You know what I’m talking about, that little voice in your head that you hear while you’re deep in the middle of a workout. It can be a blessing or a curse, pushing us to better performance or undermining our best efforts. It can prevent injury or push us into hurting ourselves. Learning to control your inner voice is of vital importance to the success of your training.
The last part of the 8th workout over two days. He wouldn't be there without having mastered his inner voice.
There are two keys to controlling your inner voice: awareness and honesty. You need to be aware of your inner voice and aware of your physical state– fatigue, technique, injuries, etc.– and you need to figure out how to be honest with yourself. It’s the honesty part that is really tricky for people, as most of us either underestimate the workout and push too hard too fast, or underestimate our own abilities and don’t push hard enough.
Both of those cases tend to drive our inner voice into telling us that we suck. I’m not as fast or strong as so-and-so; this workout really hurts; I don’t know if my shoulder/back/knee can take this; I can’t do another four rounds of this; or I’m still sore from yesterday so I shouldn’t push hard today. These statements might have an element of truth, but they don’t do anything increase our performance.
What we need to do is change that inner voice into a force to protect us from injury, develop our skill and motivate us to greater heights. Here are a couple of things to focus that voice on.
- Strategy: ”Stick to the plan: 10 push-ups, 5-count rest, 10 push-ups, 5-count rest.”
- Technique: “Full hip extension, fast elbows, control the feet.”
- Task focus: “One muscle-up at a time.”
- Confidence: “6-months ago, I couldn’t even deadlift this.”
- Motivational phrases: “Work now, rest later.”
- Damage report: “Knee, good. Back, good. Shoulder, aches– switch to mixed grip on pull-ups and mitigate the forward swing.”
Most people underestimate the psychological strength required to complete a workout. We’ve said it time and again, it’s 90% mental. If you can control your inner voice enough to get you into the gym, then you can definitely train it to push you harder and protect you from injury. Master it and it will improve your performance both inside and outside of the gym.
i have noticed that my inner voice is very quiet during exercise. there usually isn’t much going on my head anyway, but exercising is like pressing the mute button on my inner monologue.
Agree that getting to the gym and doing the wod is 90% of the battle. Karen and i are in NYC and saw the workout for today and weren’t looking forward to it. But we did it with the usual caveats of the globo gym (no good pullup bars, no bands for scaling, running on the treadmills that take time to get up to speed, transition time, etc.), but we were super glad to have it done (always a favorite time with me).
With these more demanding workouts, i tend to talk myself down and underestimate what i can do, with my inner voice pretty loud in the beginning. Yet i tend to find about halfway through my inner voice is saying that the workout is not as bad as i thought. The mind isn’t a very good judge sometimes of how we will do, and it’s better to just do it.
Thanks for this post nick–given that cf is 90% mental, it’s very helpful!!!
@rich, pyramid helen at a globo?! nice!! the regular clientele must have thought that you were two nut jobs from california.
Well, aren’t they? In any case, my inner voice must be broken.
It just keeps saying: “You know, I could really use some ice-cream right now. Preferably Haugen Dauz Swiss Almond Vanilla with Chocolate Peanut Butter.” Although, sometimes it gets distracted and chrips in, “DAMN, that girl is HOT!”.
On another note, having a goal to strive for really manages to focus the inner voice on the workout.
good post Nick. Completely agree about that voice inside. What works for me is to disect the WOD. The take-it-one-step-at-a-time focus. Slowing down enough to not get overwhelmed; and before you know it, it’s done. Should be interesting to see how that works tonight though! A total of 126 kettleball swings and 72 pull ups. Good grief.
During a particularly difficult WOD…this is my inner voice..
“!#%#this@#$#%sucks!!#%I&@hate*@this@$?wtf?????????”
My outer voice chants to calm down the inner voice: …”I love Crossfit. I love Crossfit. I love Crossfit.”
I’m just pumped you decided to take a pic of my boy Khalipa, who decided to introduce Cross Fit to me by doing 7 minutes of wall balls as one of my first intro workouts. I will never forget that half smirk and him saying.. “Thats it?”
@martin- this was a high end gym (equinox) so no one even gave us a sidewards glance. At a mid-end gym (ny health and raquet club) my workouts did get lots of looks, especially since it was one of those mid distance runs punctuated by lots of barbell work and dips. People seem to be particularly unnerved by doubleunders.
Yesterday someone started doing ab work with their trainer on one of those inflated swedish balls right near where i set up my kb and pu station, and i thought i was going to have to find another spot after the run, but they didn’t care that i was doing 63 kb swings a little over 4 feet from his head. Eventually they moved away
Nick, I like the six things to focus on… helps keeps the brain and body in sync… my inner voice for the “damage control” task sounds a lot like Kirk pleading to Scotty, (”We need more power…”)