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Failure is Not an Option! 5 Strategies to Keep you Motivated!
At some point, we've all suffered from a lack of motivation that has kept us out of the gym and may have even caused us to question whether continuing to train is right for us or is worth the struggle and commitment.
It's at these times that we need to have a strategy - a game plan - to put things into perspective so we can carry on and keep our fire and passion for training alive.
Here are five concrete can't-fail strategies that you can follow to keep your motivation and fire for training alive so that you can take advantage of all the benefits that training has to offer.
1. Keep A Positive Attitude
It's been said before, and it's true: your attitude determines everything.
While many people talk about the importance of consistently exercising and using specific training methods to get results, the mind and the importance of keeping a positive attitude is largely overlooked.
It's easy to understand why this is the case. When your training program produces fantastic results, staying positive is easy and maintaining your training desire is effortless. In fact, for many people in this situation, staying away from the gym becomes the problem!
However, when your results begin to slow or stop altogether, it's easy to become negative focusing on the problems in your training program instead of your opportunities for change. And, if you stay negative long enough, you'll eventually give up.
Keeping a positive attitude can be challenging, but it can be done even when your progress grinds to a halt and you don't think you have anything to be optimistic about.
The best way to keep a positive attitude is to re-examine and revisit the positive and exciting reasons why you started training in the first place. Returning to your original motivation for training will allow you to reconnect with your initial enthusiasm and will remind you of the great results that you want to achieve from all of your hard work.
As you revisit your initial reasons for training, be sure to focus on how you will feel when all of your hard work pays off and you succeed.
Focusing on how you feel, or the emotional component, is critical because keeping a positive attitude is purely an emotional task. Simply using logic to review a list of reasons of why you started training will not work. In fact, doing so may just make you feel worse because of the added pressure and stress caused by self-imposed expectations.
Maintaining a positive attitude is accomplished by staying in contact with the purely emotional reasons why you started training, and the feelings that you will experience after you've worked so hard and have succeeded.
If, after revisiting the reasons you started to train, you find that they have changed, acknowledge this and accept it as natural. Then, if necessary, create new emotional reasons to train and focus on how you will feel once you succeed.
2. Maintain Your Focus
Focus is critical for keeping your fire alive.
Focus is your ability to direct your energies - your thoughts and actions - towards an end in order to produce specific results. You'll achieve your goals only by focusing on them and directing your energies toward their fulfillment. If you focus on your frustrations, you'll fail.
However, maintaining your focus isn't just about being mindful of your goals and working diligently towards them. It also involves being mindful of your emotional state, being in tune with the mind-muscle connection, as well as constantly re-evaluating your exercise methods.
By maintaining your focus and directing all of your thoughts and actions towards an end, you dramatically increase your ability to produce awesome results. This will motivate you to go the distance, regardless of whatever setbacks and frustrations you might encounter along the way.
To maintain your focus, two questions are vitally important:
1. What do I want to achieve? 2. Is what I am doing now directly relevant to what I want to achieve?
By asking and answering these two questions, you will promote a state of mindfulness - an increased state of general awareness - that will train your mind to focus on your goals and your training. It will enable you to rapidly evaluate your situation to determine if your actions are relevant and focused on what you want to accomplish. Remember: if you focus on your goals you will succeed. If you don't, you won't. It's that simple.
3. Stay In The Game: Get Connected To Others
As the poet John Donne said in Meditation XVII "No man is an island, entire of itself." In bodybuilding, you can't be successful alone.
Bodybuilders and athletes know that the daily routine of meal preparation, eating, supplementation and working out is incredibly stressful, taxing, lonely and discouraging without the constant positive support of others. Many bodybuilders get the help of a training partner for this reason.
Getting a training partner is one of the best things you can do to keep your fire for training alive, because a training partner can motivate you to keep going when things get difficult. A training partner can also remind you of your goals if you forget them, help you maintain a positive attitude and help you maintain your focus. A training partner also provides a social connection, which makes an otherwise lonely activity engaging.
But getting a training partner isn't the only thing that bodybuilders do to connect to others. Going to bodybuilding shows, seminars and participating in online forums also help to keep you involved, networked and connected with others in the bodybuilding world.
4. Stay Attentive & Keep Up
Paying attention to the latest scientific training and nutrition advances is the only way that you can keep up with the dynamic and ever changing bodybuilding world.
The bodybuilding world changes every day. New knowledge is discovered and existing knowledge is refined, new articles are published, new training methods are created, and new supplements are developed. Getting the best possible results happens only by paying attention to the ever-changing bodybuilding landscape and taking the absolute best that it has to offer.
Thankfully, it's easier today than ever to spot the best catalysts for awesome results. Newsstand magazines are plentiful and the internet is a remarkable resource of unparalleled magnitude that can give you productive information with the click of your mouse.
By staying attentive and keeping up on the latest developments, you'll be able to solve problems more quickly, overcome difficulties, and fuel your success.
5. Stay On Track
Keeping your fire alive is possible only by staying on track - and this means tracking and staying on top of your performance.
To stay on track, constantly evaluate your plan and path, just like businesses review their performance each quarter. But, rather than waiting three months to evaluate your performance, evaluate your performance and progress after every workout. At the end of each day, find out what you did well, what could use improvement, what worked, what didn't work and, most importantly, what you must do in the days and weeks ahead to stay motivated and to move forward. Constant evaluation and refinement of your lifestyle will serve to prevent problems, crush them while they're small and prevent you from becoming derailed by frustrations. |
