This happens to Hector all the time. He is in the middle of a training session and he encounters a place of challenge. If the struggle gets real, his mind starts going. At that point, he looks at me and he will explain he had a long week, or that he has never been good...
Mental fitness extends further than your ability to suffer through workouts, and training your mind is just as important as your physical training in your path to becoming a better athlete.
The focus of the whole month of January will be "The Basics." We get so caught up in the fancy stuff. We are always looking for sophisticated solutions for simple problems. Yet, the basics are where it's at. Today's video is about how we love being good at shit and how to do that. You know, basic stuff. Watch it and let me know how it goes!
Changing the beliefs takes work, hard and satisfying work. The task is to identify how and when those core beliefs act and debate them every time they operate. The cool thing is that because we are all in this together, Beck and one of his students, David Burns, have managed to identify what they call habits of mind. These are just general ways in which those core beliefs usually operate in all of us.
However, because we humans clearly cannot have nice things, the term has been bastardized, oversimplified, and not problematized enough. When Henrick laughs at my suggestion of doing curls, he is just repeating a learned behavior. It is common in the functional world to look at other forms of training and think they are poor, vain, or irrelevant. On the one side, this is how every culture is created, by creating an other to separate from. That’s how we define our existence as a thing. On the other hand, this attitude is the representation of a very bad case of functional fixedness (FF). Think of this as a bad habit of the mind, a way of thinking that hinders more than helps, and that in the case of Henrick will limit his performance and his movement capacity. The purpose of this post is to explain to you what FF is so that you can catch yourself in this trap, and do something about it.
Both of my athletes Francy and Henrick agree with me that mindset is important when it comes to athletic performance. This is unusual because they mostly think I am full of shit. Truth is most people know that what you think greatly determines how you perform at a given task. This is very intuitive and obvious on a superficial level. We all know that if you think you suck at running, well guess what? You are going to suck at running. What is really hard for most people is to flip it around and use this idea to their benefit. But in fact, the base of all sports psychology is exactly this: if you want to be good at something you have to believe that you can actually be good at that thing.
Our identities are made of narratives. We cannot escape that. But we get to chose. Tear down the unproductive ones. Create ones that keep you growing.
The first time I explained to one of my male athletes that the Concept2 rower was made with a specific body type in mind it totally backfired. Henrick was complaining to me about the size of his arms, telling me it made doing pull ups harder. He was using this narrative to explain why he...
“How is that working for you?” is a rhetorical tool I use with a lot of my athletes. Whether we are talking about a nutritional habit, a workout strategy, or a marital problem, I have found it to be very productive. This is because it is a grounding experience when one asks it honestly. It prompts the person in front of you to really match what they are trying to get out of their behaviors with reality.
Trolls suck, and even though they are an Internet creation they are pretty much everywhere IRL too. Yes, they might be called douche bags, and they are not constrained by gender, race, or religion. The only thing that unifies them is that they are just a waste of time and energy. But my experience is that when it comes to fitness and nutrition, we all have an inner troll. And to be honest, this is the worst kind of troll there is.