Loaded Blog
How to bring the right mindset to Training
How to bring the right mindset to Training.
Author: Della Rose Murphy
10 minute read
At some point in time, I lived on the Gold Coast. The everyone is skinny and beautiful Gold Coast. One night, when headed out, I looked at myself and said I was too fat. Cliché right.
Shortly after, I hired a PT. She made me run until I blew out my knee. So there I was, more skinny, with one working knee. People like girls that limp right?
At some point, I realised, the mindset I was bringing to this, my mentality, that I’m the silly one, thinking some PT has the answer, was not serving me at all. I started to realise, that I need to learn how and why to train. To think for myself. I think you should too.
Here are 5 things I’ve learned, that might help your day
- Nobody likes skinny, even skinny people (well, that’s my experience)
As soon as I picked up a dumbbell, I told the PT, I didn’t want to be as big as Arnold Schwarzenegger. Could I be more original? So I ran and ran, got super thin, at no time did I feel better.
You know what helped, seeing a UFC fighter on Instagram. I honestly thought if I trained with weights that I’d look like her in 6 months. First of all, that’s crazy, she has a lifetime of work. Second, I realised, people found her way more attractive than my 80s chic bulimia look.
So, I started lifting weights. And nothing happened for a long time. But, somehow, I liked it took a long time, and I liked it was incremental.
The takeaway – you are not going to get big and muscly overnight – you have plenty of time to change the plan if you don’t like your look, but you’ll probably feel a lot better.
- Focussing on lifting heavier things, made me happy
Just having something to work for (and using annoying hashtags like #strongbodystrongmind) made me happy. I’m by no means the strongest person, my best squat is 110kg and that took me 7 years, but I liked the whole process of getting there.
For me, I think object standards, like I can lift X, made me just so happy with myself. I did that. I made that happen. I think getting strong is the best. I think it changes your mindset.
- I can be proud of having guns, and only a beta male would care
Literally, never, ever has someone said I’m too big, that I would want to listen to. I’ve definitely been told I’m too big, lots of times. I have no idea why someone says that, but it’s going to happen.
You know how many times guys have said they like my glutes? 1000 times more than the ‘too big’ comments. You can’t win them all, so choose to focus on what makes you happy.
- Sometimes you need a teaspoon of cement, sometimes you don’t
One of the best tools I found, when I was on a program was just to ‘harden up’. In the earlier times, I tended to take it too easy on myself. In the end, this is what caused me to injure my back.
It’s very hard to know yourself, but, my advice is to push yourself to get through every warm up. If you still aren’t feeling it, close down the program and come back tomorrow. Like it or not, females are far more subject to their hormones than men.
- Coaches don’t know everything
Females, from my experience (and my googling) tend to be better at reps. When my squat was 110kg for a single, I could do 12 reps at 95kg. That makes no sense. It took me a lot of research to realise that coaches would not account that females tend to be better at reps, and worse at muscular recruitment at singles. If I wanted to get better at singles, I needed a lot of singles and doubles practice – 12 sets of 2 was far better for me then 5 sets of 5.
It’s been 7 years, it’s been a great 7 years. Some of these lessons were hard, but they were all worth it. This is a journey, there is no end goal, there is no destination, I’m just out here enjoying training, with a smile on my face.
Della Rose Murphy writes and coaches as DRMC. Her coaching and writing extends to tools learned from NLP and hypnosis qualifications, and philosophy classes. While certainly not stating she as the answers, she does offer a set of tools that have helped her, and her clients live a better, progressive and more fulfilled lives. Della can be found on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/DellaRoseMurphy/
I have trouble with my mindset to train every time, sometimes I can be a bit lazy, reading the part about the achievements who was motivating you to keep going, is something I haven’t thought about it… and is so true the part about the PT’s, I haven’t seen the first one who tracks the 1 Rep Max lifting from their clients to set up a plan around those percentages and avoid injuries.