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Key Strategies to Develop Mental Fitness
Focusing on the Process
The best goal to have is simply to “get better.” Such an approach ensures that you never get too fixated on specific results.
Quit thinking about success as finishing times, qualifying standards, or placements. Think about success as continual growth and progression over time.
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Key Ideas
Managing Letdowns
Every athlete is bound to face at least a few major letdowns in his or her career. When this happens, you want to let yourself feel down for a good 24 to 48 hours.
But after two days have passed, it’s critical to shift from ruminating on the past to focusing on the future. Select the next goal and begin mapping out a process to get there.
Dealing With Uncertainty
- Prevent it: Do what you can to minimize uncertainty by training like you want to race.
- Manage it: Develop a mantra or automatic actions to fall back when uncertainty strikes.
- Grow from it: View uncertainty as an opportunity to grow. Welcome it on the path to personal growth.
Turning Anxiety into Excitement
Pre-race nerves are common, even amongst professional athletes.
Reframe nerves as excitement. When we do this, we harness heightened perception to raise ourselves up.
Instead of telling yourself, “I’m anxious, I need to calm down,” tell yourself, “I am excited, my body is primed to perform.”
Focusing on the Process
The best goal to have is simply to “get better.” Such an approach ensures that you never get too fixated on specific results.
Quit thinking about success as finishing times, qualifying standards, or placements. Think about success as continual growth and progression over time.
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What It Means to Be Tough
Toughness is experiencing something that is subjectively distressing, and then leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take a thoughtful action that aligns with your core values....
Know Your Core Values
Think of 3-5 things that matter most to you. They may be guiding principles of your life or aspects of the person you want to become.
Then write a sentence or two on each, describing what they mean to you. These are the values you’ll want to act in service of when the going gets tough.
Embrace Pain, but Don’t React to It
When you react to it, that's when it transforms into suffering.
You can learn to experience pain neutrally is through meditation: it teaches you to accept pain, sit with it and then move on, instead of reacting to it with stress.
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Internal vs. external motivation
External ...
Self-Efficacy
It means believing in your ability to perform a task and achieve goals. There are 3 ways to build self-efficacy:
- Ensure early success. When first starting out, choose activities you're certain you can do successfully.
- Watch others succeed in the activity you want to try. This is particularly effective if the person you're observing is similar to you (friends, neighbors, co-workers).
- Find a supportive voice. Personal trainers and coaches are skilled in giving appropriate encouragement, as are good friends (usually).
Fundamentally Independent Thinking (FIT)
A fundamentally independent thinker understands that nothing makes a person upset, angry, or depressed; rather, what a person thinks about the world determines how they feel.
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Uncomfortable situations
Besides the well-known health advantages, in a world where comfort is king, arduous physical activity provides a rare opportunity to practice embracing uncomfortable situations.
Exercise is a keystone habit
A change in one life area that brings about positive effects in other area. Exercise it’s not just vanity. What you do in the gym makes you a better, higher-performing person outside of it. When you develop physical fitness, you’re developing life fitness, too.
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The Time Domain
Time measurement seems so crucial that athletes forget what to do without any measurement of time.
Running an interval without any clock makes you keep in touch with your internal feelings an...
Disrupted
Disruption and a skewing of your personal space is a way to challenge your comfort zone and grow towards becoming a seasoned athlete who can perform in unfamiliar territory.
To Each His Own
Every race is a search for your individual limits. In an interval workout, the coach tells you exactly how many repetitions to do, and then you stop. The limit is imposed externally.
For athletes to run to their maximum potential in races, they are the ones that should decide how many repetitions they needed to do in order to reach exhaustion.
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Consistency Over Heroic Efforts
Though inspiration can suddenly strike, turning it into a tangible finished product is a matter of sustained effort. It’s getting up every day and doing the work.
The best people in their fie...
Seek Mentorship
We all need to grow, learn, and take risks. Having a mentor or coach makes this massively easier.
Additionally, a good mentor helps you avoid making the same mistakes they have
Sleep
Sleep is not just about rest. It’s the period where the mind is shut off and reset.
When we sacrifice sleep, we also sacrifice creativity, self-control, and attention span. When sleep is lacking, so is self-control.
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Slow down
Try not to react immediately, but be patient and gather as much information as possible.
If the problem will not matter a year from now, distance yourself somewhat from the situation to gain ...
Stay positive
When you are in a stressful situation, do not allow your mind to imagine the worst-case scenario.
Focus your mind on something positive.
Never ask “what if?”
The "what if" line of questioning induces panic and lets you focus on imagined situations that escalate the problem.
Focus on the facts and work on a solution.
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Second-person self-talk and increased performance
A series of studies have confirmed that speaking to yourself can influence your performance. When comparing the effectiveness of self-talk using first person pronouns "I can d...
Research on self-talk for endurance
- Individual variation. Not everyone benefits from the second-person self-talk. People with more narcissistic tendencies use first-person pronouns more frequently, making them more or less sensitive to the effect.
- Customized self-talk for athletes. Framing self-statements in a positive light tend to be encouraging and actionable. For example, changing "keep grinding" to "I (You) can keep going."
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Chaining
Connecting exercise to a solid event that you know will happen is a great way to stay consistent. I know that I will leave work at 5 every weekday – instead of going home, I bring my work...
Precommitment
Precommitments are actions that get you invested in going to the gym. If you’ve committed to going with a partner, you’re hardly going to leave them hanging.
Similarly, bringing clothes with you to work, packing your gym bag in advance, or laying out your workout clothes before bed for a morning workout are tricks that make it easier to stay consistent.
Rewards
In order to be effective, a reward needs to occur frequently and immediately after a workout.
Plus, it needs to be associated with going to the gym – the reward doesn’t mean much if you can have it whenever you want.
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CrossFit definition
It's a training philosophy that coaches people of all shapes and sizes to improve their physical well-being and cardiovascular fitness through varied and challenging workouts.
Each day, t...
Scalable based on your skill
Every day there is a particular workout prescribed that is completely scalable based on your skill. For example, if the workout calls for barbell squats with 135 pounds but you can only do squats with the bar (45 pounds), then that’s where you’ll start.
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- Beginners to weight training: If you have never weight trained before, CrossFit is a great place for you to start, provided you have a great coach.
- People looking for support and community: Every CrossFit gym has a really tight-knit community feel to it.
- Fitness fanatics: The general protocol is 3 days on, 1 day off, but many CrossFitters end up at the gym more frequently.
- Masochists: You’ll often be in situations where you use all your effort to finish a workout and continue to push yourself beyond.
- Former athletes: You get to compete with people in your class and go online to see how you did against the world’s elite CrossFit athletes.
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Mental Health on the Rise
Mental health issues are on the rise globally, due to a complex life that has us pursue perfection in every aspect of our lives.
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Exercise to treat Depression
Regular exercise can treat mild to moderate depression, as good as the antidepressants.
Exercise provides us with feel-good chemicals made naturally inside our body, as the brain releases endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin.
Exercising for Self-Esteem
Exercise also has a psychological benefit of making us feel great.
Using exercise as a social activity, we improve our self-esteem and get to meet new people, forming healthy and positive connections
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