Mental Tactics You Need To Know
Originally posted on https://www.fithaus.io/blog/fitness/mental-tactics-you-need-to-know/
Originally posted on YouTube by FITHAUS Personal Trainers
In my opinion, the biggest reason people fail on their journeys comes down to discipline and mindset. There’s no shortage of amazing content and information available on how to build the physique of your dreams – if you search for it and research it, you’ll find it. But that doesn’t make it any easier to do. That’s why Personal Training is so effective – of course you get loads of value with the customized training, but where you really get your value is in the added motivation and accountability of working with someone. It makes it that much easier to overcome your mental obstacles and get to your goals. But even with a Personal Trainer, you’ll need to know and prepare for a lot of mental hurdles and obstacles so you’re not hindered.
The first thing you need to do is to be able to set realistic expectations. Body changes take time. This is going to be a difficult journey, it’s going to be challenging physically and mentally. You’re going to face ups and downs throughout the process. It is a SLOW process. You’re not going to lose 25 pounds and 12% body fat in 4 weeks so it’s important to ensure you go through a proper goal setting exercise. Muscle mass comes slow. So does fat loss. Be prepared for slow, consistent progress. If you do a really good job, you’ll be up or down 1-1.5 pounds per week, depending on if you’re cutting or bulking. That’s the pace of sustainable progress. You need to mentally accept that before moving on.
Even knowing that your maximum progress is 1-1.5 pounds per week, you may not truly appreciate the consistency it takes to achieve those kind of results. So many people make incredible sacrifice Monday through Friday, only to have 2 or 3 detrimental cheat meals on weekends. Or eat perfectly throughout the day and then drink 2-3 glasses of wine every evening. We’ll dedicate a full video to showing exactly how detrimental a single cheat meal can be on your journey, but for now you need to realize that consistency is far and wide the most critical component of achieving results. Whether it comes to your training or your nutrition, consistency will make or break your progress. Anybody who tells you otherwise is flat out lying. It’s always important to stay focused on the big picture and to be able to track your results over time.
This also draws parallels to the careers of many of our clients who are busy professionals. In the first few years of your career you can expect to do a lot of grunt work, work late hours and put in a tonne of effort. Similar to how it can take some time to reap the benefits in your career, the same mentality and approach also applies to fitness.
With the help of your personal trainer, you should also stay motivated on a weekly basis based on the improvement in your key lifts (such as your squat, deadlift, bench press, etc). In the majority of cases, you’ll see strength gains before you start noticing physical changes to your body. It’s important to make sure that you have the right mindset going in to understand that consistency is what will help you win on your fitness journey. Consistency wins. If you’re consistent, you will win.
Another thing you’ll need to know is the importance of sustainability vs extremism. If you’re currently consuming 2300 calories per day and want to go on a cut, eating 1,000 calories per day all of a sudden is NOT going to be a sustainable tactic for you. You’re likely going to suffer from bouts of hunger and strong cravings. Your mood is going to be all over the place and you’re likely going to end up binging and undoing your positive progress. It’s the same thing with training, you’re not going to go from 0 to 6 workouts a week overnight. For most, it’s best to make this a gradual process as we want fitness to integrate well into our overall lifestyle. What’s the point in seeing fast results, falling off, and then reverting back to our old selves?
The last thing we’re going to discuss here is the importance of tracking – both with your training, your nutrition, your weight and your body composition. It’s so easy to THINK we’re eating healthy, or training hard, or progressing. The human mind typically likes to put a positive bias on things when it comes to our own efforts and self. People tend to overstate their positive habits and understate their negative ones, and this holds true especially in training and nutrition. Tracking your workouts and your nutrition is going to be a HUGE difference maker. You may still see positive progress without tracking, but why walk when you can run?
Our next video is going to go over tracking in detail – once you’re set up with tracking, we’d recommend really building up the habit of logging. If you’re consistent with it, you’ll have the visibility and clarity to get results and progress faster. You won’t be blind on your journey. Also, once you have your food log set up and have aggregated 7-10 days worth of data, one of our personal training managers would be happy to take a look and provide you with feedback. This nutritional advice is included free of charge with any of our packages and will definitely help set you up for success. We ultimately want you to be successful and since nutrition is such an important part of any fitness journey, we’ve included this free of charge with any of our packages!
As always, you can discuss various mental tactics with your personal trainer. If you’re not already a client of FITHAUS, feel free to reach out to us on our website or give us a call at 1-888-682-0724 if you’d like to set up a complimentary session with a member of our team. The first step will be learning more about you and your goals so that we can pair you with the right personal trainer on our team.