Can you help me or point me into the right direction to developing mental toughness? Is there some kind of way to incorporate it into a workout or my martial arts routine?
Any help or suggestions will be useful to me. Thanks.
Well let me start off by saying that the emotions you feel in a fight will ALWAYS be different. Depending on the surroundings, weather conditions, person your fighting, how your feeling that day, other people around, whether he has a weapon or not, etc. Now the two most common emotions in a fight are fear and anger. Both must be supressed. Training for eliminating fear is quite simple, but can also be quite painful. There are millions of ways to train for eliminating these emotions. Here's a good one: sparring with as little equipment as possible (so you really feel the hits) and against someone either bigger, or more skilled then you. Of course the more realistic way would be to just go out there and start fighting for real. Eliminating anger takes practice, where one must focus on total relaxation. Remember, both fear and anger cloud judgement and perception. Also, the more skilled you get the less afraid you become and the better you will be able to contain your emotions. Now I don't want to go into the deep, specific details of the human brain. I recommend buying some books on psycology and perhaps anthropology and learning the details. The first step in solving a problem is understanding it.
It doesn´t matter that much what your emotions are before the fight. If you have trained enough so that your muscles respond instinctivly and reflexivly(use your imagination when you train), you can go to a "auto-pilot mode" where you are free from emotions (like a reptile)
I use positive affirmations with every Martial Arts technique or with any exercise. For example...
When I'm practicing my Jab on my own, I will say something like "I'm powerful", or when I'm Side Kicking I will say "I'm confident". I just say short and snappy words that I can say quickly in my mind or out loud. Same idea goes with my Weight Training, while performing a Military Press; I will say, "I can Handle it". When I am doing a Bench Press, I would say, "I'm strong". I believe if you say positive affirmations and back it up with some type of physical movement, then that just makes it that much more real, and vise versa. If you ever get into a fight, you will feel confedent that you can Jab because you ARE "Powerful" and you can Side kick with athority because you ARE "confedent" in this skill.
I believe in multi-tasking in all areas of my life. In my Martial Arts training, you won't just see me stretching one muscle; you will see me doing 3 different stretches all at once. When you see me lifting weights, you will notice I'm not just concentrating on 1 body part, I am actually isolating 2 or 3 muscles. When you see me using a JKD technique, I am using mental imagery and positive affirmations.
Sadness = Frustration
Anger = unresolved sadness, or intense frustration
Fear = Lack of knowledge
Happiness = Satisfaction
Desperation = lack of faith, and fear
Faith = theory based on knowledge or lack thereof.
Understand these basic concepts, and you will begin to learn to be mentally tougher, its all about emotions.
some will get it ...some wont, Use whats useful, discard the rest.
