My love affair with bodybuilding came about as part accident and part experiment.
For the last 20 years I have been competing in some kind of sport but always with the motivation to just win, at all costs. Not always, but more often than not I achieved those things, but there was something distinctly vacuous and unfulfilling about the journey. Successful moments were often extremely fleeting and always accompanied by a tremendous emotional crash. Failure was often irredeemably corrosive to my confidence and sense of self. In truth it was a very anxious and tumultuous way to spend one's time. That feeling of it never being enough eventually makes one weary and bleary eyed.
As a scientist working in sports science and a strength and conditioning coach, I decided to embark on a giant physiological and psychological experiment working in a new sport; bodybuilding. The main aim was really to try and figure out if I could learn to enjoy the journey. I chose bodybuilding because it's not easy and it fit beautifully with my criteria for this experiment, which was:
1. To see if I could self-coach myself to be competition ready, without any performance enhancing drugs.
2. To learn to enjoy the process
A radical shift in mindset
Making bodybuilding prep fun, is not an easy task because you're combining training with harsh dieting over a 12-16 week period. The diet part is the tricky bit as this can substantially chip away at one's moods and mental resilience. To cut a long story short, I achieved both of the above objectives and the strangest thing happened when I made the conscious decision to train inside-out - mind first, body second; my life got so much better and so much happier. It also got me a silver medal in my first competition and I can honestly say I enjoyed every day of my prep.
There were some very desperate hard days, both physically and emotionally, but hard can be good. There is a real difference between making something pointlessly hard and something that is hard because you need it to progress. The latter version was the majority of my hard days and so there were tears beyond what I even imagined possible for a human being, but these were met with an acceptance rather than resistance and it changed the dynamic completely. I emerged much better for it and I learned optimism amongst a whole cacophony of mental skills just through facing fear and limiting beliefs. Bodybuilding is a surprisingly good tool to do this because being exhausted is very revealing. You can't hide, it strips you to your core which is actually a great opportunity for change.
Challenges are great, they force an evolution and growth of character but hard things can also be really fun and that was my big lesson. There is always choice about how you do any one thing, so doing something with an appreciation and joy is very different from doing it with dread, fear and begrudgement. Sometimes all you need is a fleeting moment experiencing a positive state and that is enough to know you can never go back to old ways of doing things. That is my experience with bodybuilding but it can be applied to all things. The message is the same; it is understanding how to create enjoyment and a positive mental state at any time and place..and these together fuel motivation - which is the driving force behind being able to do one's best.
The important and unimportant questions to ask?
1) How do I make my training today enjoyable?
- Adjust the focus
As an example of how I did this; I started with the understanding that being creative and experimenting with designing programs is something I really enjoy. I therefore always looked forward to trialling my session, to see how effective it was. This shifts the focus from the body (the end product) to something more intrinsic.
- Tweak intensity
Enjoyment of training is also very much linked to how well energy levels match up to training intensity and volume. When you're very tired, hard hard effort is fairly miserable. This matching of task to skill level or energy level, is the basis of the "flow" state originally proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is thought to be a real contributor to human happiness and optimum performance. Essentially, the level of work needs to be appropriate so it's not too hard, but also not too easy and it just requires being mindful of one's energy on a day to day basis and being able to tweak accordingly. The other bonus of enjoying one's training is it snowballs into consistency, confidence and a positive mind set, all necessary requirements for feeling prepared.
2) What do I need or not need in my life or situation at this precise moment to support my goals?
This is an interesting one and can be quite carthatic. It's an opportunity to remove all the things or re-evaluate relationships that don't serve you any more. As a demonstration of my very "un-abominable" will, I not only had to put some chocolates in the bin but then proceeded to cover them in washing up liquid, because quite frankly I didn't think plain "binning" was enough to deter a pre-menstrual, dieting, tired female. So there we go...placing oneself in a situation for success - not entirely dignified but it works.
Once these questions are addressed, the rest is just strategy, following through and putting one foot in front of the other. I believe answers to these questions are the bread and butter of all training program, as it creates a solid foundation.
Sleep - the elixir of life, weight loss and performance!
My main requirement for performance and being a fairly normal human being is sleep! This is a huge one for me and without good quality sleep (and a fair number of hours of this), there simply would be no prep and no competition; come to think of it probably no friends either! Ten years ago I would have managed pretty well on 2 hours sleep a night, but absolutely not now. I'm a blithering dysfunctional mess after a couple of nights of not getting my full quota. I can survive but I certainly do no thrive.
There are huge numbers of studies correlating sleep with motivation, mood, appetite control, performance, cognition, pain perception, the immune system. It is also something I have come to prioritise over everything else because sleep deprivation is one of the biggest enemies of fat loss. This can be for many reasons, but there is strong evidence to say lack of sleep negatively affects the balance of the appetite regulating hormones ghrelin (hunger) and leptin (feeling of fullness), so a person is more prone to feeling hungry and craving sugar with the added insult of lowering mental resilience. The net result; fighting the urge to attack a pot of ice cream is much harder. It also affects stress levels and fatigue which further exacerbates the problem.
A person's sleep requirement varies drastically from person to person and also at different times so it's a very personal one. During prep, sleep is one of the best things to promote good recovery, mental well-being and it's cheap! There can also be a vicious cycle with dieting and sleep, whereby harsh calorie restriction can create sleep problems and this can perpetuate a negative cascade of problems related to fat loss goals. Prioritising sleep (for me) therefore comes first above everything else. The moment diet affects sleep I address this pretty quickly, upping daily calories or adding in a pre-bed snack. What I don't do is endure it!
The revelation that not everything has to be hard and actually too much struggle is a sign something is probably not right, has completely changed by life. I am a much happier person because of this and consequently success has come a lot more easily. Sometimes working less hard but in the right way is a better strategy for sport and life.
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