Use Your Attention to Maximum Benefit

Your conscious attention is one of the resources that most people squander. For those of us who lift heavy weights, losing sharp mental focus can significantly diminish our efforts.

Having sharp mental focus enables us to devote our physical and mental energy toward a specific task. In this case lifting a heavy weight.

The weights never seem to get any lighter on their own, so it helps us to use every tactic available to do our best lifting.

 

Gym Environments

Most commercial gyms are well laid out, clean and free of rats, wild dogs or other predatory animals that might suddenly demand your full attention.

There is usually some form of mildly energetic background music to keep the ambient energy level high.

In short, there is nothing in the basic gym environment that is likely to demand our instant attention.

Unfortunately, many people choose to wallow in attention diversions that can drastically limit what they can accomplish.

 

Portable diversions

I have observed that many people wear ear buds or headsets during their workouts.

This automatically means that the persons attention is divided between some sonic atrocities (aka. Music) and the task at hand (aka. Lifting a weight).

I have been told by some that music gets them jacked up to work hard.

My thought is that if you need music to get motivated, you are probably wasting your time going to the gym.

A second major attention drain is the ubiquitous cell phone.

Many people seem to have a seriously codependent relationship with their phone and cant seem to be separated from it in the gym.

Some claim they watch videos of the lift they are doing to look at the correct form for a lift or to follow a workout program.

IMHO correct form should already be firmly in your mind before you walk through the front door of the gym.

However, the phone camera can be extremely useful to take videos of you doing a lift so that you can check your technique.

Fun House Mirrors

Mirrors are useful in ballet studios for dancers who are practicing a specific move. They are never useful for observing many moves combined.

Mirrors are primarily a distraction device in the gym.

This is particularly true of lifts like the squat and deadlift where body alignment is critical.

Keeping ones head in position to watch ones reflection usually means distorting alignment.

It also tends to create a blizzard of other thoughts that destroy mental focus.

If mirrors helped improve performance, I would assume that people practicing the piano would watch their reflection while playing.

 

Control Your Sensory Environment

Mastering difficult physical movements, such as springboard or platform diving, hitting a baseball, playing piano and powerlifting require that each of us develop a clear sense of what precise movements feel like.

Your body and mind must be synchronized in a manner that allows you to instantly know that your lifting technique is optimal.

Having well developed feedback between your muscles and your mind cannot be developed if your mind is overwhelmed with unfocused noise.

Practicing your precision movements over time with strict focus and full concentration will enable you to reach your maximum potential.

 

Mental Rehearsal then Execute!

Each and every set follow these steps:

First, clear your mind of anything other than doing the lift you are about to attempt.

Second, in your mind visualize a perfectly executed lift. Include how it will feel at each point in the lift.

Third, get into position to do the lift. This can be under the squat bar, on the bench press bench or on the deadlift platform.

Fourth, create your full body tension needed for a heavy lift.

Five, do the actual lift with as near to perfect technique as possible.

Practice this mental rehearsal and execution on every training set you do. That way, doing it in a contest or for a maximum attempt will be nearly automatic.

If someone has junk technique in practice, that is what they will do in a contest.

You cannot do your best work with a mind full of mush.

Flopping and thrashing through crude approximations of lifts will ensure that someone forever remains at a level of performance well below their potential.

It doesnt matter how long and hard that person trains.

Essentially it is like the kid who repeats 3^rd grade.for 10 years. They get very good at 3^rd gradebut never get to 4^th.

 

Bottom Line

Treat your focus and attention like the valuable resource it is.

Never allow distractions in the gym to undercut your pursuit of perfect precision practice.

You are in the gym for serious practice not a simple frenzy of random activity.

Lift Big!

Richard