BODY PRACTICES: Heavy Metal Mindfulness

For one full year, Daylle Schwartz took her time in the weight room, asking God for help, and saying a prayerful “thank you” for every repetition she completed. That, she says, is what helped her mindfully make it through the super-slow weight training program that pushed her muscles to the max, week after week.

A self-proclaimed “recovering doormat” (she is the author of the Lessons from a Recovering Doormat blog at LessonsFromaRecoveringDoormat.com), the 40-something Schwartz is a former rap artist and a bestselling author whose nine works span the indie music business and the dating life. She is also a motivational speaker who’s had her share of media appearances on the likes of Oprah, CNN, Good Morning America, Howard Stern, and dozens of other radio and television programs.

As she neared her 40s, Schwartz realized she’d been neglecting her physical well-being, and she needed to care for her body, just as she cared for her spirit, in order to love herself completely — something she talks a lot about as a counselor who focuses on self-empowerment.

Having taken up exercise around the turn of the millennium — shortly after this epiphany about self-care — she decided to look for something that fit into her hectic schedule. Slow-motion weight training fit on all counts.

“Slow-motion weight lifting gave me the experience of the empowered feeling you can have when you really focus on the flow of just doing something,” Schwartz says. “My whole mind was working with me, rather than against me. So much of success comes from getting into the moment.”

TAKING IT OH SO SLOW 
Schwartz says she had always been intrigued by weight lifting — she’d lifted weights with a friend a few times before — but she felt intimidated about walking into a gym by herself. She also didn’t know how to load the plates on a weight machine or select the right dumbbell from the free-weights rack. So when she heard about slow-motion weight lifting, she started asking friends what they thought about it and where she could learn to do it. 

No one in her circle seemed to know anything about the highly focused practice of contracting the muscles for 10 or so seconds to slowly lift the weight, then ever so slowly releasing the muscle for another 4 or 5 seconds to lower the weight. Schwartz kept investigating and soon found the offering at a small gym just three blocks from her Manhattan home. Upon learning that she could work with a trainer once a week for 30 minutes, pay as she went for training sessions, and that she didn’t have to join a gym at all, she figured she’d found the ideal solution.

That perfect-sounding plan turned out to be the most physically intense exercise Schwartz had ever tried — but it was also the most rewarding. The super-slow reps, she explains, pushed her muscles to the point of failure — and that was the place where they began to grow and strengthen. This seemed more efficient than a typical weight-lifting routine. 

The practice also improved her mindfulness and her emotional state. “I focused on yogalike breathing,” Schwartz recalls, explaining how she came to think of the workouts as “mind weight training.”

Schwartz confesses that at first the workouts were extremely painful, but the process of doing the workouts gradually changed her experience of pain. Her fear dissolved, and she was able to listen more clearly to her body.

“You completely get into the flow of what you’re doing,” she says. “I would hear my trainer in the background, and I’d focus on listening to my breath to keep my arms or legs moving in a slow, fluid movement.” 

After her workout, she’d take the rest of the week off to let her muscles recover, sneaking in just one other, short weekly workout — outdoors, preferably — for her first love, cardio. 

Schwartz typically worked out on Mondays, and in a good way, she’d feel the effects of her routine for the next several days.

“My self-esteem improved dramatically from completing each workout,” says Schwartz. “I felt like this was something I needed to do for my well-being. I was doing this because I loved myself, and I was giving myself the love of making my body healthier and stronger. I had to dig in and literally pray to have the strength to do it; I would really feel like I was looking up and saying ‘thank you’ to be able to push myself a little bit harder.”

LEARNING TO DO ANYTHING
“Slow motion opened a huge door for me,” Schwartz says. “To know that I can work out with weights and take control of my fear of working out with weights — now it doesn’t matter that I’m the only girl in the weight room. I feel confident in my ability to work with weights because of my initial training with slow motion. That was priceless for me.

“I used my whole being to [accomplish each workout]: breathing, setting my intention, and to continue setting that intention as I worked my way through each rep showed me how powerful our intention can be,” she says. “Now I know that when I put my mind to it, I can do anything. And that can push me to some really amazing limits.” And there’s no membership required.

Jennifer Derryberry Mann is a freelance writer, editor, and yoga practitioner based in Minneapolis. She is the former editor of Science & Spirit magazine.