“Mental Fitness” before “Physical Fitness”: The one thing many well-intentioned people are missing.

When I was fresh out of the military and had just joined Gold’s Gym in my mid-twenties, I was briefly acquainted with a young woman who had just broken into the ‘personal trainer’ industry. She’d been at it for only a few months when a passing conversation I had with her revealed the frustrations she was experiencing with that business. She told me it was often like “babysitting”, whereby she struggled to get her clients to follow through on their prescribed workouts and eating plans. I felt both the implicit humor and biting frustration in an experience she shared:

“One client showed up for his workout and then told me he needed to go to the restroom. As I waited for him outside – I never saw him come out of the restroom. In fact, I never saw him again.”

Wow… I can vouch for the fact that the restroom she was referring to had no rear exit door. That guy either escaped through the rafters or she briefly took her eyes off the front door. At any rate, her client wasn’t only unmotivated to work out – he was highly motivated to escape undetected.

"Mental Fitness" can optimize 'workout focus' so that "physical fitness" becomes easier

That story – with its humor and slightly tragic undertone – is revealing of the need for “mental training” before “physical training” in the physique improvement and fitness arena. We’re often told how physical fitness will improve our mental and emotional well-being. Yet we’re rarely reminded of how a good mental game needs to precede the physical one in order to make the physical one effective and achievable. And it raises the proverbial “chicken and egg” question: Does mental fitness come first to help provide physical fitness or is physical fitness the priority so as to create mental fitness? I’ve found the former to be more important – especially for those individuals who’ve spent most of their years on the sedentary side and haven’t developed much of their ‘mind/body connection.’ Once that’s developed, improved well-being and self-esteem from having a stronger and shapelier body becomes a catalyst that keeps motivation self-perpetuating.

What is ‘Mental Fitness’ for ‘Physical Fitness?’

I always divide the issue of ‘mental fitness for physical fitness’ into a macro-level and a micro-level. Unsurprisingly, the macro-level issues typically need to be addressed before the micro-level ones can be applied for fitness optimization. Dealing with the macro issues is the only method I know of that can prevent the kind of “disappearing through the backdoor of the gym” scenario described above. Macro-level issues for ‘mental fitness’ include the following:

• Motivation
• Confidence
• Breaking Negative Habits
• Creating a Compelling Future
• Physically Empowered Self-Image

Can working out and improving one’s body create these positive mental conditions? Yes… but often too slowly. We run the risk of escaping the gym through a trap-door or letting an inch of dust collect on our home gym equipment before this can take effect. That’s why I recommend dealing with the ‘mental fitness’ before the ‘physical fitness’ in most cases.

So what constitutes the micro-level of ‘mental fitness?’

That’s where we get into things such as “workout performance” and “weight lifting concentration” and even “inter-workout recuperation performance.” If you want to really change your body for the better, think of yourself as an athlete and your workouts as athletic performances. If you’ve been the sedentary type, this will be easier to do once you’ve addressed the macro-level ‘mental fitness for physical fitness’ issues and optimized them.

The field of NLP provides a terrific array of tools for optimizing mental fitness for physical fitness. I use many of them with my clients. However, I don’t limit myself to them either. There are also skills within the fields of sports psychology and mental training that are just as valuable.

One thing worth mentioning: Good mental fitness needs to work synergistically with a physical fitness program. Even the best mental training can be completely ruined by physical training that doesn’t provide a trainee with positive feedback – both psychological and physiological. HardBody Success shows trainers and trainees alike how to make their mental fitness for physical fitness work synergistically – whereby their combined effect is greater than their individual effects.