Mind Games Again

I can't say it enough: your mind is the most important factor in your success. 

If your mind is disagreeable, find a way to over-ride it.

Yesterday I had plans to go workout at the weight room, surrounded by people. Then: Change of plans. Weight room closed early. My alternative-- work out at home. Let me say, I have plenty of equipment to complete a good workout at home. It just requires a little creativity and planning. And a lonely workout in a hot garage. I just wasn't feeling it. I didn't want to do it. (Mind you, I've just come off of a mini-vacation and haven't had a good lift in 3 days.) I knew I needed to do it. How to convince my mind that I was all in for a workout? 

First, I had to figure out what I was least looking forward to in working out. For this particular day, it was assembling equipment and planning a series of exercises and moving from the garage (for bar and dumbbell work) to the pull up bar upstairs to outside on the patio (for more dynamic moves) while the family was sitting happily watching Spongebob on the couch. All of that was taxing my brain before I even began the workout-- I can be very lazy.

My solution: do a workout using the fewest amount of variation and movements so that it would be "easy": 100 clean and jerks with 65lbs for time. Fifteen sweaty minutes later, I had completed a really good workout. I convinced myself this would be an easy workout because I basically set up my bar and didn't move from there until I was done. I further broke the 100 reps into 10s with as little rest as possible between sets. 

Bottom line: trick your mind into thinking it's going to be easy. 

• Play with the way you count-- 20 reps becomes 1 to 10 and 10 to 1. Or 2- 10s. When counting rounds, I think, "Almost half way," or "After this round I'm on my last one."
• Adding weight-- go by feel; don't calculate the pounds until after you are done. Set up your starting weight and then add a little at a time. Chances are if you see X number of pounds, you're going to think, "Wow. That's heavy!" And then enters doubt.
• Don't think, just do-- the more you think about it, the better your chances for talking yourself out of it, whether it's getting yourself to the gym or planning to go heavy.