Mid Life Fitness

No one would expect to be able to build impressive muscles without spending time working hard in the gym. The same then is true of the mental attitude which is necessary in order to be able to work out that hard.

Mental strength does not come to us any more easily or naturally than physical strength. Both need to be carefully trained and developed. No matter what your genetics might dictate on either of these things, you can improve and be better than someone who has not bothered.

The one trait above all others which will see you to success is in maintaining a positive mental attitude. A positive mental attitude is the steroids of the mental strength game.

Where do you get them?

As with any strength training, it has to be done consistently otherwise you will lose any benefits that you’ve gained.

In the Western culture we’ve become accustomed to being negative about things. Our days are filled with complaining about things, being irritated or angry about other people. Road rage is a symptom of a much larger problem.

You need to learn to stop that practice, because what you do to others is reflected in your own self. Anger and frustration can be powerful motivations in a workout to really push yourself, but that assumes that you’ve made it into the gym in the first place.

Remove all negativity from your mind. While you may see negative things in others, don’t mention them, don’t even think about them. Instead find something positive to say. This is very hard to do in my experience, but it also applies to you, yourself. It’s easy to talk yourself into giving up by focusing on the negatives. Focus on the positives. If a workout didn’t go as well as you’d hoped then be determined to do better next time, but focus on the fact that you came and did it.

Normally there is a reason for a workout not going well, so search within yourself to determine why – where you ill, tired, hungry? This is the second secret, which is to learn from every experience, good or bad. Take pleasure in those experiences, because each have something to teach you and if you can learn the lesson you will do better the next time.

Establish a morning ritual where you find those nuggets of benefit in the happenings of the previous day. Start the day with a laugh, even if forced because the biofeedback will make you positive. Start the day in control of your own mind by choosing to only be positive that day.

Only you can develop the strength to stand firm in your own mind. Only you can choose to be unaffected by the moods of others, to instead focus on achieving your aims. This is how you change the rest of your life – what are you going to do about it?

All of the religious and spiritual systems have one thing in common – they have a method for grounding. You might know it as centring, prayer or contemplation but despite the names it is all a form of meditation.

In our daily lives we are especially beset by confusion. We have multiple levels of distracting communication coming in at us, any number of things which act to stress us; things we need to do, to respond to. Multitasking is commonplace even where we try to avoid it, and the end result of this process is to leave us fragmented and without focus.

We can also find ourselves withdrawing from the pressure, putting up walls and allowing ourselves to stagnate and become depressed.

Stresses damage your body

Depending on your belief system you might view your response to these problems as being an issue with your energy being, your mind or just with your spirit. We have a physical body but we also have an intangible, mental or spiritual part, the part which makes us who we are.

To improve your body you need to have focus and this means you can’t afford to be fragmented and confused, but neither can you afford to hide from the pressure either. Both will result in not scheduling your workouts, nutrition and rest properly and even when you do workout the chances of maximising what you are doing will be slight. It’s all too easy to muddle your program and not give the exercises the focus they need because your mind is somewhere else. Mental stresses will impact on chemically on your body, reducing your ability to cope and this too will slow or even reverse your progress.

The solution is to put the time aside to ground yourself. To be effective this cannot be something that is done once in a while, you need to make it a regular process and if you can’t do it every day then at least do it before each workout. You need to make sure that your focus is on what you want to be doing, to make sure that you tick every box necessary to achieve your goals.

Meditation exercise

Most meditation systems start with breathing. If you have your own system – you do yoga, Alexander technique, martial arts or belong to a religion, go and learn that part of the system and apply it to yourself. You may not have been taught it, but if you ask your teachers they will be able to help.

But if you don’t have a system or simply want to start now then follow this:

Take a seat, wherever is comfortable, close your eyes and breathe.

Open your mental eyes on your inner space. Where are you? Are you in your head, are you floating about outside your head? The first task is to bring yourself back into your head, and you do this by focusing on your breathing. As you breathe pull your awareness back inside your head.

Once you have it there, you need to start to bring it down into your body, breath by breath. Take it down past your neck, past your chest and all the way down to your pelvic floor. You can do this by visualising the bones of your chest or the backbone and go down one vertebrae each breath. If you are familiar with chakras then go down one by one, it doesn’t matter how you get there so long as you do. This is the seat of the body. I find that when I get there suddenly my breathing slows down of its own accord and I relax.

As you continue to breathe you need to be aware of the energy of the body and how it flows. You can think of the energy or spirit being drawn in as you breathe and then pushed back out as you breathe back out. If you think in terms of chakras then apply your knowledge and for example you may want to spin the root chakra. Find a visualisation that works for you.

It need only take five minutes and it may take several attempts before you can achieve it, but if you can start the energy flowing then you can clear or ground yourself. The energy is like the incoming tide, it will sweep away any disturbances; any scattered sand or water that has become backed up in a pool, leaving it fresh, clear and ready for the day.

Be present in yourself

When you are grounded then you are present in yourself, you know who you are and you are in control. If you are not grounded then life tends to live you and not the other way round. When you are centred, you are in touch with your core values, the things which you are passionate about, the things which make you who you are. If you do this before a workout then your focus is fresh, your motivation reconnected.