Think Yourself To Peak Physical Performance at 40+
What if you could train your 40-year-old mind to push your 40-year-old body into peak performance? It’s a reality, if you think it can be.
You can train your mind to push your body harder.
THE BRIEF
Time to read: 3 minutes 30 seconds
Time to action: 20 minute
Mantra: “Nobody built like you, you designed yourself!” – Jay-Z
Main message: If you think you can do more, you will in fact, do more
Stat: 50% - The reduced risk of cardiovascular diseases if you have an “I can” mindset
The great Salt-n-Pepa famously said it’s all about expression. They probably weren’t talking about a psychobiological model that allows you to can turn brain power into performance. But even if they weren’t, we certainly are!
According to this model, it’s all about “perceived effort” (PE). If it is all about thinking, should you still attempt to push it real good in the gym?
Well, exhaustion happens not when your body hits a hard physical limit, but when you hit the highest PE your mind is prepared to tolerate. Your body isn’t shutting down. Instead, you are consciously, deciding when to quit. There is more there, if you can just find a way of believing it.
If you believe you can improve by changing your relationship to perceived effort, you'll be more successful in doing so. The theory has been tested, and the results seem to speak for themselves:
STUDY 1: Mind over matter
Some students were just told to ‘do their best’ in a test of muscular endurance, while others were given a target to aim for. After 8 weeks, the students who did their best improved a bit, but the students given a ‘difficult but realistic’ goal improved the most – even more than those given easy or unattainable targets.”
STUDY 2: Don’t think, just do
It’s self-consciousness that causes underperformance. In other words, you’re getting distracted by thinking about the consequences of success or failure. So don’t overthink it, just do it.
STUDY 3: Think calm for peak performance
Lisa Wimberger, who runs the Neurosculpting Institute in Denver, has created an “automatic” process for your brain: “When stress is triggered in the brain, subjects reacted calmly instead of going into fight-or-flight mode. This was achieved by giving stressful feelings a physical representation (say a colour, texture or sound), then visualizing them ‘leaving’ the body.
Wimberger stated this works by using both hemispheres of the brain, increasing its neuroplasticity and your ability to create new thought processes to apply to stressful situations.
There is a decent, ever-increasing body of evidence to show that you can genuinely push yourself to achieve more than you thought possible. The HOW is as important as the WHAT – and we’ve got that covered for you too:
Adaptive perfectionism (AP)
Also known as a never-satisfied mindset (NSM), this has been recorded as having a positive impact on performance by allowing you to strive for increasing personal standards. Notably, it removes the maladaptive facets of perfectionism that involve self-critical evaluation and concerns about others' expectations.
Focus on performing better for you and no one else, and two things happen: you get closer to your targets and feel less anxiety.
By learning to push yourself in competition (largely with yourself), you can learn to push yourself further, without experiencing the additional stress that can come with it. It’s a universal skill that is just as applicable at work as in the gym. Pushing yourself for yourself means not only will you see just how much you're capable of, but the more you do it, the more you can achieve.
Try it for 2 weeks and see how far you can raise the bar. Then don’t tell anybody. That’s a real winner's mindset: it’s really just about you doing you, just better. To mix and match our 80s superstar divas, “Free your mind, and the rest will follow.”
DR DOG
A cognitive psychologist specialising in those most 21st Century of issues: anxiety and depression. Dog is especially good at delivering actionable answers, removing the rhetoric and hyperbole, and focusing simply and directly on practical information that can be used to help mental health on a daily basis.
