Being down at the gym

You spend yet another restless night drifting in and out of intermittent, low-quality sleep. Upon rising for the day, you resume that bitter ongoing feud with your partner that has ground you both down for several days now.

You battle through the morning traffic only to face a scornful slave-driving boss, complete with whip in hand and a set of hopelessly unattainable targets for the day. You skip lunch, work late, and suffer a puncture on your way to the gym.

When you finally get there and slip your sneakers on, you realise that today is the big day when you must attempt a new one-rep-max in the squat and bench press, and also the day you promised your fitness instructor you would try the gym’s all new super-hardcore military fitness boot camp class.

As the powers that be continue to conspire against us on a daily basis, we acknowledge the essential 21st century lifeskill: mastering the ‘bad day’.

Success, failure, happiness and sadness are all ingredients in the rich blend of life which can taste so sweet at times and yet so bitter at others. Problems often emerge in more plentiful supply than solutions, and learning how to deal with disappointment can often mean the difference between giving up, or soldiering on and emerging stronger.

When our muscles endure great stress, they hurt, but they quickly recover. Provided they are rested and nourished, they actually emerge stronger than they were before. This is the way we are made, and when it comes to building strength of character there is no analogy more beautiful than this.

Having the right attitude fosters the development of a strong character in much the same way as rest and high quality prot-ein supports the recovery and over-compensation of an exercised muscle.

When we choose to deal with disappointments in the gym and in life as opportunities instead of problems, we can unlock the incredible power of a positive mental attitude: the chief ingredient for a life that tastes sweeter than the finest gourmet dessert.

Whether you are a competitive athlete, a recreational fitness enthusiast or simply looking to lose a little weight, you will invariably be working towards some sort of goal or other, however great or small.

All athletes know the pain of poor performance in training or competition, and if you’re looking to lose weight only to find the scales are pointing in the wrong direction despite your hard work and sacrifice, then you’ve been there too. So let’s get down to business. How do we deal with disappointments in the gym, and more importantly, how can we emerge from them stronger than ever before?

Solution one: set realistic goals. Setting your sights too high is the quickest way to set yourself up for failure. Just like with any great journey, any endeavour should be undertaken first and foremost by dentifying your starting point.

You must first acknowledge where you are right now, before you can identify where you can go and when you will get there. If your goal is to weigh 60 kilos, but you currently weigh double that, then you are going to need several smaller and more attainable goals on your way to your final destination. Otherwise, every time you step on the scales and find you are not 60 kilos, you inflict needless failure upon yourself.

Solution two: be flexible. Diet, sleep patterns and stress levels will all affect performance in some way or another. It is impossible to control all these variables all the time. Sometimes you will start working out, but whatever you do, you just can’t seem to get it together.

These are the days when you must give yourself the freedom to step back, and stop flogging a dead horse. The Bulgarian National Weightlifting Team dominated the sport of weightlifting in the 1980s and 90s when they developed a new training system entirely dependent on the concept of the ‘training maximum’.

Athletes would simply work up to the maximum intensity they could comfortably handle on any given day. On a good day, they would break world records, on bad days they simply lifted as much as they could. The basic strategy here is: always work at 100 per cent, whatever your 100 per cent may be.

Solution four: learn from your mistakes. When those bad days do rear their ugly heads, think about what went wrong. Why did it go wrong and how can it be stopped from happening again?

If our weaknesses never manifest themselves and come to the fore, we can never identify them, and can consequently do nothing to work on them.

When you’ve learned all you can from a bad experience, accept it, move on, and don’t beat yourself up about it, which brings us to our final point.

Solution five: you can’t have the good without the bad. Remember the old Beavis and Butthead cartoons on MTV? For these two characters, things were either ‘cool’, or they ‘sucked’. One fine day however, they realised that if nothing sucked, then nothing could be cool either, because everything would just be normal.

In their usual bad taste, Beavis and Butthead were simply highlighting the theory of duality: that good cannot exist without evil, or happiness without sadness. If you never have a bad performance or workout, then you would never have those fantastic days by comparison, where everything just seems to come together effortlessly, giving you that enormous feeling of achievement and satisfaction that can leave you on a high, sometimes for several days running.

In short, embrace your bad days, because thanks to them the great days will come too.

info@noble-gym.com