Mental skills and personal experiment (12): getting physical

Today was my first physical powerlifting workout. Benching. Boy, how I missed that bar… These “neural vacations” have been a torture.

Apart from real fun, I obviously felt my elbows. Both – more the left than the right one, which makes sense: the ugliest injuries had been on the left arm.

I am being a good girls and strictly following the periodized spreadsheet. My desire was to load disk after disk on that bar, but I controlled it. Which was good, because I then concentrated on the items I had been “mentally rehearsing” the previous weeks.

Guys, it works: the workout today was precisely what I had rehearsed. Even with people talking to me the whole time about various issues (we are two days from a course I will teach the instructors about lifting kinesiology and they are quite anxious), focusing was easy. “Summoning” the imagery I had created during the mental rehearsal was the hardest part, but feasible.

Before I got inside the power rack for my scheduled workout, accident images kept popping to my mind. I was troubled by them – I thought they were maybe caused by the videos I chose for the course. But now I believe the mental rehearsal “intervening thoughts” might have been the expression of a fear. After all, I almost died in 2007 with one of these accidents. The actual physical contact with the bar dismissed them all.

Tomorrow will be squatting day. Mental rehearsal today was full of accident “intervening thoughts”. Observation: also in 2007 I broke my tibia while squatting over unstable surface.