We all know building the body is essential to developing fitness and pursuing a healthier lifestyle. Yet, too often budding fitness enthusiasts overlook an essential muscle in growing your fitness: the brain. Your brain manages your overall health and body’s responsiveness to exercise - and is essential to maximizing your results each workout. Read on to learn how you can best partner your brain and body in your pursuit of greater fitness. Most people are aware of the fact that your brain is more active when sleeping than while you are watching TV. Yet, fewer folks know exercise is not just a wonderful way in which to get your body firing on all pistons - but also an outstanding way to stimulate your brain. Further, just as your body needs ideal conditions to obtain ideal results - we’ve all twisted an ankle and know how it hard it can be to carry on with your daily life on one limb - ensuring your brain is healthy is as essential to your body as a pilot is to a plane. So, how do you maximize your brain's performance so you can fly through your workouts? To start, the best way is to stimulate your brain as a muscle just the same as you do the ones in your body. While it's a wonderful scene in a sport’s movie to see an athlete do the same exercise over and over again - such as hitting slap shots in a hockey rink or practicing kicking a football into the goal, even specialist athletes that focus on one element - like track runners and swimmers - still mix up the types of workouts they do on the track or in the pool to ensure they don’t get bored, or risk injury via too much repetition. We change our Warrior Workouts each day to ensure that no two classes are ever the same and it’s just as important that you change your routine each day when exercising outside our classes. This means looking to different exercises and types of physical activity that will develop your overall fitness while also keeping your brain feeling excited and stimulated by a variety of exercises. In turn, not only does understanding how your brain works improve your workouts; it means your workouts improve your brain. Your body may get a reward of dopamine after undertaking exercise - but your brain is also rewarded throughout your workout! Not only does dopamine release endorphins giving you that feel good post-exercise natural high, but it also helps fight stress and conditions like depression. Finally, moving beyond biology and science exclusively to the mental area of your mind: your brain benefits immensely from your capacity to maintain the discipline to exercise. Building your brain’s responsiveness to workouts and coordinating your exercise between body and brain will not only reap rewards in fitness; but also grow your discipline and resilience across the daily challenges of life. There are so many ways in which you can stimulate your body and brain to grow your Warrior spirit - but it's always best when you workout to ensure they do so together! What’s more, a really brainy thing to do for your body is keep an eye out for our upcoming eBook! “The Warrior Packs Way: a journey towards greater fitness”