Mental Mastery Response

Please read and re-read this Mental Mastery article from Chris Shugart. It really explains the four stages of the health and fitness lifestyle. Really stages two and three will be the hardest to overcome.

Stage two, Conscious Incompetence is tough and as Chris writes "this is the biggest issue in the fields of health, fitness and bodybuilding." He goes on to give a couple of cures for this stage including self-directed anger. The key though is realization that you are rationalizing poor decisions. Identifying your rationalizations and choosing not to allow them is a direct step to stage three.

Stage three, Conscious Competence means you have taken control of your decisions and are now living a healthy lifestyle. Moving to stage four, Unconscious Competence requires time. Make enough of the right decisions for a long enough period of time and your won't even have to think about it anymore. The trap though is falling back into stage two. If you haven't quite made it to stage four and begin to allow yourself one or two small rationalizations they can snowball and you find yourself back where you began.

Be patient, be dedicated and work your way through the stages.

More motivation from other sources

Check out FitBuff, one of my posts is featured this week. They feature a number of different blogs under different categories.

I have also come across a few different motivation for health and fitness related blogs in the last few days.
The Educated Athlete covers categories such as mindset, leadership and emotions.

Simply Fitness has a post on Motivation for running when you don't want to! The tip about getting yourself to exercise everyday by simply getting out the door with your exercise gear on is brilliant and something I definitely think works. I have usually gone for just making myself do a warm up when I don't feel like training. This works for me because the warm up has the effect of getting me moving and clears my mind. This in turn makes me feel better about the training I have planned so I invariably end up training properly and successfully. By simplifying it further to just making yourself get outside with your gear on I think you are further increasing you chances for success.

MusclePost also has a post about motivating yourself to work out. The are some useful and improtant tips like tracking your progress, setting goals and changing your workouts to continue the callenge.

Motivation

What is it that makes you train hard? Knowing how you get yourself motivated can be a big help. If you are internally motivated you push yourself because you like the feeling hard training gives you. If you are externally motivated it's the external rewards from training that drive you.

When you first start training you'll likely be externally motivated. Wanting to lose weight, gain muscle, get healthier or achieve athletically are all examples of external motivation. External motivation is great at the start and if you set achievable short term goals it can carry you a long way.

There will be times those external sources aren't motivating enough. Tough times indeed and you'll need to look inside and inspire yourself. Inspiring yourself can be easy if you've kept detailed records about your training. Simply look back and see how far you've come if your destination seems too far away. You might also go back to a particularly good session and visualize how you felt during and after that session. For those that train in a group or with a partner use the energy of others around you to pick you up. Anything you can use to get you excited about training is a motivating force.

Motivation, whatever yours is make sure you make the most of it to ensure great performance.

This article was featured in The Fourth Edition of the Carnival of Improving Life.