Channeling the Mindset of a Champion

You can tell he's a beast, because his shirt says so.

This week, a friend of mine Russell is doing a guest post. Russell has been a strength & conditioning coach and personal trainer for the past 6 years, specializing in Olympic weightlifting for 3 of those years. Starting at a movement based gym in 2009, Russell learned the fundamentals of human movement, which carried him on to work with professional athletes, elite powerlifters, professional strongmen, and world class Olympic weightlifters. You can find Russell at his blog From the Low Hang or on Instagram @RedWhiteAndJacked.

Mentality is everything in fitness. Your attitude towards whatever you are doing will bleed through into the result.

A saying I hear often is that the hardest thing to do when trying to achieve a goal is to start, but I disagree. I believe the hardest thing to do when trying to get from A to B is to keep fighting towards where you want to be when you wind up at C, or D, or Q. No fitness journey will be without its hiccups, and how you respond to those moments is what will define your results.

Road bumps on your path can come in many shapes or sizes: anywhere from a slip up on your diet to an injury that sidelines you for an extended period of time. A lot of people have this idea that the most successful athletes or fitness professionals don’t ever hit hard times. I have worked people who range from elite athletes, to everyday people stepping into the gym for the first day and I can tell you with 100% certainty that they hit about the same amount of low points as anyone else does. The difference between those who are successful and those who aren’t is how they handle those low points.

“Concentration and mental toughness are the margins of victory.” -Bill Russell 

Just like with anything else, being mentally tough takes practice. Not everyone can start with the discipline and the mentality of an elite athlete. Here are some of the tips I’ve picked up along my journey that have helped me keep my head right:

1. Prepare. Before you go to the gym, or even start your day, take a few minutes to get your head space right. Why are you doing what you’re doing? What goal are you trying to reach? Make sure you’re completely focused on your task or tasks. 
2. Push. Push yourself and test your limits. Getting out of your comfort zone can be a challenging thing to do, but once you’re there you’ll see how amazing it feels to break down your own mental barriers.
3. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Nothing worth having comes easily in fitness. That is why it’s such a great thing–because for everything you achieve, you that know you had to work to actualize it. Get comfortable with the idea that you’re going to hurt, you’re going to be tired, and you’re going to want to quit. As long as you can get past those feelings, you will succeed. 
4. You can always do something. This is probably the biggest one for me personally. Too tired to get to the gym? Stretch. Injured your leg and can’t do your leg workout? An extra upper body day never hurt anyone. Super hungry and out of calories for the day? Make an enormous salad and take those calories out of tomorrow, chances are you won't even notice. No matter how dim it seems, there is always something you can do to get your closer to your goal, even if it is only by an inch. Don't make excuses.

Your mentality defines who you are, and a strong mind is the catalyst of a strong body. Practice these four skills to break plateaus and demolish your goals.

Put Down Your Phone and Just Lift

Last week, I went to a Globo gym (which shall remain nameless), and I saw this guy sitting on the hip adductor machine. He would do 5-6 reps, send some text messages, and then repeat. His thumbs probably got a better workout than any other part of his body. He is one of many people I see working out with their heads down and phones in hand.

How often have you caught yourself getting distracted in the gym? Maybe it's not just your phone that's distracting you, but for whatever reason, your head's just in another place; you're on autopilot going through your workout. There have been plenty of times when I didn’t necessarily think about how I was going to move the weight in front of me, but rather, I just fill my head with other extraneous thoughts; I'll approach a lift and think about my laundry list of to-do’s for the day, or let other personal matters cloud my mind. I'm present physically, but mentally, I'm in 1,000 different places.

Let me just upload my selfie to Instagram first...

I’ve found that when I’m able to truly center myself and completely consume my thoughts only with the barbell in front of me, my performance improves instantly. The garbage training sessions are usually the ones in which we let our outside lives consume us; we miss lifts when we think about work or social stressors rather than our next set of squats. I've made it a point to put my phone away as soon as I step foot in the gym, and, as a result, I can truly dedicate myself to the moment.

If you’ve ever attempted the snatch before, whether it was for fun or competition, you know just how demanding of a movement it can be. Everything must fall perfectly into place to complete the lift successfully: your set-up position must be on point, your hips have to meet the bar at the right time, and your body then must receive the bar and lock it out overhead in an instant. If you lose focus for an instant, letting stressful thoughts fill your head, you're almost definitely going to miss the lift. However, if you approach the bar calmly, and you trust that your body knows what to do and when to do it, you have a much stronger chance of success.

When you watch elite athletes in any sport, or masters of any craft, one trait that separates them from the average person is their laser beam focus. Tiger Woods enters the putting green with extreme concentration. You can see that every movement he makes is very calculated and deliberate. During training, we have to filter out all of the excess crap in our heads and pay attention to our lifts.

Success in lifting (or really, damn near everything), requires absolute tunnel vision. Get rid of all of the clutter in your mind, if only for just an hour, and zoom in on that one, single thought. If you want to set PRs, you have to make sure you’re focused first.