MINDSET MATTERS
Don’t let years of habit, guilt and bad advice stand in the way of a fitter future
Don’t let years of habit, guilt and bad advice stand in the way of a fitter future
I have trained people professionally for over 10 years. In that time, I have seen people succeed and others definitely struggle to reach their fitness goals.
The single biggest indicator of success is a person’s mindset.
What do I mean by mindset? I find that people who are open to new information about training and eating succeed better. I find that people who handle setbacks or bad weeks in the gym or lack thereof - succeed better.
The first thing I say to every new client I take in is something like this: There are things that I am going to tell you that are really going to conflict with information that you have in your head. You are hearing this information from me for the first time, whereas you have formed your own opinions and habits over many years. I don’t expect you to understand, do or even believe what I am about to say to you, but I hope that you will try to implement it over the next couple of months.
We all seek information from television, magazines and the internet. It is hard to simply change an opinion you have held for a long time. Here is an example. I tell so many clients that all science shows that eating a post-workout meal of protein and carbohydrates within 30-90 minutes after a workout is extremely beneficial. Most clients won’t eat after the gym because they equate eating with gaining weight, not losing it. So, what I see is a lot of people who under-eat during the week when they exercise and overeat on weekends when they don’t.
Another thing is that people use scales way too often. If they have gained a half pound, they are ready to starve themselves. If you are weighing yourself all the time, it’s probably water weight. If fact, if you restrict your carbohydrates for a while, then you eat a lot of them, you will put water weight back on. They key word in carbohydrates is hydrate. They have a lot of water. So, I tell people to ditch the scales.
Weight doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have much to do with how you look. It’s all in your head. If you can stop using the scales as a guide to success, you will have fewer mental setbacks.
The last one I see a lot is that people let guilt of eating a “bad” meal cause them to starve themselves or over-exercise. My best piece of training advice I can give someone is to leave the past in the past. If you had a bad meal, do your best to not let it turn into a bad day or weekend. You can eat a good meal. You don’t have to starve yourself. You can just get back to the gym and do a normal workout. You don’t have to do three classes back to back and then eat celery. Establishing a routine of eating well 80 to 90 per cent of the time and exercising regularly should be your first goal. After that you can learn more about training techniques and a bit more about nutrition and you will be laughing.
So, there you have it. Where do sit on that spectrum? Are you a guilt exerciser? Can you take a setback well? Do you weigh yourself daily because you think there is a perfect number to be? I don’t expect years of media influencing your life to change overnight, but I believe that for people to be successful long term, a mindset switch is essential.