Nothing shrivels me into discomfort quite like scraping a popsicle stick on my teeth. For others, it’s rubbing two pieces of Styrofoam together. And for the boring ones, it’s fingers down a chalkboard.
Got the chills, don’t you?
Crazy how single thoughts cause physiological responses. So even if Olivia Newton-John is getting you physical, a lack of mental preparation will shortcut your gains.
CONSTRUCTING VISUALIZATIONS
Visualizations are like performance enhancing meditation sessions. Set aside ten minutes before every training session and start a ritual to mentally prepare yourself.
Take a seat, close your eyes, and focus on your breathing. Like, intense focus. Expand the stomach, not chest, with every inhale and exhale. Breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth.
Start by recreating your training session. Construct a virtual replica of everything, even down to tightening up your Chucks. Where are you at? Sitting on your favorite bench? What music is playing? Metal? (It better be.) Is that hot chick on the stairmaster like she always is? Stay focused. How do your warm-up sets feel. Light? How does the knurl feel against your chalked hands? How loose are you? Make every repetition perfect. Where do your feet line up under the bar? How externally rotated are they? Where do you take your grip? Load the bar with your PR weight. What does the gym smell like? What’s the temperature? What clothes are you wearing? How do you feel approaching the bar? Are you confident? How is it going to feel rolling over your shoulder?
You get the idea.
THE USES OF VISUALIZATION
- To put yourself in a positive light
Slated to pull a PR? (It doesn’t matter if you’re a true competitor or just an average joe busting heads in a commercial gym.) Visualize your attempt, starting with pre-pull rituals. Detach from negative emotions. Squat, pull, or press with perfect form. Then do it again. And again. Mentally dominate it.
Get detailed. What muscles are firing and when? How strong are they contracting? How heavy does the bar feel at lockout? How good do you feel? How satisfied are you after the lift?
Your goal is to convince yourself that you’ve “been there, done that.”
- To learn something new
Do mobility issues have your squat suffering? Envision what a perfect squat would feel like. How would your hips move? What would the bottom feel like? When do the knees bend?
Sometimes a sucky squat comes down to coordination more so than mobility, so this is a double positive.
- To come back from an injury
Last January I broke my foot in five places tricking. Since then, I’ve had perpetual fear of getting back into the sport because I can’t help but think my foot will shatter unexpectedly. (Although I did conquer this fear.)
- Solidifying a mind muscle connection
There’s a reason “mind” is half of mind-muscle connection. Stepping under heavy shit, doing shit, and trying to feel shit in the process is a shitty way to go about developing it, too.
A good mind-muscle connection happens before you touch the bar by recreating exactly what the lift will feel like. What muscles are getting the most stimulation? What joints and limbs are moving where to achieve this? What muscle fibers are fatiguing first?
You can almost mentally engorge muscles with blood before the lift. So if you’re doing incline presses, and you want the upper chest to blow up, convince yourself they are swollen with fluid before you unrack the bar.
STUDYING
Seeing yourself from a third person perspective is a great teaching tool. Although this is more reserved for learning specific lifts, snapping a video of your heavier training sets can be of huge benefit.
“Nah bro, I swear my elbows don’t flare on the bench press.”
Let the video decide.
If you train solo, capture your top end sets of every lift. If you’re experienced, you won’t be revolutionized, but you will learn something.
If you’re a competitive lifter, record all of your competition attempts. Watch them over and over. See what went wrong and what went right. Compare yourself to other successful lifters at similar heights and weights. And, as a bonus, address any corrections or alterations with visualizations prior to your training.
COMING DOWN FROM EMOTIONAL HIGHS
In the gym, most guys are like eighteen year old dudes. They’re trying to close way too early. (Thanks to Gary Vaynerchuk for the analogy.) Save your energy and excitement for when it counts. Rocking out and getting mentally psyched during warm-ups is common, especially before a heavy lift. We crank up the headphones and before we know it we’re mentally jacked before being close to lifting anything heavy. This is what I call idling, and as mentioned in 12 Tips to Tune the Nervous System. Idling kills performance.
In The Strongest Shall Survive, Bill Starr outlines a rhythmic breathing protocol for these situations (it’s also great for the times you’re in a brain fog and can’t focus). It looks like this:
- Inhale through the nose as close to 100% as possible
- When you think you’re at 100%, take one last inhale (you’ll never be at 100%)
- Hold for 5-10 seconds
- Exhale 100% through pursed lips
- When you think you’re at 100%, take one last exhale
- Hold for 5-10 seconds
- Repeat
This clears your mind and settles your heart rate—an especially useful tactic during a competition if nerves creep in.
