Yesterday morning I had a client who looked like hell. I mean that in the nicest possible way, but you could tell he wasn’t in peak form. He didn’t sleep well the night before, he was fighting off a cold, running late, eyes glassed over, pretty much the hottest mess you could ever imagine seeing. He wasn’t thinking he should have even come to the gym that day, but didn’t want to cancel and was hoping I would take it easy on him.

I hadn’t planned on it.

He was dragging his butt around more than the Oilers first line, slowly going through the motions with no real passion or energy, and with all the excitement of yesterday’s dishwater.

Once we got through a modified warmup (he was late, after all), and started into our main working sets, he was looking at the weights like they were immovable objects, and he was definitely NOT the irresistible force circa Wrestlemania 3.

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When we were getting ready to throw some dumbbells around, he let out a “I don’t think I can do this,” to which I decided to see if I could change his mindset a little.

“Before you get under these weights, I want you to say to yourself that you feel STRONG today.” To this he replied:

“I feel strong today.”

“Nope, that’s not going to do. I want you to say ‘I feel STRONG today!!’ And throw some emphasis on the word STRONG.”

“I feel strong today.”

“Again.”

I feel strong today!”

“Again!”

“I feel STRONG today!”

“Now lift that weight, and with every rep repeat exactly what you just said to me.”

At this point, he pulled the dumbbells up and began repeating to himself (using his outside voice) that he felt strong today. With each rep, he seemed to push the weights up easier, almost as if saying it was giving him more strength.

That’s because it was.

Everyone has crappy days where they feel like a bag of crushed assholes, and everyone has gone through feeling like that only to find out they had a great workout residing deep inside themselves. Every now and then, you just can’t wake that beast up, so you go through the motions, which totally sucks.

You have the ability to change your mindset about a workout just like you have the ability to turn the lights on and off in your livingroom. Telling yourself that you can do something is the first step to believing that you can, which is the last step before actually doing it. We see this all the time in elite athletes, whose confidence is through the roof prior to taking a big shot, yet can’t hit the broad side of a barn if they’re rattled or their confidence isn’t there. We also see the reverse, where back pain sufferers focus on the eminent feelings of pain associated with a specific movement, and begin to move in more of a pain avoidance manner than in a beneficial pattern, which will eventually lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy of developing the pain they were trying to avoid.

Think of the time when Rocky was training to fight the Russian, and while doing some of the sickest front lever’s you’ve ever seen his coach had him repeatedly saying “No Pain” to push him through and believe that he had no pain that would make him want to stop.

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It’s scientifically proven that listening to “Hearts on Fire” leads to doing pushups with your shirt off, no matter where you are. That’s a fact. There’s research and stuff like that to back it up. Go ahead, tell me you don’t want to bang out 50 pushups after watching even 20 seconds of something like that. I dare you.

You can do the same thing, and I know because I’ve done it. At some point, the thought of pain becomes a physical manifestation of pain. Strong focus and powerful determination can compartmentalize pain and make the body overcome the desire to resist the activity, which is why injured athletes can still come back into the game and compete like crazy, even on broken legs or torn what-have-you’s.

With me, about 18 months ago I was in a lot of pain due to my back. One morning it was especially bad, and I decided then and there that I was going to do everything in my power to not only try to fix my back, but change my mindset about how I was experiencing the pain itself. I re-learned how to contract the muscles throughout the lumbar region, individually, and then as a collective unit. Then I worked on getting the ability to maintain that contraction through various movements like squats, deadlifts, single leg exercises, and even some advanced core exercises.

Each movement I set up for, I used a simple mantra of telling myself I was going to do it pain free, I would be strong throughout it, and I would get better and better as a result of it. Previously to this, I would approach an exercise thinking “Is this going to be the one that I screw myself up for good with?” Yeah, that never does anyone any favors.

Much in the same way, thinking there’s a possibility of failure can lead to not giving maximal effort, or in self-sabotaging how much attention you pay to the important details that can help you succeed. If that means getting ready to deadlift, applying for a job, or stepping up to the plate and asking that hot waitress out for a night on the town, believing you will fail before you try will result in failure.

Back to the client I was telling you about, after the first series of exercises, the second series went very similar, with me telling him to say he felt strong, which he did over and over again. After the first set, you could tell he finally believed it 100% of the way, and from then on out, he set 3 PR’s with very solid technique on the deadlift alone. Not too bad for a day when he felt like a bag of rocks.