Well, the secret is that when it comes to motivation there isn’t any secret. Top athletes and those who manage to make their fitness training work for them know that what makes you go on when every muscle is screaming at you to give up is not grit, courage or tenacity – these are the things we use to describe what is going on after the event. What keeps you focused, motivated and able to perform your best is the ability to zone out in your mind and simply ignore pain.
Long distance runners know that pain is a constant friend, yet most of them are able to simply ignore it by training their minds to focus on something else, far away, and let their bodies do all the work.
“Before I go into training I tell myself that I am going to have fun. It’s going to be something I enjoy,” is a statement which world class competitors often repeat. It doesn’t mean that their training is pain free or that they get any less tired than the rest of us, quite the contrary as a matter of fact, but by approaching physical training with a positive frame of mind they create an air of anticipation which takes them through the first phase of it which is enough.
The thing you need to understand is that the human body is a machine with a high degree of latent energy. If you hang around doing nothing that’s just what it wants to keep on doing and if you are exercising and being active then it tends to simply keep doing that. World class athletes know that. They know that by entering their training with a positive frame of mind they can fool the body long enough for it to adjust to training and make it harder for it to stop.
It’s a mind trick of course. To achieve it you need to create a routine, a ritual almost, of the things you do before you start to train. Some people take the process of getting changed in the locker room, putting on their training clothes, lacing up their trainers, and create, in their mind, a process of transition. They go from feeling anxious and tired to being full of energy, ready to tackle the workout that lies ahead. Others create a small ritual out of adjusting their towel, sipping water from their bottle, before they hit the treadmill. The point is that these tricks work and you will really need to find your own process to help you get started.
A really hard workout is taxing on the mind as well as the body. No matter how hard you have prepared or how fit you are, if you really push yourself, when you are on the go there will come a moment in your workout when you will feel that the strength is flowing out of your limbs, your lungs are labouring, your heart is pumping and every breath is going through some kind of restriction in your throat.
The thing to remember is that this feeling is natural. You have reached the point past which lies what runners call their “second wind” and what martial artists call “being in the zone”. Get through this barrier and what lies beyond suddenly becomes easier. Getting through it though requires mental concentration. The trick here is not to ignore your body, if you do that you will either incur an injury or simply stop as you will feel that this is too much. What you need to do is listen to your body and simply trick it on keeping going just a little longer. Ballet dancers count beats, runners count steps and tell themselves in the next four, the next five, the next eight, they need to just get through. Martial artists count breaths, body builders count reps. The fact is that by breaking the task up so that it no longer seems like a huge 10km run on the treadmill, the lifting of 150kg ten times, or punching the heavy bag non-stop for three minutes, they can keep the body going to the point when it can take care of itself, again.
There are many explanations on the reasons we hit this barrier when we exercise. None of them completely satisfying. The most popular one, at the moment, is that the body is making a transition at that point from one system to another. So it goes from being aerobic where you need every breath you take in order to ‘pay’ for what you do, to being anaerobic when it can work flat out with ever decreasing oxygen, building up an oxygen debt which then needs to be repaid.
Runners hitting their second wind, lengthen their stride and take deeper breaths. Ballet dancers move through cyclical dance routines which are less taxing and martial artists and boxers dance and bob and weave and duck, catching their breath on the go. The fact that these people can do it at that level, should make the less of us determined to get through our own personal barrier, at any cost. The rewards are certainly more than just worth it.
