MTSU Faculty-Staff Health and Wellness Program

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MTSU Faculty-Staff Health and Wellness Program

MENTAL SKILLS FOR EXERCISE

By Mark Anshel, Ph.D., Professor and Wellness Program Director

Your thoughts really do influence emotions, mood, effort, and exercise performance. Here are suggestions taken from the exercise psychology literature that helps promote exercise performance and outcomes. I divide these mental skills into two components, pre-exercise and exercise-related.

I. Pre-Exercise Mental Skills

1. Develop an exercise routine; schedule it. Ultimately, the goal of any exerciser is to ritualize his or her fitness program. Researchers claim that we thrive on rituals because they help reduce stress, cut down on the number of things we have to plan and think about, and promotes overall well-being. An exercise ritual – scheduling our exercise times and locations - reduces the chance of “forgetting” or running out of time to exercise.

2. Receive proper instruction and coaching. Exercise is a science; there is a right way and a wrong way to perform it. Listen to your coach and ask questions. There is a separate document on “myths and truths” about exercise, so read that. In addition, your coach will discuss these with you.

3. Develop a positive attitude and self-confidence toward exercise. The enthusiasm you feel toward any task or program will result in better adherence and superior outcomes. See the “big picture” about the benefits – short-term and long-term – of your involvement, and be committed to experience the full program. Do not let others or one or two individual experiences control your destiny. This is your health and quality of life we are talking about. Feel confident in your ability to learn, improve, and expect to receive all the benefits you deserve from the energy you are investing in this program. Along these lines, remember to live a life that is consistent with your values (e.g., health, family, high quality job performance, faith, excellence, and so on).

4. Have realistic, but challenging goals. The extensive research on goal setting is clear; goals tend to increase motivation, help the performer focus his or her energy toward the desired outcome, and fulfill a personal need to achieve and to feel competent, both of which are normal and desirable. To have goals that are credible, however, be sure your goals are challenging, but realistic. Although a few beginning exercisers decide to train for eventually running a marathon (i.e., a 26-mile race), including one MTSU staff member from a previous program, this is not realistic thinking for most of us.

5. Obtain fitness tests: Humans thrive on data – numbers - because test results motivate us to change behavior. Ask any doctor what is the number one motivator to change the unhealthy habits of their patients. Fitness testing also provides your coach with direction to provide an accurate exercise prescription.

6. Positive Pre-exercise Thoughts: Have you ever said to yourself, before attending a fitness facility or before exercising, “I don’t want to do this,” or “Do I really have to exercise today?” What about the content of your thoughts during exercise? Positive (e.g., “I can do this,” “I feel good”) or negative (e.g., “I am not enjoying this,” or “This really sucks”)? Studies show that the content of your thinking – positive or negative -

II. Exercise-related Mental Skills

1. Positive self-talk: Although discussed earlier, this is a strategy that is essential to good exercise performance. Before your exercise session, be optimistic about the likely outcomes of your exercise session and of your involvement in the program, and equally important, think “upbeat” thoughts during your exercise session. Your energy level, and hence, exercise performance, will actually improve in response to positive self-talk, as opposed to thinking negative thoughts.

2. Association: Association refers to connecting one’s thoughts to bodily sensations, that is, focusing on specific body parts and muscle groups during exertion. Thus, when lifting weights, the exerciser uses association by focusing his or her attention on the muscles most heavily involved in that lift. When performing a bicep curl, for example, exercisers would focus their attention on the biceps muscle primarily responsible for that action. In response to cardiovascular activity, runners use association to think about the bodily sensations during the run – connecting thoughts to actions. Less fit folks prefer to not use association during cardiovascular exercise because those thoughts are not always pleasant. Instead, they would use dissociation.

3. Dissociation: Instead of focusing on the muscles being used or the bodily sensations being experienced during exercise, dissociation is concerned with disconnecting one’s mind with one’s exertion. The use of music when performing physical activity, especially when exercise is performed in synchronization to music, is a good example of a dissociation strategy. The person is focusing his or her attention on external stimuli rather than on bodily sensations experienced during exercise. Dissociation is a common technique used during cardiovascular work, but not weight training, in which your attentional focus should be on the muscle group being exerted.

4. Bizarre imagery: This strategy concerns thinking about the impossible. Imagery concerns visualizing an action, that is, a mental representation of performance. Bizzare imagery means that the thought content cannot occur in reality, yet is motivational to the performer. Examples include thinking about “washing away” plaque against the walls of arteries, or having your fat “melt away” when performing aerobic activity. Cancer patients have used bizarre imagery to image shrinking tumors when receiving chemotherapy.

5. Music and rhythm: If you have ever participated in an aerobics class in which you were moving to music – and felt more energy then when exercising in the absence of music? Music is a distractor, helping the person focus on external (musical) stimuli, while the person gives minimal attention to bodily sensations associated with physical effort (e.g., fatigue, sweating, exertion, high heart rate, discomfort). Exercising with fast-paced music tends increase arousal level, which allows the person to move with greater intensity. Slower-paced music reduces arousal, reducing heart rate and increasing relaxation.

6. Social support: If you like to exercise with a friend, or receive recognition from friends, family, or colleagues you are experiencing social support. Support is one of the leading predictors of exercise adherence – after you being an exercise program, you stay with it. Social support can be direct (e.g., exercising with another person, or receiving instruction or coaching) or indirect (e.g., others offer praise, recognition, or approval without exercising with you). Some individuals, however, prefer to exercise alone, or do not find it motivating to receive attention from others.

7. Psyching-up: The goal here is to improve arousal level, excitation, or positive emotion, which, in turn, increases effort and physical exertion. Examples of psyching up strategies can be verbal (e.g., “come on, I can do this,” “go for it,” “lets get this done,” “do it, do it, do it”) or non-verbal (e.g., increasing exertion during a particular phase of an exercise, perhaps when lifting weights, or temporarily increasing the pace of a walk or jog).

8. Mood words: You want a mood state that is commensurate with the type of exercise intensity. Yoga, for instance, calls for a calm, low-key mood state for a low arousal state level, while pumping iron requires a more vigorous and intense mood, or high arousal intensity. Examples include “Go!,” “Good,” “Good job,” “Feels good,” “I can do this,” “Go for it,” “Relax,” or “Fly.” These words tend to increase or decrease arousal, and sometimes accompany imagery that promotes effort, confidence, and properly executed skills.

In summary, mental skills are often ignored or not known to exercisers, yet have an important role in improving exercise performance. There is a strong link between the mind and body, and what you think (also called cognition) and feel (emotion) will directly influence your physical performance. Many of these strategies are used by world class athletes, as part of their training and during competition. Your fitness coaches should know about these, but if you have any questions, please ask me. Mark Anshel