SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Medidojo, Inc., the company building Dojo, the AI meditation app for iOS that generates a personalized meditation session, today announced that elite chess grandmaster Anish Giri has joined as a Founding Member of the Dojo High Performance Team. Giri is joining the team to help build the mental training system that he can integrate into his own preparation and tournament routine.

Giri has been a fixture of elite chess for more than a decade, with tournament victories including the Tata Steel Masters. This spring he finished runner-up at the 2026 Candidates Tournament in Cyprus, the strongest Candidates result of his career, one step from a world title match.

Mental training has become chess’s new arms race. Several elite grandmasters have incorporated meditation, mindfulness and yoga into their routines, using them to improve concentration, manage emotions under pressure and recover more quickly from setbacks. Some practice daily, including during tournaments, while others use brief meditation as part of their pre-game routine. The physiology backs it up: research published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology found that a single game of chess raises heart rate and suppresses heart rate variability, the same stress signature the body produces under physical load. A chess player’s mind is not calm. It is an engine running hot.

Chess has seen meditation endorsements before. This is different. Giri joins Medidojo as part of the team, helping design the training system he will use: relaxation first, then focus, then visualization, the three internal skills elite chess demands.

Dojo generates personalized meditation with AI instead of serving a library of prerecorded tracks. Describe what you need and the app builds a custom session from modules like breathwork, body scan, focus, visualization, or meditation for insomnia/sleep. Connect an Apple Watch, AirPods Pro 3, WHOOP or other devices and Dojo shows heart rate response during practice, so users can see whether meditation is working instead of guessing. In Medidojo’s early wearable analysis, 76.8 percent of Dojo sessions lowered the user’s heart rate, with an average drop of 6.5 beats per minute, typically beginning within the first minute of practice. The approach matches where wearable science is heading: a 2026 analysis of Apple Heart and Movement Study data found that heart signals measured during mindful breathing carry significantly more health information than passive readings.

“Every serious athlete trains the body with a program and a feedback loop. Almost nobody trains the mind that way,” said Asaf Shamir, Founder and CEO of Medidojo, Inc. “Chess is where that changes first, because in chess the mind is the entire sport. Anish competes at the top of the most cognitively brutal game on earth. We are not asking him to relax. We are training him like an athlete, and the heart rate data will tell us whether it is working.”

“Studies show that meditation and breathwork can do wonders. I am a chess player who cares about concentration and visualization, and about recovering a clear state after a long game,” said Anish Giri, an elite Chess Grandmaster and a Founding Member of the Dojo High Performance Team. “What interested me in Dojo is treating those as skills you can train, with feedback-based meditation and breath-work.”

Research supports meditation as a tool for high performance [1]: a meta-analysis of 111 randomized trials involving 9,538 people found measurable improvements in executive attention, working memory, inhibitory control and sustained attention. A separate Cambridge-led analysis [2] of 13 randomized trials and 2,371 participants found significant reductions in psychological distress, highlighting meditation’s potential to support both cognitive performance and composure under pressure.

Medidojo plans to expand the Dojo High Performance Team with athletes and performers in other disciplines. The timing follows the market: meditation apps are projected to reach 2.7 billion dollars in 2026, and analysts name AI personalization and wearable integration as the trends defining the category’s next five years. Dojo is built on both.

Download Dojo on the App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dojo-master-meditation/id6503365052

For elite athletes interested in joining Medidojo’s High Performance Team: athletes@medidojo.com 

About Medidojo, Inc.

Medidojo, Inc. is a company developing Dojo, an AI native mind training app for iOS, built in California. Instead of a static content library, Dojo generates custom meditation sessions from what the user needs in the moment and can show heart rate response during practice through Apple Watch and other wearables. People use Dojo for focus, stress relief, better sleep, and short meditation breaks that fit real schedules.

Sources:
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10902202/ 
[2 ]https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00081-5

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SOURCE Medidojo, Inc.