Mental Training: #1 of 4
An Introduction to Mental Training
Cultivate your power. You may recognize that as Garage Strength’s motto. A number of people have asked me about the origins of our tagline, and it happens to feed directly into the next major topic I would like to cover.
When I was younger, I was intrigued by people’s religious stories and experiences. Why did certain things happen to certain people? Why did they believe what they believed? In an effort to try and understand all of this, I realized I had a keen interest in religious studies. Not just one particular religion, but all of them and the universal principles and tenets that united them. Each religion provided a solid foundation of principles that could be used to guide an individual’s daily life.
Cultivate your power. This phrase sprang to my mind during my final Confucianism class at Penn State. I loved studying the teachings and figuring out ways to relate them to my everyday life. All I ever thought about was lifting weights and training, and it was nice to find ways to relate the principles of Confucius back to the principles of training. One of the key principles of Confucianism is “moral self-cultivation.” Simply put, Confucius wanted individuals to use their knowledge to develop particular moral character traits that will improve the individual internally and, as a result, improve society externally. By using particular rituals and practice, the individual could cultivate their moral charisma. In other words, each of us has the ability to cultivate our power.
So what does this have to do with training? As a coach, every day I am treated to a variety of excuses and reasons for missing training sessions, lack of rest, and improper nutrition. These are not training points specialized to highly trained, refined athletes. These are essential to peak performance in normal, everyday life. Excuses are reasons to explain failure. Instead of accepting the failure and moving toward success, the excuse is a crutch and explanation for a lack of preparedness. Many people place their success on their ability and skills, but failures are attributed to excuses and “reasons beyond control.” We are a society of failed fitness sessions, fad gyms and fad diet systems. All of these are gimmicks, and all of them take advantage of the fact that our society looks externally, not internally.
Looking Inward
Things happen. There are instances when outside influences have a significant impact upon your life and your schedule. But more often than not, the reasons that are provided for not training or eating improperly take place within the mind. How many times have we heard stories from people who thought they were incredibly tired and unmotivated, only to push through a training session and feel much better when they were finished? Or even further, how often have we heard about an exhausted person in a life-threatening situation who survived simply because they knew they had to? Your mind tells you that you want a candy bar, bottle of soda, or brownie. Your body does not. If you can remove yourself from the situation, distract yourself, and move on, three hours later it will become a distant memory.
The same goes for training. The battle starts within the mind. Some days you are feeling a bit groggy. It is easy to leave work and go home and take a nap. It is easy to make excuses, to avoid training. If you’ve ever pushed through those excuses and forced yourself to train, you know that after your session there is an immediate sense of relief. A few hours after the session, there’s a greater feeling: a sense of individual accomplishment and success that was sparked by the power within the mind.
“Cultivate your power.” Take control of your life. Take control of what happens to you, starting with internal views on life. Goals are achieved because of individual hard work, good choices, and ability. Mistakes that happen in training are just that, simple mistakes. They can be fixed by continuing to grow, understand and adapt to the training process. Cultivate your power. Accept responsibility for your actions and start the trend toward success. Cultivating yourself will lead to hard work and good results. This starts by looking inward.
How badly do you want to achieve your goals?
Do you want to be a champion? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to become a phenomenal athlete? Do you want to be in extraordinary shape at the age of 50? Begin by looking at your inner self. Start contemplating what you need to change to cultivate your power. This power will lead to great control in life and great results in training.
At the Garage, it is not only the coach’s responsibility to cultivate a trainee’s body, but also his or her mind. How can we avoid the mental traps and further strengthen our mind? This will come in the next installment of this series…Cultivate Your Power: Mindfulness.