The Mental Gymnastics of Working Out

My client was just finishing a set of tough oblique crunches, and I asked:

 “Where did you feel that the most?”

This is a standard question used by many personal trainers, physical therapists, and the like to access the client’s perception of what musculature has been working for the duration of the exercise. I expected the client to say, “…the abs, on the side,” or something like that, thus confirming the intent of the exercise. Had the client said something like, “…the legs,” then I would have known that something wasn’t right and would have made the necessary adjustments.

But…

Kenny, the client, is no ordinary guy, and therefore doesn’t give ordinary responses. This is the same guy who refers to any glute exercise as “doing a little glutation…oh yeah.”…and then he winks.

His response:

“In my mind.”

We laughed, and I knew instinctively what he meant. Anyone who has worked out hard and has pushed the limits knows what this means. Possible meanings are: “I’d like to quit, but you were standing there and so I didn’t”, “I know why I’m doing it, but it sucks to do it”, or “Don’t ever ask me to do that again.” Experience teaches that this thought process lasts for about 20 seconds, then the feeling subsides, and you’re left with a dissipating memory that doesn’t seem so bad. Let’s face it, if the memory was all that bad, we’d never do that activity again. Most certainly, while you’re in the middle of an exercise, you’d never psychologically make it through if you couldn’t take solace in the fact that you were never going to have a functional memory of that event again. This uncanny ability to survive the moment, this surreal ability to divorce your self from the immediate happenings of any pain, peril, or danger, is what my martial arts instructor affectionately calls “mental gymnastics.”

Mental gymnastics are responsible for me getting my black belt in the martial arts. Mental gymnastics are responsible for me completing graduate school. Mental gymnastics are responsible for me staying within the fitness industry. Mental gymnastics are responsible for raising a 24 year old son, getting remarried and staying married for 8 years, raising 2 precocious daughters, and creating my own fitness company. Mental gymnastics are the foundational pieces of the psychological glue that holds my psyche together long enough to allow me to get to the next step, whatever that next step might hold.

I’ve discovered that when I do a hard set of squats or leg extensions, it’s often necessary to hold a conversation with myself in my mind. I tell myself how many reps I have left, complete one more, then tell myself that I have one rep less than what I had before…and I continue to do this until the set is complete. This usually starts somewhere around the last 5 reps, but in the moment, I really don’t care what it looks like, what I look like, or who’s looking. My only thought is to complete the goal as best I can, and failure is not an option. So it hurts…oh well. So it burns…oh well. The benefit that I’ll get from the work far outweighs the discomfort, and mental gymnastics allows me the fortitude to persevere and endure.

For me, Yoda said it best:

“No! Try not; do! Or do not. There is no try.”

It doesn’t matter how we get there, or when. As my father says “Did you get what you needed to get?” Our mental dexterity, our mental fortitude and ability, to endure any pain, peril, or danger is so needed in the many aspects of our lives. For many of us, there are people- children, aging parents, and loved ones, who depend on us to show up and produce the sustenance to their primary needs. Our ability to gymnastically train our minds is paramount to meeting, not only our fitness goals, but our life goals as well.

As we transition into 2011, I wish you the best of Luck, Peace, and Blessings working on that Triple Mental Lindy Dive…And if you see me in the gym talking to myself as if I’m cursing myself out, don’t report me to the authorities; just smile and know that I trying to get to the next level, whatever that may be.

Happy Holidays!

Earnest L. Hudson, Jr.

MS, CSCS, CES, PES