Fitness Strength Training: Winning Mentality for Long - term Training Success by Anders N W Lindgreen

Many advanced trainees differ from their less experience peers in the way they perceive their own fitness, health and wellness. Their fitness strength training goals are largely long-term oriented and they are more concerned with the overall outcome of their efforts than micro managing their performance. You seldom hear them speak of preparing for "Beach 20XX" or making New Years Resolutions about what they should do. They just do. The rest is just not what they are about, and their performances are consistently getting better where others may experience three steps forward and two steps back.

This mentality is largely brought on by experience, knowing what works for yourself and I'm sure also quite a few short-term rallies for Beach 19XX. They have done that but have now aligned their goals with who they are and what they want to get out of this lifestyle of theirs. Minor defeats don't face them as long as they are moving forward toward. If they' feel sick, they rest until they've recovered. Their program and structure is consistent but not set in stone. If they feel amazing they may very well double their efforts on the day just like they'll take it easier on less energetic occasions.

The advantages are obvious as you heave a healthier and more mature relationship to your fitness, health and wellness. If you have a day or a night that didn't follow protocol it won't force you to take the entire week off (while you indulge in comfort-activities and self-loathing). Unless you are a professional athlete there is no need to put such emphasis on one "wrong move". All it does is creating guilt. If you start to consistently regress backwards then, by all means, pick yourself up and be stricter, but if you are doing 60-80% good deeds every week, then there is no need to get upset when life gets in the way. It always will every now and then.

We could learn a lot from these men and women but chances are that we won't until we naturally come to the same conclusions that they have. There is absolutely nothing wrong with short-term thinking, if you align it with long-term goal setting. Eventually we are all likely to retire from the pure performance and aesthetics stages of our training and thinking, and perhaps that has to do with improved self-image, maturity or the fact that we feel at ease with what we have achieved or will achieve. Whichever the case, the sooner we can embrace it, the better.