Fitness is often perceived as something which is totally physical. You do a workout in which you need to lift weights or press a barbell or run 5 miles. Almost no thought is given to what goes on inside your head, how your mindset may affect the way you train and how effective your workouts may be.
My own experience (and those of my workout buddies) shows that there’s a firm connection between your mindset and the effectiveness of your workouts. To put it simply, no matter how strong you are, unless your mind is in the right place, your workouts will suffer for it.
3 Main Workout Mentalities
There are 3 general mentalities that I’d like to discuss. I call them the sloth, the worker bee, and the tiger mentalities.
The Sloth Mentality
The sloth is a lazy beast. It would like nothing more than to lounge in the sun, letting the day drift by in pleasant idleness.
A person with a sloth mentality doesn’t want to be budged (at least where workouts are concerned. In other fields they can be very hardworking), he or she only go to the gym when they feel that they have to go and they do it begrudgingly, as if they were forced to do so against their will.
What happens is that the workouts a person with a sloth mentality does are often ineffective. There is no real effort made in these workouts. They are often judged by time and not by intensity. It’s a “going through the motions” type of workouts and this is never the way to achieve real results.
The Worker Bee Mentality
Worker bees are industrious. They like to workout or it seems second nature to them. A person with a worker bee mentality will visit the gym often, know exactly what needs to be done there and do it.
The way a bee works is through routine. This mentality breeds hardworking, dilligent repetitiveness. While proper fitness must be made into a routine, it can also turn into too much of a routine. You may fall into some semi-comfortable zone of workouts which are hard but not too challenging.
You will get results with a worker bee mentality because you are making an effort. However, it’s easy to fall into a routine which may make it harder to get optimal results. Your workouts may lack that twist which you need in order to get really lean.
Tiger Mentality
Imagine how a tiger hunts in the wild, that mad sprint until it catches its prey. This is how really powerful workouts look, a burst of energy with a focused determination on your goals.
A tiger doesn’t always follow the same path. What it does is give the chase everthing its got. It never gives up.
When you do your workouts with a tiger mentality you will achieve a level of intensity, energy, and motivation that you never experienced before. It will be like every workout is a chase, a hunt. This will no longer be just a routine. Each workout will be an experience in itself.
If you have the tiger mentality you don’t go through the motions or stick to the same exercise routine. You’re always looking for new ways to push yourself in the gym, you seek out new training methods, more challenging exercises.
You may try bodyweight training one week with a plan such as the Shapeshifter Body Redesign program or advanced muscle balancing workouts such as in the Double Edged Fat Loss plan. You are open to change. You actively seek it to continue improving your results.
How to Work on Your Mentality
So, are you a sloth, a worker bee, or a tiger? If it’s the latter then good for you. If not, all is not lost.
You may be surprised but you can work and alter your mentality. You can become enthusiastic about training. The way you think when you go to the gym will be how you actually behave once you’re there.
Try running this thought through your mind: “I want to workout. I’m going to give it everything I’ve got. I will have fun.”
Once you repeat this sentence (or something similar to it) over and over again in your mind, you will soon grow to believe it. Your mind will absorb this message and you will feel your mood change. You will gradually grow to anticipate and long for your workouts.
You should also check out this post on how to make exercise fun. It will give you some tips on how to spice up your workouts.
What you need to do is work on yourself, realize that exercise is not a chore but something to enjoy and to explore new ways of doing. Once you come to enjoy working out, you will see that it brings better and faster results.
