Heads up: This article delivers some harsh truths. The goal is to inspire you to think about how you’re approaching your internal and external dialogue in the gym. It’s not written in judgment. It’s written with well-intentioned honesty. Okay, let’s proceed.
“Shit, this is workout is going to suck.”
“At work today, this chick Marissa stole the last square of toilet paper.”
“God, this burns, God, this burns.”
I bet you recognize the three statements above as complaints. Two pertain to working out. One is about that harlot Marissa leaving you stranded on the toilet…again! The work complaint is external – one person is saying it to another. The workout complaints might be internal or external.
While it feels good to get something off of your chest or commiserate with a compatriot, it’s not helpful. Internalizing complaints is just as bad. Complaining isn’t good for you, no matter how good it feels in the moment. And it’s making your workouts worse.
Let’s discuss how and what to do instead.
You’re Training Your Brain
Your brain has a lot of jobs, all of which lead to one end goal – keeping you alive. Two ways that the brain meets its goal are by mapping environments and by conserving energy.
The brain always wants to know, what do we do here? Evolutionarily, it wants to know how to behave so that an environment doesn’t overwhelm and kill you. Since we’re social animals, it also wants you to behave so that you aren’t cast out. And the third part of this oversimplified explanation–the brain wants to know how to gather resources from an environment.
So, how does this pertain to complaining while working out? Complaints engrain themselves in your brain’s map of the environment.
Last year, I recorded a podcast with our friends Craig and Jonathan from Building the Elite. During the podcast, we talked about mental skills and other mental and emotional aspects of physical training. I mentioned how a lot of folks say things to themselves at the gym like “I just need to be tougher” or “I’m such a p-word.” Jonathan responded, and I’m paraphrasing, “Yeah, it just doesn’t make sense because your brain is always paying attention. And it thinks, okay, in this environment we think and behave this way. So, every time you go to train you think negatively about yourself and hinder your performance.”
Complaining works the same way. You tell your brain this is what we do in this environment. Then it becomes part of the brain’s energy conservation strategy. It uses the model that includes complaining every time that you step into the gym so that it doesn’t have to create a new model each time. The complaint cycle accelerates the negativity bias innate in all humans and your performance suffers. What’s more, you just won’t enjoy yourself as much as you should.
You’re Making the Workout Harder
Negative mindsets, spurred on by internal complaining, decrease our physical output and increase our ratings of perceived exertion. It makes everything seem harder.
The result is that you don’t work anywhere near your actual capabilities and you enjoy the work far less than you otherwise would.
For example, let’s say one day you come to the gym in a great mood. It’s not your favorite workout, but you’re focused on doing it well and getting the most out of it. You work hard and you leave feeling accomplished.
During the next week, you come in to do the same workout. But you look at the workout and you really emphasize how much you don’t like it. You start the internal complaint cycle. As the workout progresses, you start noticing all the ways that you don’t like it, how it makes you uncomfortable.
In the good mood example, you’ll actually accomplish more work, furthering your progress toward your results, while thinking the workout was actually kind of fun.
In the bad mood example, you won’t work as hard, slowing your progress toward your results, and you won’t enjoy yourself as much as you should.
See what I’m sayin’?
Let’s explore a quick science-y explanation before we depart from this topic.
Complaints, negative perceptions, and negative mindsets spur the release of stress hormones. Complaining literally stresses out your body. In turn, you perceive the workout, and future similar workouts, as more stressful than they actually are. That’s not neat.
Pay Attention to Discomfort and You Miss Everything Else
WATCH THIS VIDEO BEFORE READING ON!
There’s a psychological concept called attentional blindness illustrated by a famous study using a gorilla suit and a basketball.
During the initial iteration of the study, experimentees were asked to watch a group of people passing a basketball back and forth while counting the number of passes. While the people pass the basketball, a person in a gorilla suit walks right through the middle of everything. The person in the gorilla suit even pauses in the middle of the frame. You’d expect that the experimentees would notice a gaht dang great ape strolling through the scene, but most didn’t. They were too locked in on the basketball. Attentional blindness isn’t just about visual attention. It extrapolates to all attention.
Your basketball is your focus on discomfort and the subsequent internal complaining.
