4 Tips to Change Your Training Mindset

Your ability to reach your fitness goals is totally dependent on your mindset. Unless you’ve got it right, you’ll always fall short of your potential. Here are 3 hacks to help you develop that killer mindset to conquer your goals every time.

Mental Imagery
A major key to achieving success is to be able to plant in the forefront of your mind vivid imagery of yourself doing the thing that you want to achieve. A few years ago, mental imagery, also known as visualisation, was the domain of professional athletes and self-help gurus. In recent times, however, there has been an increasing appreciation for the positive effects of mental imagery on goal attainment among the everyday exerciser.

When you regularly visualise yourself accomplishing your goals in your ‘mind’s eye’, you provide a powerful stimulus to success. All you need to do is to utilise your imagination and focus to mentally rehearse the attainment of your goals. Start at the daily level and do it while you are lying in bed before you get up in the morning. See yourself doing everything that you need to in order to have a perfect goal attainment day, from springing out of bed, enjoying a healthy nutritious breakfast, powering through an invigorating, calorie depleting work-out and then enjoying an energy restoring post work-out shake.

When you’re lying in bed at night, you should undertake another mental imagery session. See yourself having accomplished your end goal with the body, the strength and the energy that you are working towards. Create a crystal-clear image of this new you and embrace the feelings that go with it – the self-confidence, the energy and the joy of accomplishment. 

Goal Setting
SMART is an acronym that can help you to set meaningful goals. SMART stands for . . .

• Specific

• Measurable

• Actionable

• Relevant

• Time Bound 

Let’s consider these aspects, one at a time.

• Specific

The less specific a goal, the harder it is to determine how long the goal should take, and how to measure success. You need to get specific. Don’t just say you want to lose weight – say exactly how much.

• Measurable

How is the goal to be measured? What determines success? The key is to make sure that, in whatever way the goal is measured, it accurately reflects success.

• Actionable

What is your action plan? Make sure that the actions that are needed to find success are achievable. If some aspects of the action plan are unclear, break them down into manageable, actionable sub-goals.

• Relevant

There are an infinite number of goals that we can set for ourselves. To evaluate the relevance of our goals, we can use an effort overvalue scale. Most of the time we should focus our energies on low effort, high value goals. Alternatively, use the 80/20 principle – which are the 20% of goals that will achieve 80% of the benefit.

• Time Bound

By including a specific date by which a goal should be accomplished, it helps provide an incentive and allows us to monitor progress. Be wary of open-ended goals – they will be very difficult to accomplish.

Resilience
Every worthwhile experience in life comes as a result of trial and error. When we suffer a setback, it is simply the expression of that process that will take us to our next success. Yet, so often we beat ourselves up when we fall short. That needs to change. By creating a mental environment where we accept mistakes, achievements that fall short of our goals and set-backs, we free ourselves to keep going, to keep trying, to keep taking risks. Analyze set-backs without emotion in order to learn from them.

Create A Mantra
A mantra is a phrase, or even a single word, that you repeat to yourself to keep you focused on the task at hand. It’s something that all great athletes and sports people use to stay in the zone. The phrase you choose is completely over to you. It should be something that empowers you and tunes into physical performance. 

Wrap Up
Adopt these four mental hacks to power up your mindset and stay focused on accomplishing your goals. Use them in relation to your fitness objectives as well as every other worthwhile goal in life and you will be a more successful, positive person.