Get better. Set goals once a year and you’ll fail several times in those 12 months. Here’s how to make sure you’re always progressing and shaping a growth mindset.
Pick one improvement each week
Spending more time focusing on how you should be better, rather than on ways that can help you to get better is like being the employee of the month – a winner and loser at the same time. The point is, there’s always something more you can do. You can always make it fractionally better. You can always strive to be a micro upgrade of yourself. This forges a lasting philosophy that you can follow in every aspect of your life. Failing to do this and without practicing gratitude is about as useful as telling a color blind person to eat their greens.
Concentrate on the movement
While lifting weights, focus on the motion of the dumbbell instead of the muscle it’s working. By pushing your body into improper forms, you will create negative effects on the muscle in the short and long term. So, while running, focus on pushing against the ground instead of the distance covered. When you ignore your surroundings and pay attention to your movements, your form and performance will always improve. External focus is very important. Concentrating on the effect of your body’s movement is more effective than concentrating on your body itself. When you adopt an external focus, you perform much more automatically and efficiently. Somehow the body knows what it has to do to achieve the desired outcome, and that results in more fluid, efficient, and accurate movement. This can be applied to any exercise.
Give reality technical difficulties
It’s worth setting half a dozen monthly fitness goals and just as many long-term goals that you can accomplish every six months. Yep, it’s old advice, but try to add two unrealistic goals to your long-term goal list to keep yourself consistently moving forward so you never have that feeling of being finished. Whether you want to break sweat with The Rock or have shoulders so strong they could throw a pork chop past a starving wolf – keep it ambitious. Having goals that are realistic short and long term is great because you have a sense of accomplishment when they are met, but always have the next ones ready to go.
Pretend you have a crystal ball
Before you can believe in a goal, you must first must have an idea of what it looks like. Visualization is on-brand if you’re looking to create all kind of athletic success, but it also aids relaxation and helps reduce fear and anxiety. Some find it useful to write their goal down in as much detail as possible so it translates into a visual representation that’s almost indistinguishable from reality. Develop your fitness future board which becomes a visual map that you create to design your best possible future. It serves as a virtual GPS of what you want to look like and will turn that mind-based avatar into one that dominates the real world.
Down time? Pfft!
Reducing your rest time will allow you to stimulate more growth. When you do a set, you recruit and fatigue your muscle fibers and the more of them you fatigue, the more you stimulate the target muscle. Short rest periods also cause other muscle-building bonuses like increased lactate production and blood flow to the targeted muscles. A muscle fiber that is recruited, but not fatigued is not trained. When you reduce your rest intervals, your fibers cannot recover to the same extent, which means you accumulate more fatigue in the fibers from set to set leading to more growth in these fibers. Plus you are forced to recruit more fibers from set to set to compensate for the fact that your fibers are too tired and need help to complete the task. Gym gossiping will eat up more rest time then you need so try and stay focused on your workout, not on Jamie in her yoga pants.
Embrace temporary dyscalculia
It’s not a Transylvanian disease – it’s an inability to count, your reps in particular.
When reps are counted most stop when that magic number of 10 or 12 is hit as if it’s an accomplishment. Do not allow numbers to limit your potential and rather let your muscles tell you when to stop not your mind. It’s far more enjoyable and less stressful to be at one with your body and enjoy the exercise – as opposed to spending most of your workout in your head counting.
