By Healthy Hueman: Alijah Hollaway
Before you can get your dream body, you need to get your mind warmed up with mindset fitness to be ready to take on the task of becoming fit and active. The greatest asset you have for getting in shape is your mind. With mindset fitness, you’ll be more inclined to exercise and keep it up. You’ll enjoy it more too. Here’s how to get your mind warmed up and ready for an active lifestyle.
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Mastering Mindset Fitness
Your mind is just like a computer – it stores and retrieves information. Its purpose is to work things out for you. Like a computer, it relies on good programming, so when it comes to getting fit, it’s important that your mind has a specific idea of what you want. So, make sure you have a clear goal.
Like a car’s navigation system, once your mind has a precise goal it can develop a route to get you there. If you know exactly what you want to achieve and think about what you want, then your mind can access the right information to succeed.
Positive thinking
The next step for mindset fitness is to always think positively. Successful people think and act on what they do want, while unsuccessful people focus on what they don’t want. Some recommended books to help you train your brain to think positively are:
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
James Clear
Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits.
Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts
Jennie Allen
In Get Out of Your Head, inspires and equips us to transform our emotions, our outlook, and even our circumstances by taking control of our thoughts. Our enemy is determined to get in our heads to make us feel helpless and overwhelmed.
The Power of Positive Thinking
Norman Vincent Peale
Vincent Peale elucidates how each of us harbors the ability to fulfill our dreams, develop a positive attitude and attain a peaceful mind. With inspiring examples and anecdotes, the book successfully delivers stimulating ideas and practical techniques to adopt optimism and live a victorious life
Your mind struggles to process negatives, so when you say, ‘I don’t want to be stressed and overweight’, your mind has to think about stress and being overweight.
Make sure all your fitness aims and other thoughts set out exactly what you do want, like being motivated and exercising daily.
In life, you enjoy yourself most and get the best results when you’re in the right frame of mind. So the best way to get in shape is to exercise when you’re feeling good. The more you do this, the more you’ll build up a positive bank of exercise memories.
Mindset Fitness Success
Your success will come from you focusing on all your strengths. Do this mindset fitness exercise to get you ready.
- Think about a time when you’ve been energized and at your best and let all the details come back to you.
- Spend ten minutes thinking about all your good qualities, strengths, and characteristics. Add to this all the good things that loved ones say about you.
- Spend ten minutes thinking about all the positive things you have in your life. Think also about all the things and people who are dear to you.
- Take ten more minutes to think about a time when you’ve been happy, confident, and at your best.
- Now spend ten minutes thinking about the benefits that getting fit will bring to your whole life.
Your journey to mindset fitness
Imagine you’re going on a trip and that your destination is getting fit!
- Choose your destination. In your mind decide exactly how you want to look and feel and how much you want to weigh. Picture it in your mind as clearly as possible.
- Allow the right time frame – just like making a car journey, you need to set the right amount of time to get to your final destination. Think about your goal and decide what is the right time frame to achieve it.
- Plan your journey. Map out your route and think about the resources you’ll need.
- Now go through your entire journey and think about everything you need to do to achieve your goals. Maybe you need to do some research, get the right kit, and work out a fitness plan.
Daydream your journey.
Visualize your last holiday and go through everything from the planning stage and packing to the journey itself, the highlights of the holiday, and your journey home. Now do the same with your fitness journey. Picture yourself going through all the stages of getting to your ideal fitness level. See yourself becoming motivated, planning your routine, and doing your workout. Visualize yourself enjoying it, and week by week you’ll see yourself becoming more focused, fitter, and healthier.
- Stay on track – like every journey there may be delays, hold-ups and pitfalls, so picture yourself staying focused. Identify any problems and imagine the actions you’ll need to take to get back on track.
- Enjoy the ride – our best trips are the ones when we appreciate the journey. Take time to think about enjoying the process of getting fit, knowing that you are on the way to your destination.
- Relax. You’ve done some fantastic exercises that will help you achieve your goals, so take a few minutes to relax and unwind after every workout
Your mindset is arguably the most important aspect of your fitness goals. You need to develop a mindset that will help you improve your mental focus, not only at the gym but in your everyday life. Be kind to yourself as you set new fitness goals, begin to examine your own long-held truths and personal stories, and sense a mindset shift.