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| Mental Training Tips for Runners |
Shirley Archer has a great article in the July issue of the IDEA Fitness Journal. In 'What is Mindset Training? A Primer,' Archer covers many different types of mindsets, including promotion vs. prevention, fixed vs. growth and 10 key negative mindsets.
Promotion and Prevention are a powerful set of mindsets in my life. Am I promoting my wellness when I take time to exercise and receive massage and meditate, or am I preventing disease?
Promotion seems to work better in the first few month of a behavior change. Switching to a prevention mindset once the new wellness behavior has been established enables athletes to keep performing the new behavior when new gains and successes aren't as common. For instance, during the first few months of a running program, promoting improved health is easy - we are running farther and faster and our body is becoming stronger.
Once we reach our goal weekly mileage, a prevention mindset can help runners keep up with our training, even when our bodies aren't getting leaner or our times faster. In a promotion mindset, feedback will be success based - a new, faster 5K time or feeling that a ten mile run is 'easier' on our bodies than it used to be. Prevention mindset feedback is failure based - we can see when we didn't run according to our schedule that our running times are slower and it is harder to complete long runs.
Overtraining feedback can also be failure-based - feeling exhausted, a higher resting heart rate and changes in mood and sleep patterns are signals that overtraining may be happening.
Read more about Mindset Training here: http://www.ideafit.com/fitness-library/what-is-mindset-training-a-primer
Great topic!! Our thoughts have such a powerful impact on our success, both positively and negatively.
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