The slim young lady leaned against the pillar in her cricketing clothes and greeted me warmly. I hadn't seen her for sometime so inquired about her performance during the current cricket season. She replied that she did not have any big scores, "I seem to lose my concentration half way through", she added. I asked her for a reason and she replied, "I feel tired and seem to lose my concentration". I pointed to a teammate who works out regularly on her fitness and asked, "Does she get out because she feels tired?" "No, that girl can bat or bowl all day long and not feel tired, she is very fit", said the young lady.

There we were talking about being fit and losing concentration. Isn't keeping fit about exercising the body and concentration about focussing the mind? What would a fit body have anything do with concentration?

GA_googleFillSlot("sitagitarectanglebottom"); You see, our bodies receive energies from different sources and use them for different purposes. Amongst various kinds of energies, the body has three main types of energies    Physical Energy, Mental Energy and Emotional Energy. When a student works round the clock for her exams, she is primarily running on mental and emotional energies. An athlete primarily uses physical energy. Nevertheless, remember that the energies we use are not mutually exclusive. That is, we cannot run our systems only on one kind of energy. We may use more of one and less of the other depending what kind of activity we are doing.

A software programmer would mainly be doing mental work and therefore use mental energy. A manual labourer, as his name suggests, is mainly physical. And if someone were to be under severe emotional stress, like a tragic loss or distress, he would use his emotional energy.

When the body is not kept fit, something very interesting happens. What happens when a person doing extensive mental work does not keep his body fit? A student studying for his exams, whose body is not regularly exercised, carries along using sheer will power, which is a combination of mental and emotional energies. The body is unable to process energies efficiently as it has not been exercised and the mind provides the energy by means of will power. The mind not only does its own work but also subsidises the inefficient body's needs. As it is the mind carries this great big load and now has the extra burden of the body. The mind and brain are high precision instruments and need to be taken care of. Don't we take great care of high-tech machines?

So, when we exercise the body regularly, the body becomes efficient in its performance. Then it has enough energy to run its functions and then have some energy left over for the mind to do its job. Now the mind can carry on doing its high precision high quality software job and let the body do its physical job. The mind is the software running all this hardware, our body.

Exercising Options:

Gym: Look for a Gym in your neighbourhood, which is a clean and well- ventilated place. Also check out the quality of the instructor. A Gym where the emphasis is on fitness is better than a place which talks of big muscles. More equipment is not necessarily better, and the emphasis must be on instruction.

Yoga Institute: What we need is a Yoga Institute which teaches Yoga for fitness and general well-being. There are also places which market spiritual Yoga but they may not fit our purpose. Anybody with a few years' experience is apt to start an institute, so check out their background.

Sports Clubs: Take up a game or sport for the fun of it and not really for competition. It could be fun cricket, football or volleyball. Gather a group of friends and go to the playground, and start a fitness regime, jogging, floor exercises and parallel bars. Go have fun and see your mind become clearer and grades starting to improve.

P.Raghu Nandan

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