Meditation, Breathing, Cold Exposure and all that mindful stuff

If anyone had told me 12 months ago, that I’ll be immerging myself in +2°C water on a freezing cold -4°C New Years Day morning in 2025, I would have seriously questioned their mental health. And yet here I was, stepping into a small local river canal and even enjoying myself while doing it. So what happened? And what the hell does this have to do with badminton anyways?

Introduction

As with a lot of people when they cross the 40 years mark, I couldn’t help but noticing that my body and mind started showing signs of change. Some small health issues started kreeping in, I keep having several respiratory infections during the cold seasons and I was having some issues with sleep. And since I’m not the type to simply accept those things as unavoidable and god given, I started researching and dipping my toes into different things that I found along the way. And the more I did so, the more fun I found in that mindfulness stuff.

So if you haven’t left this thread yet, you might be interested in my experiences with some of the stuff that I tried and maybe some recommendations and starting points if you are completely new to the matter and want to check out if this could be something for you too.

Disclaimer: I am very far from considering myself even remotely an expert in these topics. I’ll only share my very personal experiences with the stuff that I’ve tried so far to maybe give some of you a certain starting point if you want to give it a try for yourself. Let’s keep in mind that everybody is different and everybody will make different experiences with this.

Let’s start with…

Meditation

It’s almost been a shocking 10 years when I started this thread, dealing with issues to calm down after a practise or even match session:
https://www.badmintoncentral.com/fo…s-to-calm-down-after-evening-sessions.157053/

And even if there was a lot of good advice, none of them seem to be the real game changer for me. And after talking to a friend who is deep into Yoga and meditation for years now, I decided to give it a go. But where to start?! If you search YouTube you’ll find a lot of beginner tutorials and of course a gazillion guided meditation videos for literally every situation in life resulting in massive option paralysis.
That same friend directed me to a mini series in Netflix called “Headspace” which was then my door opener:

Each episode shows the basics of a specific sort of meditation and at the end of each episode there’s a 5-7 minutes guided meditation based on the technique shown in the episode. Very easy to understand and to follow and to me a perfect way to get in touch with the whole matter. They also have a YouTube channel with loads of guided meditations for all sorts of occasions.

So I went on and I tried to implement meditation to wind down after an evening badminton session. And the results I got were nothing but stunning. For me personally, I found the most effective meditations for that purpose to be sort of body scan meditations. The most effective one for me was this one here that I can highly recommend if you want to give it a try (it’s in German, sorry…):

I’ve found that a technique called “non-sleep deep rest” (NSDR) very recently that seems to be very similar and I really like this video as well:

Spending 15-20 minutes on one of those meditations just lying or sitting down on the couch helps me reduce my heart rate and my overall stress level significantly. I still need some time to fully calm down and being able to go to sleep, but the meditation clearly can speed up this process and especially helps to close my thinking about the previous match situations during the session.

As a bit of background to the NSDR routines, they are based on a technique called Yoga Nidra:

So far I’ve only dipped my toes into that whole area, but those seem to have a lot of potential. If you also want to give it a go, here’s a starter:

I’ve done this routine instead of taking a nap on a day when I felt very exhausted and tired in the afternoon and it felt as if I had actually taken a good nap. My whole body and brain felt vitalized and re-energized without the tiredness I usually feel after an afternoon nap. So this is something I will be digging into deeper. I can imagine this being super useful during a break on a long tournament day.

Before I continue with things like breathing exercises or cold exposure, I’d like to take a break here and split this huge cake into several smaller slices. And I would highly appreciate some feedback if anyone found it to be useful up to here and of course it would be very interesting to hear from others who have would like to share their own experiences with mediation.