Physical Training, NOT Exercise
First, get the word ‘exercise’, wrap it up in a garbage bag, and throw it away. Why? Because the word exercise is completely useless for you.
When you go to the gym with ‘physical training’ in your mind, you’ll go with the intention of training, which means cranking up the intensity for a real workout.
Training is teaching and forcing your body to adapt by pushing yourself past your perceived limitations. This makes you stronger, faster, and better each day.
Exercise? That’s mediocre. It’s for the average. It’s bullshit, and it’s not for you.
Physical Training is crucial for success. Top executives and entrepreneurs rank physical training as an important trait. Why?
Because it crushes laziness, builds mental resilience, shifts your mind to a growth attitude, provides daily motivation, and reinforces accountability and consistency. And if you’re into boosting your brainpower, here’s another huge incentive for you; physical training promotes neurogenesis and neuroplasticity.
Crush Laziness With Intense Physical Training
Not one successful individual is lazy. Laziness is poison. It’ll make you fat, it’ll make you grow old in the mind, it’ll make you complacent, and it’ll rob you of your dreams.
Moreover, laziness isn’t only about being stagnant in the physical sense of it. There’s mental laziness too. This can shape itself as procrastination, a lack of motivation, taking shortcuts, lying to avoid responsibility and any action that may help you feel comfortable in the short-term. Most times, such actions don’t contribute to long term fulfillment.
Mental laziness on its own is deadlier because it’s more subtle and easier to justify. It is an invisible enemy. So when you indulge in physical training, you’re doing everything that goes against laziness.
You’re pushing harder than yesterday which means you’ve mentally prepared your mind to work and avoid shortcuts. You’ve made a promise to yourself that you’ll be training at least a certain amount of times a week.
Moreover, you’re upholding yourself to that promise, which means you’re practicing accountability no matter how uncomfortable it gets. In that process, you learn to stop giving power to rationalizations that may deter you from your goal. You build these habits of thinking that lead to productivity which transfers to every other area of life. Thinking about other areas of life, there are many other effects on physical training on health beyond muscles.
Build Mental Strength and Motivation Through Physical Training
Mental strength and motivation is another area where you’ll begin to experience the benefits of physical training.
Exercise is weak because all you have to do is do the same thing over and over again. Physical training means you have the intent to grow and to grow, you must push yourself into a state of extreme pain and push through. During those moments when your body yells, “stop. Stop. STOP.”, and your mind responds, “ PUSH HARDER.”, you begin to experience limitations are perceived, and you’re capable of more. This will motivate you to do more.
The mind is stronger than your body and you experience this through vigorous physical training. Think of Navy Seals and their hell week. They survive and thrive during a week of strenuous physical training while sleep-deprived because their mind has committed to overcoming.
When you learn that your mind is the gateway to power, you’ll prioritize mental strength as much as or even more than physical strength.
Mental strength is what keeps a person persevering even when it gets grueling in business and life. It is this trait that turns you into a person who will never give up and it is the attitude of never giving up that makes people winners.
Build a growth attitude through physical training.
Physical Training is about growing. It’s about performing better. You can do it in a quantifiable way or you can do it based on how you feel about your performance.
At the end of the day, all that matters is that you’ve pushed as hard as you can regardless of your set and repetition count because there will be days when your body won’t be as nourished or recovered. But that doesn’t discredit the importance of keeping an eye on the weight you’re pushing and your repetition and set counts because they validate growth. So. It is important to track numbers and review them monthly to ensure that you’re on a growth trajectory.
Your numbers should always reveal an upward projection. Doing this will motivate you to keep going in all areas of your life. You’ll even find yourself applying that which you learned from tracking your growth in physical training to other areas of your life such as setting a direction, short-term goals, and forming reasons to train even when you don’t feel like it. The value of physical training in life is not limited to a single area.
Reinforce accountability and consistency.
Physical growth requires you to stress your muscles and increase stress every day. There will be days when you won’t want to engage in physical training and you’ll know if you need to take a day off or if it’s a fleeting feeling of laziness. Very often, it’s a fleeting feeling of laziness and you’ll learn to quit the bullshit that your mind might create to get a day off.
You’ll become accountable and develop a habit of consistency. Over time, these habits will override feelings.
So often, we should exercise the mind through the active acquisition of information rather than a passive act like watching a movie on Netflix.
Once you engage in physical training and experience the true importance and effectiveness of accountability and consistency, you’ll implement this to other areas of your life like replacing the habit of watching Netflix with reading.
You’ll even be hopeful about changing your life because you’ll know the effectiveness of consistency in creating habits that will incentivize you to develop more powerful habits. Gandhi says something very similar to this, the consistency develops habits and your habit determines your character which will determine the quality of your life.
Physical training promotes neurogenesis.
Physically training your body promotes the growth of new neurons all around your brain. Think of it like this, when a person has low self-esteem for as long as they can remember, they’ve dominated their mind with memories that contribute to low self-esteem. When they begin to physically train and go through sessions that they’re proud of, they start to develop memorable memories that contribute to high self-esteem because these memories are associated with a very memorable emotion, pride.
Once we engage in vigorous physical training, we start to feel proud of ourselves, especially if we’ve pushed past our perceived limits. We start to develop new memories that get hardcoded in the mind, which develops new neurons, and this develops a new sense of identity. However, neurogenesis alone isn’t sufficient to maintain a new identity, which leads to the importance of the next point.
Physical training promotes neuroplasticity.
Physical training also promotes neuroplasticity which is the reconstruction of our brain connections. Going back to the prior example, if all a person has known about themselves are notions of low self-esteem and suddenly they are inspired to change their life then decide to take the first step through physical training, they’ll jump into a lifestyle that contradicts low self-esteem.
As they train often, they’ll often feel proud and activate the memories that are associated with pride. So. Their brain will strengthen the neural network associated with positive memories at the expense of memories that promote low self-esteem. As they continue a lifestyle of vigorous physical training, the neural network of positive emotions and memories will overpower the neural connection associated with low self-esteem and they’ll begin to wake up feeling proud of themselves. Neuroplasticity occurs from consistency and is the key to maintaining a new identity.
So it’s clear what you have to do. Drop the word, exercise, from your vocabulary and physically train vigorously to strengthen your mind and how you feel about yourself. Then, commit to this lifestyle.
Lastly, physical training doesn’t always have to be by yourself. For rest days in your physical training schedule, you don’t have to stay stagnant. You can physically move moderately through team-building. Team-building gamifies physical training, which increases fun, motivation, and tricks your mind to avoid seeing physical movement as a chore. We know this because we see an increase in physical movement with a smile on our participants when they participate in our novel team building activities such as bubble soccer for adults and fortnite parties for the younger crowd.
Produced by Motivational Hacks.
