5 Mental Hacks to Push Yourself Harder During Workouts

Doing your workouts with more sets, reps, and intensity than your program’s recommendation requires immense mental power, endurance, and fortitude. Even with plenty of motivation, we can still find ourselves throwing the towel in once we go beyond our limits.

Some reasons for giving up include false fatigue and mild discomfort. While these factors are natural effects of working out, they can be ignored if you know how to trick your brain. Follow the hacks below.

1. Eyes off the clock

Keeping track of the time as you exercise will only slow your perception of it. Hence, the workout session would feel exhausting. Instead of looking at your watch or any device that tells the time, just stare forward. According to a study, people who focused their attention on a target ran faster with longer durations.

2. Have a mantra

It’s important to have positive self-talk when you feel you’re about to give up. Like staring straight forward, repeating a mantra will keep you focused and help you avoid distracting thoughts such as; “What should I eat after this?”, “God, I’m tired.”, and “When will this be over?”

3. Like what you’re feeling

Each of us has different sets of enjoyment when it comes to exercising. Some like the feeling of sweat trickling down their skin. Others work out every day to listen to their hearts pounding. Then there are those who’ve learned to love the pain of going beyond their limits. You need to find what’s yours. Maybe you’ll get addicted to it enough to want to exercise daily.

4. Have a buddy

If hacking your own mind or self-motivation doesn’t work, you need to have a fitness buddy. Now a workout friend can be anyone. They can be a gym instructor, fellow gym goer, neighbor, friend, or significant other. And they can push your motivation when it’s running thin. The best part of having a fitness buddy is that you can hold each other accountable for your fitness goals.

5. Visualize what’s happening in your body

Another trick to keep your mind from feeling exhaustion and pain is visualizing what’s going on in it as you exercise. Our hearts do beat at insane rates when we’re working out so it makes sense to visualize a sped-up flow of blood in our veins.

You can also go the imaginative route. I like to think my body is made up of bionic parts that release pressurized steam during strength training. Through this, I forget about my physical limitations and focus on pumping iron.

Overall, the greatest hack to perform more workout reps and sets with higher intensities is to just do it. Yes, like the Nike slogan. Don’t think about anything else. If you decide to do 20 reps of bicep curls instead of 13, just do it. If you want to run for 10 miles on the treadmill instead of 6, just do it.

Need more workout tips? Read these!

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