“Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.”
-Yogi Berra
Preparing athletes for the physical side of sports pays my bills, but for those athletes, it’s often the mental side of sports that makes the difference between success and failure.
When it comes to fitness, your mental approach matters just as much as your physical efforts. Fat loss, hypertrophy, powerlifting, whatever, if you’re confident in your approach and focus on what matters, you’ll succeed. But if you stress over the minutia, beat yourself up over every failure and struggle to perform when it matters most, you’ll fall short of your goals.
The more I train and the more I coach, the more I see common mental crutches that lifters cling to. I’ve seen these crutches trip up lifters in the gym and the powerlifting platform. I’ve also seen lifters eliminate these crutches, only to overcome obstacles and plateaus that used to hold them back.
Here are six mental crutches that ruin your progress. Are you hamstrung by any of them?
1. PRE-WORKOUT STIMULANTS
I love my morning cup of coffee as much as anyone, but you shouldn’t need 300 mg of caffeine just to get to under the bar.
At every Optimizing the Big 3 seminar I do with Greg Robins, Greg speaks about the mental fatigue one may experience when approaching overtraining. You should want to train hard and shouldn’t need a pre-workout powder or energy drink to get amped up. That desire should be inborn. Physical fatigue aside, you’re digging yourself a deeper mental hole if you remedy your mental fatigue with stimulants.
Don’t feel like training? Try the 15-minute approach. Get to the gym and give yourself 15 minutes to foam roll and warm up. After 15 minutes, if you still don’t feel like training, don’t. But I have a feeling that by then, you’ll be ready to get after it.
Some are more driven than others, but a caffeine-based pick-me-up should be saved for only the most sluggish of days. Save it for when you really need it.
2. MUSIC
Music can be a tremendous motivator for training. I wrote an entire article dedicated to songs to hit PR’s to. But if you need the perfect song at the perfect time just to lift the bar, you need to rethink your mental fortitude.
I haven’t trained with headphones in years. I’d rather be able to communicate with my training partners and not have to pop out an earbud and say, “What?” every time someone wants to talk to me.
Sure, I piss and moan whenever Katie Perry or Drake is on the stereo at CSP. Just ask our interns. I’m probably more vocal about the music selection than anyone, but I’ve learned that if I can get after it to the sounds of some atrocious pop song, then I can train through anything.
From a powerlifting perspective, you don’t get to pick the music at the meet. Practice like you play: no headphones, no cherry-picking your favorite song, just focus and get to work.
3. SCREAMING AND YELLING
Screaming and yelling to psyche yourself up might work for some lifters, but the majority of the best lifters stay calm and focused when it comes time to perform. Adam Pine, one of the best lifters and coaches I know, has spoken extensively about the importance of remaining calm when approaching a big lift. Adam writes:
“I like to think about what I have to do during each lift. I have a mental checklist I perform before I go into a lift. If I’m busy yelling, getting slapped in the face, or snorting ammonia, I get distracted from what I have to do. My focus shifts from the lift, to psyching myself up for the lift. This increases the likelihood you’ll experience a breakdown in form and miss the lift.”
I couldn’t agree more. The more calm and focused you are during training, the more confident you can be when you need to hit a PR without relying on pure adrenaline.
4. EXTENDED WARM-UPS
Warming up is important, but it’s not what makes or breaks your ability to train. I used to be the person who couldn’t even lift an empty bar without foam rolling and stretching every muscle from head to toe. Now, I realize that a good warm-up should only take about 10 minutes and it doesn’t crush me mentally if I don’t get in an extended warm-up.
I’ve coached a lot of novice powerlifters. One thing we focus on before a meet is establishing a warm-up routine that can be done if they suddenly realize they’re short on time, because you never know when schedules will change on competition day.
In fact, at our most recent meet, Alex forgot her foam roller. She still deadlifted 300 pounds. Noah only warmed up to a 225 squat before he ran out of time. He still crushed his opener at 325 pounds.
Don’t handcuff yourself with the need to warm up for an hour before you touch a weight. That’s more a mental crutch than a physical one.
5. PERFECT EQUIPMENT
Lifters are particular about their gear, but strong is strong, regardless of the perfect barbell, squat rack, belt or shoes.
You should be able to train hard and heavy regardless of whether you’re at the world’s best powerlifting gym or at Planet Fitness. You shouldn’t be mentally shattered if you forgot your gym bag, someone took your favorite squat rack or if the brand of plates don’t match on both sides of the bar. The equipment doesn’t make you strong, YOU make you strong.
Eddie Van Halen would still be the world’s greatest guitarist on a $50 Walmart guitar. Bobby Flay could cook a delicious meal if he was in the Iron Chef kitchen or in your dorm room with a George Foreman grill. It’s the wizard, not the wand.
If you had to walk into a random commercial gym with no gym bag, would you still be successful? If the answer is no, why not?
6. FEEDBACK
I provide feedback to lifters and athletes for a living. I like to believe it’s important. But if it becomes too important, your performance will suffer when it matters most.
I’ve written about the dangers of feedback dependency before. If you constantly need validation after every set and rep, you’ll struggle to build unconscious competency, which is the ability to make complex skills automatic.
Failure is part of learning. Allowing yourself to fail, reevaluate your approach and learn from your mistakes is crucial to progress. Having a coach and receiving feedback is part of this process, but at some point the training wheels need to come off and you need to perform on your own. If you feel paralyzed without someone coaching you and correcting you every step of the way, you’ll struggle to get very far.
CRUSH YOUR CRUTCHES
Your mindset is often the difference between getting stuck and shattering a plateau. Your perception is your reality, so if you allow yourself to think that these small mental crutches make a difference, they will. If you let them go and focus on what actually makes a difference – your attitude and work ethic – you’ll succeed.