How important is the setting of our mind to achieve the goal?

It's great when in this day and age of constant hustle and bustle, excessive workload and many hours spent at work, we find time for ourselves. When our free time is used actively, be it by any kind of sport, it is doubly great. During sporting activity, our bodies release (among other things) the hormone endorphin, which causes us to feel happy, satisfied and good when we finish a scheduled practice or game and go into the locker room feeling happy, albeit drained of our last strength. The good mood will not stick with us only for a few minutes after the activity is over, but thanks to regular exercise we can maintain it throughout the day. We will be more energetic, relaxed and satisfied. Judge for yourself - isn't regular exercise worth keeping a good, positive mood?

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If the motivation of good mood and energy throughout the day isn't worth it for someone to do sport or exercise in general on a regular basis, have a set routine and order to their training days and try to get the most out of the sport, the question probably flashes through their mind:

"What am I exercising for? Is the effort and hard work worth the muscular arms?"

These are some of the questions that must have crossed the minds of many people who try, or have tried in the past, to go to the gym. A lot of them quit from one day to the next because they got tired of the regular routine where they come to the workout, work out like a robot the required part and go home again in the same mood they came with, annoyed. Quite frankly, if my workouts were to be in a similar vein, I would probably quit sooner or later. Then there would be a phase where we actually quit our only physical activity, there would be a blank period without exercise, and after some time the thought would enter our minds again - what if we tried exercising again?

And so the old, familiar faces are repeated over and over again in gyms, longing for the satisfaction of a workout. But what can we do to turn ordinary workouts into meaningful ones that allow us to improve and push our limits? Workouts that make us improve our fitness, work on strength and build muscle? It all starts in the head...

So many times I've read an introductory message from my clients where 70% of it was the sentence:

,,...I'm slacking in the gym and I'm not enjoying the workout because I don't know how or what to train for my goal."

Ladies (and gentlemen), that's exactly what I'm talking about. Setting a goal in our heads for which we will put all our efforts is the first crucial step to successfully achieving our goals. Without a goal, we can't start working on what will get us to our goal if we are heading to an unknown destination (or at least have no idea). For example, is your goal weight loss? Focus on strength training along with cardio activity and a proper diet. This will achieve a caloric deficit that will help you shed excess pounds. Weight loss was just one of the examples (and also one of the most common requests from clients), where you need to set your goal in your head and work on all the necessary aspects that are associated with this process. Beyond setting a goal, it is more than important to be able to answer WHY - why I started exercising, why I started losing weight, why I want to eat healthy, why cardio is good, etc. A very common answer is:

"I'm doing it because I saw it on that fitesy/fitness person on social media."

And are you really sure that the one you follow is doing everything right and is a good source of information for you? Are you sure your goal is the same as the influencer's goal on IG?

Therefore, to be able to stick with a sporting activity, you need much more than a few videos of your social media idol. You need your own answer to the question of why you decided to take up sport, what it brings you, if and what results you see in your body, strength and fitness. Because if we were to follow someone else, do things (exercises, workouts) literally to the letter according to them, would that be our goal that we are going for and want to achieve? Or will it be the person's goal that we set our diet and exercise plan around? What I'm saying is - it's not a bad idea to be inspired. On the contrary, today's time offers countless options and information that we can draw from to our advantage, as long as we are smart and always take from it only what is appropriate to achieve our goal. Copying someone else and expecting the same results is likely to bring us only one thing - disappointment and disgust with the whole process we have embarked on, which may make us lose the desire to keep working on ourselves if the process we have learned in detail has not worked out for us.

In conclusion, I want to come back to the essential point - it is very important to identify two important steps in your mind. The first is to set your goal and the second is to set your mind so that we can answer the question why we are doing this and what we expect from the whole process. This is the only way we can tailor everything to our individual needs and focus only on ourselves and our goal. It is equally important to realise that we are only doing this for ourselves, regardless of whether our environment likes it. It's our choice, and if we feel like doing sports in our free time while others want to spend theirs drinking beer - that's everyone's business. Only the individual knows what fulfills and makes him/her happy. If you too have found such a liking in sport, whatever its focus, I believe it is the best thing for you. Loving the whole journey and not just the success itself, together whether in sports or anything else, is the blueprint for staying on your path.

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