better at something new. Sure, I was training my body, but I was training my mind too.
It was during my yoga practice that I slowly noticed how everything is connected. My breath affected my movement; yoga taught me that if I can control my breathing, I can control having a better outcome. Meaning if I slowed my breath down versus having shallow, rapid breathing or holding my breath, I would be able to get another rep in or go deeper into a pose. Mindfulness came with practice, and with practice comes resilience. According to Ingwerson (2023), to be resilient, you must (1) face adversity, this adversity can cause strain mentally, physically, emotionally, etc., and (2) positively adapt to it. So, resilience is the positive adaptation towards adversity.
Every athlete naturally face adversity every time they are training, playing, or recovering from a loss, but not every athlete can naturally and positively adapt to the adversity they face.
Research highlights that resilience isn’t one-dimensional; athletes build better resilience when looked at through a psychological, physical resilience, load, and recovery lens, think a multidimensional viewpoint. (Den Hartigh et al., 2022) Merging mindfulness and resilience training with sport training was first studied in 1985, thanks to Dr. Kabat-Zinn and his work on mindfulness in sports. We have learned with Collegiate and Olympic rowers’ that performance optimization can be improved as well as sports specific mental skills. Ingwerson (2023) Evidence based models have shown that mindfulness and mental resilience teach athletes self-regulation, mind body awareness, and healthy, practical stress coping techniques.
A study in 2020 found that after an 8-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction program, participants showed significantly improved coping skills, which were related to increased mindfulness. Another study from 2018 focused on the effectiveness of the mindfulness-acceptance-commitment (MAC) approach on athletic performance and sports competition anxiety with a randomized clinical trial. The application of the MAC approach significantly improved both athletic performance and reduced experiential avoidance and sports anxiety. (Dehghani et al. 2018)
Together, research paints us this clear and powerful picture. Resilience is not about going harder, it’s about slowing down to be able to respond, rather than react and relearning how to recover and overcome life's many pressures. Sports, physical activity, and exercise give us a haven to practice mindfulness and resilience in real time. This is how movement tied with intention becomes mindfulness. As I mentioned before, CrossFit was a moving meditation. For me that’s how my mindfulness practice began, I didn’t have the knowledge and language yet, but I did have my breath. Not in silence, but in motion, one breath at a time.
Thank you and be sure to follow us on all socials @theemochayoga and subscribe to our youtube channel for free guided meditations!
Stoyanova, S., Ivantchev, N., Gergov, T., & Yordanova, B. (2025). Mental Resilience and Mindfulness in Athletes: A Preliminary Study Across Sports and Experience Levels. Sports, 13(10), 334. https://doi.org/10.3390/sports13100334
Ingwerson, J. (2023). 52/Resilience, mindfulness and sports performance optimization. In The Youth Athlete A Practitioner’ s Guide to Providing Comprehensive Sports Medicine Care (pp. 561–564). chapter, Stacy Masucci.
Den Hartigh, R. J. R., Meerhoff, L. R. A., Van Yperen, N. W., Neumann, N. D., Brauers, J. J., Frencken, W. G. P., Emerencia, A., Hill, Y., Platvoet, S., Atzmueller, M., Lemmink, K. A. P. M., & Brink, M. S. (2022). Resilience in sports: a multidisciplinary, dynamic, and personalized perspective. International review of sport and exercise psychology, 17(1), 564–586. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750984X.2022.2039749
Dehghani, W. by M. (2018, May 5). Mahmood Dehghani, Azadeh Delbar Saf, Asghar Vosoughi, Giti Tebbenouri, Hadi Ghazanfari Zarnagh. Effectiveness of the mindfulness-acceptance-commitment-based approach on athletic performance and sports competition anxiety: a randomized clinical trial. https://www.ephysician.ir/index.php/browse-issues/10/5/1014-6749