Building your inner coaches
Realizing your full potential as a lifter will be greatly enhanced by developing your internal mental skills that enable you to perform at your best.
This is not positive attitude or motivation.
This is using your mental capacity to organize and manage your best physical performance.
IMHO There are three Inner Coaches that are essential to your success. If you do not develop these skills, there is little chance that you can advance beyond the novice or intermediate level in any sport.
The Coaching Problem in Powerlifting
Powerlifting is an unusual sport, in that all the critical performance action takes place within a span of five to ten seconds. Once you begin a lift only a few seconds elapse between start and completion.
This is very much like platform diving.
Once you hop off the board you will get into the water within a few seconds. Everything you are going to do as a competitor must be done in the few seconds from the time you leave the board until the time you enter the water.
Contrast this with other sports such as basketball, where your moves are performed over many minutes of continuous action.
You must use your own inner coaches to develop and perfect the unique skills needed to do your best possible performance in the five to ten seconds you will be lifting a heavy weight.
The three inner coaches
- High level planning and strategy
- The voice in your head
- Muscle control and the feel of precision execution
You can get input and suggestions from an external coach on high level planning and strategy.
A coach can design a workout plan, diet plan, and how you implement them in your training.
However, no one outside of you can coach you on managing your thoughts and controlling the muscles under your skin.
You and you alone have access to the world inside your own body. Others can tell you what to do, but you alone can actually do whats needed.
No one else can access and manage the voice in your head or develop the skill of body awareness and muscle control needed for precision athletic movement.
Thus, you need to develop an inner coach for each of the two skills that only you can access directly.
High level planning and strategy
This is where you address the questions of where do I want to go and how do I get there?
These are the familiar things such as workout plans, recovery plans and probably a plan for nutrition and supplements.
It is critical to make a good plan and then follow it!
Winging it typically means zero progress year to year and decade to decade.
Your internal coach must take responsibility for tracking how well you adhere to your plan.
Remember the words of the great Bull Stewart: if you have no plan your plan is to fail.
He also said, if your plan is good (and you follow it) the results take care of themselves.
Your inner coach is responsible for assessing what’s working and what’s not as you execute your plan. You must also establish why something is working or not working.
A critical part of this is to understand what data is of use to you and what data is utterly irrelevant.
In short you are managing your training to follow a plan to produce specific results. Along the way you’re assessing how you are doing and how well the plan is working.
The voice in your head.
All of us have an internal dialogue going on constantly. One key to success is using this continual dialogue to your advantage.
Left alone, the internal voice can produce mental chaos. This chaos can undercut any real chance you have for success.
You can use your internal dialog to your benefit.
Your internal voice can be an excellent tool for building laser-like focus during your workouts.
You can use your internal voice to eliminate distractions and focus on the things you need to do in order to perform precision movements.
You can discipline your internal voice to prevent negative self-talk and criticism.
In short, the internal voice can be a powerful ally in building your athletic skills.
Body awareness and muscle control (aka. The Feel).
This is perhaps the most underappreciated element needed to produce great performance.
This is using your mind to consciously control your muscles to perform precision athletic movements.
Very few people understand how important this skill is because it occurs totally out of sight under the skin.
No funky You Tube videos.
This is the skill of controlled muscle contraction, balance, and coordinated athletic movement.
It can only be built by each person learning to read their own bodys signals to control individual muscle groups. It is probably best described as the feel of doing perfect athletic movements.
This is a difficult skill to develop. It requires a great deal of practice over time and intense focus. The skill quickly erodes if not practiced at least weekly.
Most people dont bother to work on this because they are unaware of how critical it is.
However, building this skill is the only way most people will move beyond the novice or intermediate level.
Coda
This week I have presented some ideas that I hope you find interesting. However, beyond doing good planning and record keeping, I didnt offer much guidance on what to do if you want to make use of this.
Therefore..
Next week I will discuss using the voice in your head as a positive ally in producing excellent performance. The following week I will discuss in greater detail body awareness and muscle control.
Lift big!
Richard
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