Indoor Sport Services Training Guide

The mind is the athlete... the body simply the means to performance.

We spend a great deal of time warming the body up, stretching, fuelling it, and generally ensuring that the body is going to endure the stresses of our work-outs. How much attention do we pay to warming-up mentally for exercise? Usually very little! Why don't we do this? Usually because no-one has told us how to! Therefore, this section will show you how you can make the most of your mental muscles to help you have the best impact on your physical muscles!

On the most simple level, what you think influences what you actually do. So if you are wanting to have really high quality, consistent training on your Indoor Rower, you will have to exert some mental effort to ensure that this is what you get. A period of planning, some occasional reviewing, and a lot of self-talk while you are exercising need to be natural elements of your training programme. The more you can be strong in your thinking, approaching your training with purpose and conviction, the more you will get out of every session you do. Most people get maximum enjoyment from seeing that they are making good progress, so you need to make sure that you set up your training in such a way that you allow your mind to see how well you are improving session by session.

You will be exerting a good amount of physical effort during your training, and we are sure you will get added benefits from the time you invest if you are able to make sure that you get the appropriate psychological impact too.

Before we get into specific advice, it's worth highlighting a couple of useful principles that you need to keep checking you are successfully achieving from time to time.

First, managing your expectations of the progress you are going to make is really important. Too often people expect too much of themselves too quickly, and are therefore disappointed in the progress they make. People tend to focus on what they have not achieved, rather than the progress they have made. So, make sure you are keeping the progress you have made very much in the forefront of your thinking. You can make progress every day, and if you achieve that a few days per week, after several weeks that will be adding up to a good overall achievement.

Another important mindset tip to keep focused on is that your attitude is a choice. Therefore, how you perceive your exercise and training, and what you believe you can achieve, is very much based down to the attitude you chose to adopt. Don't expect to alter negative attitudes into positive ones immediately, but work on developing a more positive attitude over time as you build up evidence from the efforts that you are making. You are taking on a great challenge with your training, so look forward to it and see how far you can push yourself. Also, keep an eye on your attitude and monitor it so that you can keep making positive choices with it so that it keeps working for you on your quest for fitness.

It is very clear in all types of performance that if you can get your mind right, it is much easier to get the body right. It's therefore important that you think about the key mental elements that need to be in place in order for you to get your body as prepared as possible. There are key factors such as confidence, concentration and motivation that need to be constantly checked to help you understand differences in your training performance. Equally, when it comes to actually racing, you would need to think about controlling nerves, maintaining belief, and managing pain responses. Within your exercise and training time, if you can include some focus upon your developing mental fitness it will be of great help to your short-term and long-term success.

At the simplest level, it is critical that you identify some personal outcomes that will be important to you when you achieve them. Starting with your final aims clearly in mind will undoubtedly make a big impact for you. This is the first step of the goal-setting process that you will be introduced to, and you should take some time working out this key first step. Along with this, you will need to make sure that you regularly look back at what you have already achieved, and aim to learn as much as possible about how you get the most out of your training, as quickly as possible. With learning, you will be able to make strong choices relating to the type of training you really get a buzz from, and which training sessions you find a struggle. You can then plan accordingly to work out ways of keeping the fun sessions fun, and the tough sessions as enjoyable as possible for you. The main focus of staying switched on to your training is to ensure that it remains your training programme. Too often people believe they are carrying out something that they should do when it comes to regular training, rather than doing something that they completely want to do.

This subtle, but important difference needs to be constantly focused upon in order that you maintain ownership of your programme and keep really enjoying your training, week in, week out.