The final leg of my five part series on Mental Toughness is being able to maintain strict form while your body is extremely uncomfortable. This is a very difficult thing to do simply because your entire body is telling you to do exactly the opposite of what you should be doing. And this is precisely why we are talking about mental toughness - in a sense, it is the aggregate of all the previous sections
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The fourth segment of my five-part series on mental toughness is one that is probably most relevant to you as it is one of the biggest reasons why so many people don’t want to train or do high intensity training. Pain tolerance. Of course the kind of pain I’m referring to is the good kind of pain and not the pain that is associated with muscle tears or joint pain. That is bad pain and
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This week’s blog post will continue on from last week’s blog on Fear Management, part 3 of 5 in the series Mental Toughness for which I did the training on for the White Collar Boxers. The next mental tool you can employ when you’re facing fear is to imagine the worst case scenario. This is effective because by imagining the worst case scenario, you have created a lower bound for yourself in which all possible
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“There is no illusion greater than fear.” -- Laozi So this week’s blog topic may not be the most relevant to you, but it was very much relevant to the white collar boxers that were fighting 2 weekends ago. Even though you may not have experienced a boxing match in your life, if you have any ounce of empathy in you, then you will know how scary it can be to fight in a
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We all have a general idea of what our maximum effort level looks like in our heads and we vaguely know how that should feel. We get used to that look and feel as being our 100% effort and continue working at that rate thinking it’s our best effort. However, it is quite possible that you have never reached your 100% effort level as I have written before on an earlier blog entry as there
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The Road from Being Good to Great In light of the upcoming Brawl on the Bund event this Saturday, which I have been a part of as their guest trainer, today’s blog will be part one of five in a series that talks about the topic that I trained the boxers on - mental toughness. Today’s post is specifically on how mental toughness plays a part in high intensity training. It’s unfortunate that this
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Don't want to build muscle? This is a very common question that I get asked especially by women when I suggest that they add some strength training into their routine. From my experience, it’s very hard to convince many women to build muscle. This may be related to a mild stigma in society against women building muscle for fear of looking “butch”. But another reason many women hesitate
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Although, I typically don’t like to make generalizations, I think it’s interesting to share some observations I’ve had regarding the fitness stigmas here in Shanghai. This blog entry contains no tips or advice on how to train better or eat healthier but rather it’s a reflection on the industry in which I am in and some context which I find brings things into better perspective. You may agree or disagree with me and if you
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It’s tough to change your lifestyle. The challenges of replacing bad habits with good habits can seem daunting. Most people believe they need to exert a high level of willpower to refrain from doing their bad habits and to start doing the good ones. But there are ways to make it easier - very simple and easy ways that have a huge impact. The key is to have a social network that supports the change
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There’s a bug going around town! I don’t know about you, but a lot of people I know are sick these days! Maybe it’s due to the constant change in temperatures? Maybe it’s due to the change of seasons? Maybe it’s due to the stars? Maybe it’s all of the above! One thing for sure is that if you’re sick with the flu, then it’s definitely because your immune system has weakened to the point
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