To Achieve Your Fitness Goals You Need to Exercise Your Mind

When most of us, mere mortals, see a super well-built and fit person, the first thought that springs to mind is “Wow! They must work out a lot!”

But what most of don’t know is that actually there is much more to working out in order to be (and look!) fit.

I have mentioned here on this blog several times that diet is much more important than exercise. That’s a fact. Your body shape and composition is 70% influenced by what you eat and 30% by how much you exercise.

But there is another less talked about aspect to fitness - it’s a concept called mind over matter. Yes, all professional athletes and those involved in the sports industry on a professional level know about it. Yes, there are countless books (and courses) on sport psychology.

And yet, considering the amount of people that go to gyms or other types of non-professional fitness training, there are disproportionate levels of awareness about this concept between the pros and those trying to lead a healthy lifestyle.

If you’re a non-pro like me, here’s a revelation. There are 3 important factors in achieving your top fitness levels: 1. Mind, 2. Diet and 3. Exercise.

For instance we often think we can exercise only until our muscles start to burn and hurt, but physiologically we can do more if we set our minds to it. We crave certain (not-so-healthy) foods, when actually our bodies don’t need the extra empty calories and so forth.

This is why it’s important to train our minds to think differently. Instead of saying that you want to lose weight, tell yourself that you ARE losing weight. Instead of say you want to be fitter/faster/stronger, say that you are fitter/faster/stronger (at least you were fitter that yesterday!). This type of present-tense self-talk is a fuel for positive behaviour and change.

It sounds easy, but takes time to put into practice. We are all so good at sabotaging ourselves, that positive thoughts may not be so easy to form. But the first step is to understand what we are doing wrong and why. If you think of yourself as fat, slow, skinny, unfit you are very likely to remain the way you are or even worse to turn these thoughts into reality.

What could be the cause of these thoughts? Could it be that you were often called fat when you were young and now you are more likely to think of yourself as fat? You need to dig deep and ask yourself some questions. And it’s not as scary as you think (turns out I am too worried whether people will see me as arrogant and full of myself if I let those positive thoughts influence my behaviour).

So in a way fitness is about much more than looking good. It starts from within. The ultimate goal here is to believe in yourself and to work harder to achieve your goals. Say that you are losing weight and see that it will become much easier to forgo the chocolate cookies passed around in the office. Say that you are fit and power through that extra set of exercises.

Believe in yourself. If you don’t, who will?

How to Sort Out Stuff in Your Head

Photo by Airik Lopez

How many times have you cursed certain events for turning your perfectly normal day into a nightmare? Or even worse - how many times have you woken up on the wrong side of the bed? There's nothing worse than starting your day with pouring rain or by missing your train to work and then frowning all day about it. But that's life, right?

Wrong. There are ways to keep a positive outlook on life even in such disastrous circumstances. Remember Oprah's book The Secret? The idea that thinking positively about what you want to achieve (and writing it down on paper) will incline the forces of the universe to work in your favour? Could it be true?

Not sure about the whole grand idea but, judging from life experience, I can't deny putting your mind to something will help you achieve it. Self-talk (i.e. the conversations going on in our heads) is one heck of a powerful tool which helps you achieve happiness and all those great things you set out to achieve.

You see, as common sense would dictate, telling yourself you can do something can help it happen. Telling yourself you can't do something can make that come true as well. For instance, constantly telling yourself that it's very hard to find a job is more likely to lead you to sit and watch telly instead of updating your CV.

So what can we do to make the power of self-talk work in our favour? Well you can't simply will yourself into a positive mood and, most of the time, it can be quite challenging to get rid of negative thoughts. In fact, as a self-proclaimed pessimist I am fully aware of the parasitical nature of negative self-talk.

Photo by Wavy1

But where there is a will, there is a way. For starters, you can address negative thoughts as another person - acknowledge them, but distance yourself as you would from someone's negative opinion or question their validity (i.e. is it true that you will NEVER find a job? Probably not.). If the thoughts are overwhelming put them aside at first and distract yourself with the scope of revisiting them at a later time (perhaps even write them down somewhere and try to forget about them for a while.).

A more long-term solution to escaping the vicious downward spiral of negative self-talk is changing the way you talk to yourself. Don't treat every negative event as a catastrophe - try to let go of negative thoughts by changing the way you describe things.

For example, instead of thinking "I missed the train, will be late and X will be mad at me", tell yourself "I better call and let X know I will be late." It takes time to change the way we think but as long as we are aware of our thought processes we can start working on changing them.

Finally, one thing that particularly works for me is making vision boards or sticking cut outs representing my goals, dreams and happy in a visible place. A good one is on the back of your front door - it puts a smile on your face before I head out.

Photo by Nilson

I hope you found this post interesting. We live and we learn. Remember - never regret anything as you have probably made the right decision based on the information and feelings you had at that time.