4 Powerful Secrets to Develop Your Mental Strength Using Workouts | Ronan Oliveira

I believe that training your body is the best way to train your mind. And I want to give you a couple of tips and secrets that I used to develop my own mental strength with my fitness regimen. The number one secret here is to stop working out and start training. You know, I had a friend that used to live with me and he sabotaged his training even before it started. You know, he started complaining half an hour before he needed to go to a workout. It was that idea, oh, man, is that time of the day? Is that day of the week? My goodness, this is gonna suck. And it's the time that I'm there struggling a lot. So he was already building up his misery to the time that he would go do his workout. And then, lo and behold, it sucked. It was horrible. And part of that is because of the mindset that he brought into this. He was thinking, I'm doing a workout. It's that thing that I need to do and to get my body in a state that change, the state that I don't accept. And not only that is unsustainable. You can't keep that up for too long. It also doesn't bring a pure effectiveness to your training. In the middle of his training, he was putting his phone and then he was like spending five minutes looking for the right song and then, you know, checking his Facebook and so you're not doing anything. Super, well done. Have you seen the way that martial artists or high level Olympic athletes train is completely different. They don't do a workout, they do training. This is something that I learned with my Chinese kung fu master. I studied under him for a couple of years and he was the most. He was the strongest mind I've ever met. And he built that through his martial arts practice. When you go training martial arts, you don't go there to go through a routine and do the things that you need to do. Oh, it's that time of the day. You bring your mind and your soul into that thing. You are training who you are as a person. You're throwing a punch not only to work that movement, but to work the way that you understand yourself when you are doing that for 500 times. So think back to that friend of mine that I told you the story. Do you know anyone who is like that? Let me know in the comments. Maybe that person is you. If that is, there's no problem. If you are doing something that is challenging, especially if you don't enjoy it and you're doing this every day or a couple of times in a Week, you might as well make the most out of it. Instead of trying to avoid, instead of counting the minutes for this to finish. What if you just shifted your mindset and looked at this training as a way of, for example, training your mind to do things that you don't necessarily want to do? How wonderful is that type of skill? For other things that other challenges that appear in your work or different areas of life, we need to be able to do things that we don't necessarily want to do. And, and we can train this part of our mindset when we are training our bodies. If it's not the most joyful things that you have in your daily basis, there are different ways of looking at your training that shifts your outlook. The now brings your mind into it, and this is one of the ways to do so. The second secret or tip is training your body to muscular failure. You know, when you go to the gym and you lift something heavy or if you're doing push ups, you know, after this video, you go and you do push ups, but you do to the maximum amount that you can get. Sometimes this is not even the most effective thing that you want to do in your training today for your body, if your body is still recovering. But sometimes it is the most effective thing to train your mind just to experience that level of intensity. Because when you reach muscular failure, this is the moment that you can no longer complete one more repetition of an exercise because your muscles have reached their limit. When that happens, you face the moment that you lose. Your exercise won, the challenge was too big and you can't complete. That's called failure for a reason. But what happens after that? What happens after that is that you bring yourself back up. You know, you take a few breaths, and after two minutes or three, you're ready to go for one more. Or later on, you go home, you finish your training, and now you recover. And maybe tomorrow, the next day, you can do the whole training again and try and start to realize that reaching those moments of failure is not a big deal. First, that intensity and the pain that comes from it is not the end of the world. And second, you can always recover. And they always teach you to be a little bit better and think about how precious this way of thinking, practicing this way of thinking is towards other challenges in your life. You know, if you're going for endeavors that you want to start, maybe start a company or try something new or even ask for a raise, but you're avoiding this because you may fail. What happens if you fail? But if you're training your mind to conditioning it to reach moments of failure in your physical training, while other people are looking, you are there, like struggling to push yourself from the ground, and you realize that that is not the end of the world. That also unlocks your action towards this type of situation in other areas of your life. The number three point or secret here is to add isometric holds to your training. Very, very specific thing. Isometric holds is when you hold a position. Imagine that you're holding a plank or you have two dumbbells and you're doing a lateral raise. But instead of going up and down, you hold that thing in the hardest position. That will be a time that this starts burning and that there is a strong sense of pain. And I'm not asking you to do that, to experience pain because you're a masochist or anything like that, but just to experience, experience pain for what it is. Bringing an intense sensation of pain on purpose to your training gives you the opportunity of paying attention to it instead of avoiding it. When something is hurting, you bring your mind. You sing a song in your head, you count the seconds for it to finish. What if you bring your mind straight in the middle of that sensation and you start feeling how it is in your body? You know the feeling of sensation, of that thing burning, your blood flowing to it, what thoughts go through your mind, how your heart starts racing. You start deconstructing that experience, and soon you realize that pain does not equal suffering. Pain is only equal suffering if you're trying to avoid it, if you're trying to run away from it, and then it really sucks and you have the miserable experience. But if you look at it for what it is, it's just a sensation. It's not good or bad. It's just an intense experience. And you can start appreciating and start feeling less afraid of painful or uncomfortable situations. And just think of how further you can go in other areas of your life, maybe relationships or work or other areas. If you are not afraid of feeling pain, if you know that you can dissociate pain from suffering and experience experiencing for what it is, this is a great opportunity on how to train your mental strength in your physical training. And the fourth and last secret comes with the idea of accepting your body the way it is right now. And that's a very interesting thing, because in fitness, we are usually trying to transform our bodies. And if we are trying to transform, a lot of people come from the standpoint of not accepting, accepting it. This is they look at themselves and they say this is so bad that I need to do my workouts, I need to pay the price and feel the pain so I can change this to something that I accept. And even though this is an idea that was popularized by some high level athletes or bodybuilders that talk about how much they feel disgusted with themselves and how they needed to change and people thought this was a beautiful thing, thing, most people who get very far don't do this because this is not a sustainable standpoint. You cannot keep then of self hatred to some extent for too long until you reach a point that you accept. Because the more you do that, the more you nurture that idea of looking at yourself and not accepting what is used. It doesn't matter where you go, that remains there. What you want to do is while you're working on your body for it to be stronger, for you to, to gain shape or whatever you're trying to do, you are practicing acceptance and appreciation of your present moment, of the body that you already have. And maybe there are things that you don't necessarily like and you don't need to lie to yourself, but it can pull your attention to the things that you are grateful for, to the things that you accept, to your body being. And this gives you more resource, it gives you more energy for you to put into your fitness regimen, your transformation journey. And this not only applies to your physical training, this builds your mental strength to any other area of your life that you are trying to change, but you're not attached to the outcome. You are not a hostage of the circumstances. You are free. You accept where you are, in your finances, in your relationships, in your work, in other areas. And you are still putting in the work to change because you're not attached to that specific outcome. You are now accepting the present moment that gives you more empowerment to reach a next better level for yourself in any other areas. And this is another element of mental strength that you can train your physical training. Now I want to ask you this question. When you train, when what are the techniques that you use not only to train your body but to develop a stronger mind? And if you still haven't reached that strong mind, what is an element of a stronger mind that you want to develop? Is it, is it tolerance to pain? Is it discipline? Is it acceptance? What is it something that you want to transform in your mind that can bring your physical training to help you with that? Let me know in the comments below and let's have this conversation. I'm very excited to see see what is your perspective on this. And if you want to see more videos on fitness that can help your physical training so you can bring your mind into it, I created a whole playlist with all the fitness videos that I've done so far in Mindval. You can just click here and get started. I talk to you in the comment section and I see you in the next video.