As your basketball bounces around your mind, you miss a lot of good shit. First, that you’re alive and doing something that most people won’t do. That’s not just a little thing. Second, you’re missing out on an accurate appraisal of how you’re performing. You’re likely doing better than you think, and you likely have more in the tank. And if you’re doing worse than you think, it’s damn tough to fix the issue because your mind is focused on what’s aversive.
If you’re at the gym to improve yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally, you have to stop focusing on your basketball.
Complaining Affects Everyone Else Too
We’re not totally sure what drives empathy in humans. Some scientists hang their hats on mirror neurons. Others focus on hormones such as oxytocin. Others still mention social context, upbringing, motivation, and the physiological stuff the first two groups of scientists propose. No matter the exact explanation, it’s true that our movements, moods, and words affect those around us.
Outward complaints typically affect others in two ways: they attract or repel.
Many outward complaints pull other people into a cycle of complaining. Misery loves company. Now there is more than one person caught in a negative thought cycle. Now more than one person is having a worse time.
Complaining also pushes people away. People doing their best to work hard and have a good experience don’t like being around people that bitch. They want to be around other people that are striving to kick ass.
Okay, What Should We Do Instead of Complain?
I’m not going to leave you hanging. Now we’ll walk through a few simple actions you can take to keep your head in the right place.
Set a Transition Habit
Our days are full of transitions. We transition from one task to another, from home to the car, from the car to work, etc. Each of those transitions is an opportunity to set a trigger that positively affects us.
Former Beyond Strength coach, Jon Hughes, mastered a transition habit. Each day before coaching, he’d sit in his car for five minutes. During that five minutes, he’d meditate, letting go of any stressors from his day up to that point. It gave him the freedom to coach, be present, and create a killer environment for the clients.
You don’t have to meditate. Your transitional habit could be a simple appraisal of your day and what you’re leaving outside the gym. It could be setting an intention about what you want out of the day’s workout. It could be listening to a song that you love. Experiment to find something that works for you. But the outcome should be that you’re in a positive headspace and ready to challenge yourself.
Acceptance
In his book Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzales tells several mortifying stories about people in dire situations that managed to survive when most would die. Across varying terrain–the ocean, the jungles of South America, the Yosemite Valley–and across varying circumstances all of the survivors had one thing in common; they accepted their circumstances.
They didn’t sugarcoat it. They said, “Okay, this is where I’m at. Now what?”
The gym isn’t–well, it shouldn’t be–a survival situation. But it nonetheless puts us in the throes of discomfort. And to be successful, we have to manage discomfort. How do we manage it?
Accept that some difficult and uncomfortable things are just part of the deal. Hanging is a great example.
Your forearms will burn if you hang for an appreciable amount of time. If you don’t accept that, you’ll focus on how much it burns. That focus decreases your performance and stresses you out. Broken record time: your results suffer and you have less fun. No bueno.
But if you accept that burning is part of the deal, you can focus on the objective of hanging for the amount of time that you’re supposed to hang. You realize that just because something feels a certain way doesn’t mean that it should stop you from getting to your goal.
Tap Into Your Why
Viktor Frankl said, “In some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”
Reminding ourselves why we are training, why we are doing uncomfortable things, gives purpose to our discomfort. Reconnecting with our purpose alleviates our perceived suffering by reminding us what we’re working to accomplish.
Purpose puts discomfort in the context of making progress. Rather than feeling sorry for ourselves, we feel motivated to rise to the occasion.
Remember your why.
Control and Compartmentalization
Create a short-term focus on what you can control. You can control your execution of the exercise. You can control your breathing. You can control your facial posture. Doing these things decreases your body’s stress response, in turn decreasing your rating of perceived exertion. Check in on these things over and over throughout the workout.
Once you’re focused on what you can control, compartmentalize the workout. Instead of thinking about how much there is to do, focus on the next, immediate action. For example, the next work interval or the next rep. Then do that over and over again until you look up and realize that the session is over.
Remember…
All of these strategies sit atop a simple shift in thought that helps us keep perspective. Just because something burns doesn’t mean that you’re hurt. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean that you should panic or decrease your effort. Everything is alright.
And to remind yourself that everything is alright, to keep yourself out of complaining’s negative thought patterns, remember that…
You’re fine. You’re just uncomfortable.
