Your brain controls your output; it is always evaluating the effort level. Mental fitness, toughness, strength (whatever you like to call it) must be developed in order to get the most out of your body. When the brain is surprised, you underperform…
If you’ve ever underestimated a workout you know this feeling all too well. You look at the workout and think; ‘ah that’s not too bad’ – then 3 minutes in you feel like you’ve been hit by a tonne of bricks and you’re gasping for air. Similarly, the workouts you worry about the most are often the ones you finish feeling like did well – even though you did work really hard and still gasping for air.
The last 6 weeks I’ve been following a program on the bike to help build my threshold power. It’s been fascinating how my perception of each workout prior has effected my performance during – drastically. There have been 3 memorable workouts over the last few weeks. All of them have been at the exact same effort (in this case it’s power measured by the bike – about 95%) but they have been for different durations:
Workout 1: 1x 40min effort – I saw this workout in the program 10 days before I did it and couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had never put out that power for so long. I knew it was going to be brutal.
Workout 2: 2x 25min efforts – this was the following week after the 40min effort. I was curious knowing what the 40min was like, this one was less in a single blow, but more overall. I knew it would be hard.
Workout 3: 2x 15min efforts – this was a deload week. I’d spent so much time at this power around the 20min mark in other workouts so naturally I dismissed this workout as being super easy.
So how did it go. Workouts 1 and 2 were hard, very hard. But I found myself enjoying them, enjoying the pain and the effort. I performed well, better than expected and finished feeling great. Workout 3 was a different story. I suffered, not a fun kind of suffering either. It was way harder than expected and I did not have fun.
This was fascinating to me. As someone who has worked to develop what I feel is a pretty good level of mental fitness, it was really interesting to experience this. The key word in all of that info above is “expected” – my brain was surprised so I underperformed. I expected workout 1 and 2 to be hard – they absolutely were, but it was in line with my expectations therefore I wasn’t surprised. Workout 3 was the opposite.
We are not born being mentally tough. A lot of mental toughness is based on our past experiences, what we’ve endured by chance and most importantly the difficult things we’ve chosen to endure. You can lean into these experiences and use the knowledge to control how your brain responds.
I tried to tell myself that workout 3 was going to be hard – I was still working at 95% effort (based on my best 20min effort) for 15mins. But subconsciously I knew I’d done workouts much harder so it was difficult to overcome that relaxed feeling towards workout 3.
When I was a Royal Marines Commando, there was a common phrase that we should not “rest on our laurels”. The laurels were awarded to the Royal Marines to honor their gallantry during capture of Belle Isle in 1761. We wore them on our berets. To become a Commando you had to be tough, those before us had achieved greatness in battle but we still had to live up to that standard.
Mental fitness is an edge that needs constant sharpening. Just because you’ve done something before, doesn’t mean you’re able to do it now. You also need to give each situation the respect it deserves. If you don’t your brain will be surprised and you will underperform.
Most people go to the gym to look better and feel better – nothing wrong with that and it’s certainly a part of why I train too. But the real beauty of putting yourself in really hard workouts is what you learn about what goes on in-between your ears. The gym is a low risk environment for building your mental fitness so that if you ever need it in a high risk situation – you’re prepared.
