Training Your Mental Fitness
David Hageman, CSCS
Stressful situations require mental toughness.
One’s Mental Toughness and discipline is developed in different arenas such as in sports, work, and even someone’s upbringing. In addition to one’s foundation, you can train your mind through difficult training sessions in the gym. Through intense physical training and focusing on the tips below, you can be more accustom to overcoming difficult obstacles wherever they may present themselves… combat situations, a dangerous fire, a difficult rescue, and any physical altercation.
Here at our gym with our Professional Athletes (for us that is our military, police, and rescue personnel), we not only test your physical abilities, but also challenge your mental toughness, desire, and even professionalism. Professionalism?? By this we mean how you approach your training. Do you dread it, openly complain about it, even get too excited about it? We hope to develop and train the mentality similar to that of of the “Quiet Professionals”. A workman-like attitude where we accomplish the mission in front of us, suffer silently, yet enjoy and have fun with it.
Mental Fitness and Physical fitness should compliment each other. Can you be a good leader in one of these physically demanding professions and be unfit? Maybe, but it’s very hard. Can you be physically fit and not a good leader? Definitely, but the more physically fit you are the easier it is to be mental fit. As a combat/operations leader, you need to be poised, alert and able to make quick and accurate decisions under stress, not bent over trying to catch your breath.
As part of the Military Athlete training team, we travel all over the country training military units and law enforcement groups the Military Athlete System. Obviously, a bulk of the instruction is Strength and Conditioning, but part of it is training the mind and shaping attitudes. Here are some comments for Military Athelete founder, Rob Shaul, on training Mental Fitness.
Gym-based mental toughness is one of the most transferable attributes we train. We train in the gym to perform outside.
Feedback from world class mountaineers and special operations soldiers – athletes who by definition have pretty darn high mental toughness – have both reported back that the mental toughness they learned and build in the gym transfered to their performance on the mountain and on the battlefield.
Mental Fitness can and needs to be trained!
I’m a strength coach who believes that mental toughness should and can be trained in the gym. Further, initial gym-based mental toughness can’t be seen as the ultimate judge of an athlete’s character.
What I mean by this is, gym-based mental toughness can be learned. Often, new athletes will suffer with mental toughness their first time in the gym, but the next time they come in and endure one of these work capacity/mental toughness sessions, they do much better. They have some idea what to expect, and their performance improves.
Further, I think mental toughness can and should be coached. Here are some guidelines we use:
1) Don’t go to complete failure. Stop and rest before digging yourself into a deep hole. I instruct my athletes to stop with 1-2 reps left and rest then instead of going to complete failure before stopping.
2) Limit your rest to 5 breaths. That’s it.
3) No rest between transitions. This is the hardest one. Move right from one exercise to the next and start it. Your mind will want to rest. Your body doesn’t need to. You’ll surprise yourself.
4) The darker things get, the shorter term your thinking needs to be. When things really suck, just tell yourself, “one rep at a time.” – don’t think about the whole set.
