Northern Michigan Woman - Jan/Feb 2024 Fitness Issue
Believing is Succeeding
Liz Belt 2023-12-22 06:20:14
Training Your Brain to Perform
I began my journey in the fitness industry in 2004. I was fresh off a deployment to Iraq and was still serving in the United States Army Reserve. The deployment had interrupted my softball scholarship and my studies toward a teaching degree. After the 16-month hiatus, I transferred to Northern Michigan University and switched my major to health and fitness.
The interesting thing about this shift is that it wasn’t driven by an innate vision of leading people in exercise, rather it was motivated by a deep feeling of wanting to help people be better and more confident. Being one of seven kids, a multisport athlete and serving in the military had given me a “no excuses” attitude.
Why do I share all of this with you? Because the things that had shaped me at a young age had also served me a dose of misunderstanding on the expansive obstacles that humans go through to be their best selves. I had no concept of how the brain can work against people because I thought, “If they just do the work, they will be better.” My white knight syndrome would quickly diminish as I made my way into my career and saw firsthand that each person is fighting their own battles.
Today, I’m sitting in my own studio where I am in year five of training clients in specified cycling programs. I have the absolute pleasure of working with people with a multitude of goals, all the way from increased fitness and weight loss to professional cyclists. Each rider can see their fitness trends and track their growth. Having a system that offers this amount of information can be rewarding, but it can also be discouraging.
This is where the challenge truly begins. Pushing consistently past your comfort zone can be demanding.
It boils down to stress. Hard work creates discomfort. Discomfort creates fear. Fear digs up the thought of failure. The thought of failure makes many humans want to quit.
Quitting when things get tough decreases confidence and builds bad habits.
So how do we avoid this cycle? By training our brains to perform as hard as our bodies perform. There is an emotional response to physical stress that some people can push through, and others, initially cannot. Regardless of your lifestyle, and whether clinical or self-driven, everyone could use some work on creating tools to get through the mental gymnastics that life throws our way.
On the other end of the spectrum, and something I see more often, is a lack of confidence. To be frank, regardless of where you are in your journey of self-confidence, there’s a chance you need to go back to the beginning. You have to believe in yourself and you have to know you are worth it.
You can lose the weight. You can build the muscle. You can get faster. You can increase your power-to-weight ratio. You can get the job promotion. If you consistently tell yourself, you “can’t” how do you expect your brain to play along when things get tough?
My advice to all of my clients is that we take things on with a realistic and attainable approach. Start with showing up and going through the motions. Set some consistency and allow yourself to push when things start coming together.
From there, set your goal by taking a good look at what is attainable. How many hours a week do you have to commit to your goal? Is your family in support of the goal? On top of the physical work it will take, do you also have the space to focus on the nutrition that is required? If you tell me you have 8 hours a week to put toward a goal, I will then tell you to subtract 2 hours for drive time and 30 minutes for unexpected interruptions.
The realistic approach, in my mind, is the only approach, because our lifestyles don’t leave a lot of space for the things that are in our control, let alone the things that are not. Take it one step at a time and don’t try to convince yourself that it’s attainable to make 6,000 changes at once. That’s like tossing a grenade into a china shop and thinking nothing will break.
I like to believe that wherever my riders are on their journey, they know they have my support and that I will do my best to help them work through each barrier. I may not be a psychologist, but I do understand that perseverance is a habit, and it needs to be exercised to become a part of our character.
The world wants us to believe that less than 1% of our population is considered elite athletes. I would challenge you to consider that 99% of us are giving them that permission because we aren’t working to our full potential. Everyone is capable of more than they think, but it starts with the conversations you have with yourself and believing you can. Stop denying yourself success and get to work.
A Marquette native, Liz Belt relocated to Traverse City in 2013 after 12 years of serving in the Army, including a deployment to Iraq. In 2019, Liz opened Intrepid Cycling Co. She currently owns and operates Intrepid and does personal training at Mi Moves. She, her husband and her two children love Traverse City and are grateful to call it home.
©Northern Michigan Woman Magazine. View All Articles.