The Critical Importance of Emotion in Weight Lifting

When you’re lifting weights, there are many different important factors that will impact on the outcome of your training. There’s the program you pick, there’s your dedication to the training and there’s the amount of time you dedicate to it. But one of the most important factors of all and something that often gets overlooked, is the importance of emotion. There are many reasons why emotion is critical for your training, which we will see now.

Getting Out to the Gym

Often you hear people talking about training as though it were a challenge or a chore. They talk about how crucial it is to have the ‘will’ to train and to force yourself out of the bed every day, even when you don’t want to.

They talk about ‘no pain, no gain’ and ‘eye of the tiger’. And that’s all good and well – drive will certainly help you to get to the gym and commit to your training program. But you know what’s even better? To actually want to go to the gym. To feel as though any time you’re not training is time wasted, to be itching to get there at every opportunity. This is how all the most successful athletes feel. This is how Arnold Schwarzenegger describes feeling.

This is what gives you unstoppable motivation and drive to achieve your goals.
If you’re going to reach this point, then that means you need to understand why it is you’re training and what it is that really appeals to you about the idea of working out. That means you need a vision and a goal and you need to be able to feel completely motivated by that ideal.

Lifting More

This same drive and determination is also what’s going to make your actual workouts all the more effective. That’s because you’ll be able to dig deep to find that part of you that’s capable of lifting more, punching harder and running further.
And to do this, you need to once again be able to tap into the reason for your training and to remember why it’s worth so much to you.
This isn’t just a pep talk: it changes the entire way your central nervous system works. When something really matters to you, your body will pump out more adrenaline, more dopamine, more norepinephrine… and all these things will combine together in order to give you more focus and more drive when you’re training.