At Psychology of Movement we often talk about the concept of our minds being either obstacles or resources to our sport and exercise pursuits.
Today we will discuss a common way in which our minds can act as obstacles to us participating in the way that we really want to and performing at our best. Whether you are just starting out on your exercise journey, a regular exerciser or a performer in sport, you may be familiar with this challenge.
There’s a popular quote in the sport and exercise spaces that goes something like: “the mind quits before the body does.” The idea is that when we get really uncomfortable (psychologically or physically) whilst exercising/training, we often decide to stop or back off based on intolerance of discomfort rather than our physical limitations. To an extent this is true, but in reality our minds can actually quit way before we get to a position of discomfort, and we don’t even realise it.
When we go into a challenging workout, we tend to have some sort of expectation about how it will go and what we will achieve. Sometimes these expectations are clear and sit in the forefront of our minds - we might have specific goals that we’re determined to achieve, or alternatively we might not feel confident at all and expect to fall short of our desired performance. On other occasions, our expectations might be rather vague - we aren’t sure how things are going to play out, or maybe we aren’t focusing on outcomes but just getting on with the workout, so any expectations are wholly in the background.
These expectations are based on a whole myriad of factors: past experiences (and how we interpreted those past experiences), evaluation of our current physical and psychological states, and generalised ideas we hold about ourselves and what we are capable of, to name a few. This all happens quite automatically. We can intervene with conscious reflection, but like it or not we’ll have come to some sort of conclusion before we engage in any introspection.
This is relevant because research in psychology has long since shown that we automatically seek, or are more attentive to, information that confirms the ideas we already hold. Furthermore, we are more likely to interpret ambiguous cues in a way that serves those pre-existing ideas. What this means is that our expectations can have a bigger effect than we realise on the outcomes of our workouts.
These processes can be helpful if we have positive expectations. However, when we have negative expectations, or even conservative expectations, they can sometimes work against us. We can end up delivering performances reflective of those expectations, rather than reflective of our actual present-moment capacities. This can even work us against us sometimes when we have positive expectations. In my (Chloe) time working with Olympic weightlifters, I noticed that for some lifters, setting a specific goal to strive for would generally get them pretty close if not to that number, all things being well. However, taking an attitude of “I’m going to keep lifting my best and see just how far I can go” more often than not resulted in bigger lifts. They weren’t putting limits on themselves, even if framed positively - they were doing their absolute best and it was genuinely their body that stopped them as opposed to a partly informed yet also partly arbitrary number.
A quick pause for some nuances...
I want to more explicitly highlight here that this doesn't necessarily apply to everyone in the same way - as with any psychological phenomenon, there is individual variation depending on a whole host of factors. You'll notice I use the words "can" and "sometimes" quite a lot, and this is a nod to the reality that there are many, many moving parts when it comes to physical performance. Equally, I'm not suggesting you shouldn't set specific goals - just that it can be worth also holding in mind the reality that you don't know your full potential and there are possible outcomes you might not expect. So aim for something (or not), but keep the possibility open in your mind that you could exceed that. Equally if you fall short, there are good reasons.
Additionally, there are also times when we significantly outperform our expectations, or even underperform when they are positive. Psychology is not the only element involved here - it’s a complex puzzle. But it’s worth becoming aware of what kinds of expectations, be those logical or more emotionally based, we are carrying into workouts (or even competitions) and how those are guiding our responses and actions.
What to do with these ideas?
The good news is, you don’t need to go in with really positive expectations or believe that you’re invincible or anything like that. In fact, you can work to side-step this obstacle whilst feeling completely lacking in confidence. You just have to recognise that our minds necessarily limit us - one of the functions of our problem-solving, conscious mind is to create some element of coherence and certainty to the environment so we can navigate it. This means we automatically look for things to make sense given past experience or ideas we hold. It’s often more comfortable to hold a negative expectation that feels familiar rather than be open to something new. Equally, our minds cannot actually know the future. We can make some reasonable-ish predictions, but we cannot know it with the certainty that we feel we can. And finally, if we are trying to achieve a performance we haven't actually been able to achieve yet, if we're uncertain about it that's natural, because by definition we haven't done it yet.
I like to think of this challenge in terms of a metaphor. Imagine a plane lined up on a runway, the pilot considering attempting to take off. If I came along and placed a barrier halfway up the runway, the plane isn’t going to take off because the runway isn’t clear so it cannot get up enough speed. This is how I see this mental obstacle - we put arbitrary ceilings on our potential performance, meaning we then don’t leave the ground, i.e. the confines of our pre-existing ideas. If we just move those to the side - we don’t even have to get rid of them - then we have the opportunity to take off, i.e. to enter new territory and to do what we can actually do.
Of course the plane has to be in good condition and the pilot has to be sufficiently skilled for the take-off to occur - and the same applies to us, we all have limitations and can only operate within those. But this is about allowing it to be genuine current limitations that stop us, rather than our minds. When I notice I am apprehensive about the outcome of a workout I remind myself: “I am going to let my body and environment dictate the outcome, not my mind.” This means, like the weightlifters, I am going to focus on getting the most out of the capacity my body has today, with a nod to the fact that the environment can have something to do with that (e.g. a run on a windy day).
I hope that was food for thought if nothing else. If you want to discuss these ideas further, feel free to get in touch.
Chloe
Psychology of Movement
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