PENCIL IT IN
Convince yourself of possibility. And then don’t question it. If a fifty-three year old woman can lift a tractor trailer to save her son, the shit you’re about to do is well within the realm of possibility.
Frankly, I don’t care how heavy you think it feels. Consider the absolute potential of your muscles and realize them. If you keep a training log (hint: you should be), write your workout in a day in advanced. No one likes scratching out and erasing things. Write it confidently and tell yourself it’s etched there forever. There’s no going back.
CONCLUSION
If you’re not training mentally, you’re shortcutting your gains physically. So shoot some videos of yourself and then analyze them side by side against successful people that share similarities. Keep a log and write your workout down ahead of time to convince yourself of possibility. Use visualizations to prepare yourself before training. And try rhythmic breathing if you’re mind is slipping of a lift or training session. It all adds up. “The manner in which an athlete controls his mind,” Bill Starr once wrote, “determines, to a great extent, just how well he will perform on any given day.”
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How do you use visualizations, if at all? I’d love to hear your comments below.
I usually go through my workout mentally before i do it, not exactly a few minutes before starting but sometime during the day i imagine it, i don’t if it has something to do with it, but i always go to the gym with a positive mindset and a strong will to train, things flow well. The mind is for sure a very powerfull tool and we often forget to use it. In weight training there’s that idea that nutrition plays an 80% role, i think the mind might have that same weight on results.
I agree, Helder. When it comes to nutrition, the mind in itself is what stops you from eating the cake
LOL True True
This is almost the exact technique that I was taught to use, a a young bloke, before every game of football that I played. I guarantee that it works, on the occasions that I didn’t visualize the game before I played, I always played a crap game. The mental aspect of training very underrated. Instead many uneducated trainers feel they can find focus and determination in a pre-workout supplement!
Awesome stuff, Niko. Glad you have similar experiences.
Lately I’ve been doing upper chest activation work (Modified Svend Presses and V Presses), dynamic stretching, and some other cool stuff. I have to say, I’m guilty of not getting mentally jacked during the activation work and dynamic stretching, but getting mentally fatigued. I’m trying to cut down on the idling, which I partake in a lot, to make it quicker and more efficient.
I normally don’t mentally prep before I exercise or stretch. I usually use visualizations during the work itself. I try to focus and focus intently on the muscles at work. It helps loads. Whereas before I sucked at the V presses since I didn’t understand the mechanics, now I am pretty good at them. I feel them where I should now. I used to feel them in my shoulders before I redirected all focus towards the upper chest.
It’s like you hit new depths of connection when you continually visualize and focus on the muscle at work. I’ve also seen this effect in my dynamic stretching.
I used to feel my lower back work a little too much in my right leg back lift (lifting backwards), until I tried to visualize the front of my thigh stretching. After I started to focus on the stretch there, the lower back pain subsided. Focusing on single limbs during the leg lifts makes my training more efficient.
I try to implement it wherever I have problems and it really helps more than any other thing I’ve tried to fix things.
It’s a weird mix of focus and visualization. Nothing is but the point of focus and the load. I even try to implement it during the breathing sessions I have. It might sound like overkill, but I’m willing to dive into it as long as my training doesn’t suffer in the case I fatigue my mind too much. I think it’s pretty sustainable, though.
Visualizing before tricking sessions sounds like it would be awesome. I always see myself from a third-person perspective. I’ll definitely try it out. I’ll have to keep within the realm of reality, as my daydreams tend to take an anime-like twist, haha. If I ever fly during these sessions, I’ll know I went too far, haha.
Good stuff! Funny you mentioned thinking about the ANTAGONIST muscle. This actually helps a bunch when trying to contract certain muscles.
Anthony this is a great article.
I’m a huge fan of the mind muscle connection with building muscle and especially rehab. I often find myself palpating my glutes during SL RDL’s and really focusing on feel overhead presses in my deltoids with a packed shoulder. Great stuff Dude.
Anthony,
Great read. This is very helpful, and I encourage everyone to give this a shot. My pull-up has always suffered, because I was unable to fully activate my back muscles. Doing some resistance band work before a pulling session helped me a lot, and I’ve also started smacking the muscles I’m *really* aiming to hit before a set, which helps me “turn them on.” Another trick I like: executing the final repetition of every set as SLOWLY as possible–also, on movements involving an extension (bench, shoulder press, etc.) I hold the bar above me in a full extension for 5-10 seconds before beginning to lower it. Doing all of this has helped me “feel” my workouts more. My girlfriend told me I have a “Captain America chest” after a month of chest specialization with these activation tweaks, and the mirror and measurements confirm it is working, so I’m a happy camper. Cheers!