Month: February 2022

After working on my previous project; Positive and Negative Self-talk: Strengthen your mind, I decided to continue working on the same inquiry. In the previous project, I focused on observing my thoughts and navigating between positive and negative thoughts while training and sharing my journey to motivate other athletes to train their minds. In this project, I want to further my research in sharing my tools of “How to train and strengthen your mind?” with others aiming to help others and experiment together. 

Our minds are always overwhelmed with thoughts that could affect us physically which will ruin our progress and performance in training. It is very important for athletes to know how to cope with their negative thoughts, anxiety, and fear. The three most important elements to strengthen our mind in CrossFit are focus, motivation, and confidence. By setting goals every day and reminding ourselves of our overall goal of why we doing CrossFit, we will be motivated and energized to give our workout 100% of hard work. Motivation is not enough, being confident is very important. knowing our own strength and practicing self-talk such as motivational statements “come on, you can do it” would help us to be confident. Finally, focus, in order to be focused, we need to clear all the distractions in our mind. 

Therefore, I designed a CrossFit mind journal as a pre-workout journal to help you strengthen your mind by keeping you focused, motivated and confident. This journal is designed to clear your mind and keep you focused as well as a progression tracker to track your journey in CrossFit. Each day, before training you will start by filling your workout and start the exercise of the day. These exercises required you to write to express your feelings on the paper and be more conscious of how you are feeling, acknowledge them, and release them. 

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INSPIRATIONS

“The greatest adaptation to CrossFit takes place between the ears” – Greg Glassman

In project two, I decided to explore a new inquiry that I am passionate about which is navigating between our inner voices. How may we strengthen our minds to succeed in CrossFit? CrossFit is a huge part of my life, and l have been always curious about how to stay focused and overcome the negative thoughts I face especially during intense workouts or a big lift. So, I decided in this project to test my mind in different ways and see how my performance going. I tried to react to it and another day to ignore it, but that failed. I felt my body was working against me. Therefore, I decided to observe those feeling without taking any action and replace it with positive thoughts such as a strong statement or reminding myself of my goals or being engaged with the music while separating myself from my thoughts while observing them. This way helps me to manage negative thoughts and feel motivated to successfully complete my workout with a great performance. I believe that everyone has a way to cope with fear, and that’s why it’s important that we explore ourselves to find a way that works best for us. 

Training in CrossFit for four years and being with different CrossFit communities, I realized that there are people who might compare themselves to others instead of tracking their own journey. This way we are not going to improve because mentally we are obsessed and stressed out which going to only hold us back. In order to move forward, we need to shift our focus to ourselves, believe in ourselves, be patient, and be committed to being the best version of ourselves. Some people at CrossFit gyms might say negative comments either about your performance or techniques and that going to affect our minds and distract us during the workout. Creating a mental answer machine auto-response to let go of the comments, would help us to not let these comments consume us. Finally, we are all human, we go through a lot and have some bad days where we mentally don’t feel like pushing hard during our training and that is normal. However, it’s better to control our emotions and not to let them take over and ruin our day and workout. 

Outcome

I created a motivational video reflecting my own journey aiming to motivate and encourage the CrossFit community at any fitness level to train their mind. CrossFit is a mind sport as much as physical and when you strengthen your mind, you will be surprised by how much more capability you have.

“The human body is an incredible machine, but most people only get out of that machine what their mind allows them” – Rich Froning 

Inspirations