Motivation is important. It is essential for success, but must be controlled.
If you are like me, you enjoy learning about weight training and resistance training. You can go on the internet and find tons of content in regard to training methods and the best ways to workout. The various training options that you can choose from are inexhaustible, and even if you could try them all, more training methods would quickly be created after you thought you tried them all.
Training methodology is so important for success that it is constantly studied, researched, taught, and updated. Unfortunately, it can overshadow other important factors that contribute to success, such as motivation and belief.
Without motivation, no training method is going to work very well because the enthusiasm and energy required to make it work will be missing. Even if you do happen to have plenty of enthusiasm, it is important to believe that you will succeed and improve. Doubts in your ability and thoughts of failure do not just affect your mind. Those doubts and thoughts are passed on to your nervous system which will send doubting signals to your muscles. Negative thoughts also affect your body chemistry and release hormones that have negative effects on your body. Even though you may have motivation, drive and energy, you must have a calm confidence that your training is working.
Arnold and Tom Platz often talk about the power of the mind and how your thinking must be right in order to make your hard work pay off. Bill Pearl talks about the power of positive thoughts as a necessary ingredient for success. Michael Jordan is not a weight lifter or bodybuilder, but he is another example of a successful person who stresses the importance of a positive mental perspective in his book, I Can’t Accept Not Trying.
While having extreme motivation is an important factor for achieving success at weight training, I believe it can destroy you if you don’t pair it with confidence and a willingness to listen to your body. In other words, be motivated, but don’t let it drive you to kill yourself with self-destructive training practices. If you want to succeed so bad that you have no choice but to take steroids or other PED’s that put your body at risk for health problems, your desires are working against you, not for you. If you want to succeed so bad that you constantly overtrain, or constantly over eat to the point of sickness, your desires are working against you instead of for you.
Motivation and desire must be matched with confidence and enough discipline to listen to your own body. Many lifters have the discipline to push themselves to try hard, but lack the discipline to listen to their bodies and refrain from hurting themselves with fanaticism. Richard Hawthorne is a world record holder in the deadlift. Leroy Colbert is often considered the first bodybuilder to develop 21 inch arms before steroids were available. Both of these men are known for their drive, their sustained commitment to hard work over time, and their belief in their ability, yet neither of these men are so driven that they are deaf when it comes to listening to their own body.
If you take a close look at Richard Hawthorne’s perspective, you will find that his drive provides energy, but it is combined with a confidence that provides calmness while exerting maximum effort. In other words, his energy is under control and it works for him. His energy doesn’t become chaotic and reckless, rather it provides direction, focus, and purpose.
If your desire is so great, that it drives you to work so hard that you can’t hear your body when it tells you to stop, or to cut back, then your desires will blow up in your face. Your desires must be paired with the discipline to train within your capacity to withstand hard training and recover.
At the end of this article, you will find videos of bodybuilders and powerlifters who stress the importance of motivation and the mind. These are the type of motivational videos that can get me so motivated that I go into overdrive and train myself into oblivion, however, past episodes of overdoing it have taught me to train hard enough to improve, but not so hard that my efforts backfire with injury or overtraining. While unrestrained motivation can be dangerous, it will never take away from the fact that a high degree of motivation is essential for success. Keep these things in mind as you watch the following videos on motivation and achievement. May God bless you with the best of training.
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