Rebuild Your Mind; Rebuild Your Body

For a long time I was blinded by science and the media into believing that the best way to measure your weight and hence keep track of your progress was by using the scales.

Scales don’t lie (well not too much), it’s scientific, mechanical truth. Mirrors on the other hand really can lie as a trip to an amusement park can show you. Gossip claims that the mirrors in gyms are carefully angled to make you look good.

But I’ve come to discard that commonly held notion. It’s true that the scales can be an important tool in the armoury for someone looking to lose weight, but for someone looking to add muscle to an underdeveloped and underweight frame, the scales are a threat.

There are many issues with scales which we all know, such as variations in fluids, but we put too much faith in their scientific truth. Our subconscious minds rely on that too much. “Two pounds increase! But I only ate a quarter pounder!”

There is so much media attention on weight that I think people underestimate the impact not just on the overweight, but on the underweight too. I know that I get paranoid about gaining weight. I know consciously that putting on muscle will increase my weight but my subconscious panics when the scales increase.

It’s true that the mirror can lie, but while I’m in a more bulking phase of my program I lock the scales away. If I use the same mirror, I get a consistent image from day to day. It’s impossible for me to micromanage my weight because a few pounds here or there don’t show.

So for now it’s mirrors only, and I do it in the knowledge that they have their own flaws. Great when pumped, not so great when things have relaxed!

No matter how we try, the one thing that we can count on is failure.  What makes us though is how we deal with it.

My program was on track, everything was coming along just nicely until I picked up a new injury.  That is par for the course, at least for me.  If you push the limits then sometimes you are going to overstep them.  There I was happily pushing more weight because the last time I’d done this routine I’d noticed that I needed to increase the weight – it was an exercise I’d not done often before.  I’m still not sure what went wrong and I’ve replayed it in my head a number of times.

But that isn’t the important point.  It’s how you deal with it and I have to admit that I dealt with it poorly.  Not intentionally, but because it was a rib injury it impacted on just about every exercise I did, even the cardio.  So I gave it a break.

It was the right thing to do.  Better to take a couple of weeks out than create something which would keep me out of training for months.  But, here is the mistake;  I allowed myself to shift my daily routines – I mean it wouldn’t hurt would it?

Well four months later, I’m now struggling to re-establish those routines.  And there is the lesson.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve got more things I could do, more things I need to do than time to do them.  There are solutions to that, but in the end we have to make choices.

We are going to fail.  If you are prepared for it then you can cope with it and move on.  If it catches you by surprise then it can shift you into a new paradigm without you even realising it.

So how do you deal with failure?