Jan 11
13
Conquer Your Resolutions
With the start of every new year comes a quest for resolving issues that have hindered our personal development and success in the past. Whether or not we like it though, the real measure of our ability to personally develop goes beyond just kicking the year off on the right foot. Our ability to follow through with our resolutions year round and inevitably conquer them is what allows us to adapt and become better.
While the psychology behind a new beginning is a very powerful motivator, I’d like to remind you how similar resolutions are to daily goals and dreams. More specifically, every minute of every day, we are either taking a step forwards or backwards from achieving our goals and dreams. The only real difference between resolutions and goals or dreams is that a new year is often associated with the former. With this in mind, I’d like to point out some ways you can maximize your mental and physical capacities from a fitness perspective so that you’re in tip-top shape for conquering your resolutions and goals or dreams.
Mental Capacity
Maximizing your mental capacity involves:
Minimizing intimidation
No matter how good we are at something, we have to remain humble in the fact that there’s always going to be someone else out there who’s better. This also applies to the large range of training experience present in the gym. For those on the beginner end, it’s important to realize that just getting into the gym is half the battle. As such, the atmosphere upon your arrival each day should not hinder your own motivation to gain some progress momentum – regardless of whether you feel intimidated or overwhelmed by what others are doing. Find comfort in the fact that there’s a good chance some of the gym regulars are performing a movement wrong anyway.
For those lying on the more experienced end of the spectrum, it’s important to realize that your knowledge of various ways to train each area of the body automatically gives you more “space” in the gym when it comes to picking an exercise. Not to mention, your prior knowledge of a gym’s general volume throughout the week is always nice for planning your own training sessions around others.
Listening to our body
There’s no sense in following a routine or program that your body responds poorly to. After all, the only thing that delivers results on a given day is your body. Sometimes this requires you to focus on doing more of what your body responds best to on a given day by sacrificing variety.
Even though this sounds like common sense, listening to your body is a skill that must be acquired over time. Therefore, its ultimately up to you to determine how to tweak the variables (exercises and rep schemes + loading mechanisms, nutrition and diet overall, and supplementation if used) to suit your body and goals. One word of caution: Do not use this as excuse to be lazy because of a little metabolic fatigue or to skip from one training methodology to another just because of impatience.
Physical Capacity
Maximizing your physical capacity involves:
Getting rid of distractions
The two outstanding distractions I’m referring to are cell phones and food advertisements. Basically, do anything and everything possible to keep cell phones out of sight and sound when training. This is out of respect for others and especially yourself. Cell phones take away from the quality of a productive workout by influencing your mental capacity to stay in the zone. As a result, physical performance becomes hindered, and the training effect for a given day is gone.
In terms of food advertisements, suffice it to say that we are what we eat. This cliché demonstrates that, if you eat junk, you’ll produce junk. Although the gradual move towards healthier dietary habits is getting better, the majority of food advertisements present junk in the most attractive way. In reality though, when’s the last time you ate at a fast food restaurant and the food looked exactly like the picture on their advertisement?
Healthy food can also be attractive. And the benefits from an attractive healthy meal are very real. Real food instills that “healthy full” feeling. This isn’t something that can be felt after consuming refined foods.
Training rather than working out
Some days the body performs better than others. On those days you feel really good, why not become even more engaged toward getting the most out of that workout? Taking advantage of these ”on days” is paramount to your success in the gym. When you do this, you are no longer working out. You are training in effect to surpass previous efforts. This feeling can only happen if you are truly in the zone, which means you’ve already maximized your mental capacity and you’ve eliminated oustanding distractions for a given training session. You can reproduce this training effect every time if you really want to.
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So it’s up to you–the individual. I’ve simply reminded you of a few necessary requirements for maximizing your mental and physical capacities on a given day. Hopefully these reminders will help you keep pushing hard and conquer your resolutions and goals or dreams.
