It Is Never “Good Enough”: Creating The Champion Mentality

It’s sometimes hard to find the motivation to push yourself to prepare for a competition or a show, or the motivation to push yourself in the wake of a loss.

Do You Have The Right Mentality?

There’s a lot about bodybuilding and weightlifting competitions that is outside your control. Your genetics and the length of time you have been training are not within your control, and neither are your competitors’ genetics or the time they have been training. You may have lost the competition as soon as your competitors showed up. But while there is an element of luck in competing, that’s no reason to return to your same routine once you get back to the gym. If you keep losing, there’s something you can change.

To be a champion, you have to learn to hate to lose, and you also have to find a way to outdo your rivals. You have to be smarter than them and work harder than they do. These are the only things about your body and your abilities that are under your control.

Staying Focused And Using The Right Advice

One of the easiest things in the world to do is get advice. Everyone at the gym, on the Internet, and in your life has some piece of advice to offer you about your workout, your diet and pretty much everything else.

Most of it is probably wrong or based on misinformation. What’s worse, the advice you get from bodybuilding magazines and websites is often just a way to sell the latest hype supplements or equipment. Do your own research and find your own sources of information, not just what the biggest guy at the gym swears by. He might not have any idea what he’s doing either. If you do decide to try something based on the advice of someone else, no matter how small a change it seems, research it first. It’ll take a few minutes but you could be saving yourself a ton of time, money and energy that you could have spent making actual progress instead of stagnating or even undoing years of hard work.

Taking control of your information is the first way to change your routine for the better. You might find something you’ve been doing for months or years has been holding you back. You have a plan, and now it’s time to get to work. If you’re up against people with good genes, you’ve got to work harder than they do. If you’re up against people who work as hard as you do, you’ve got to push it even harder.

This means not quitting with just a few minutes left when you’re doing cardio, not taking just one night off to the party. If you let all these little “just”s creep up on you, it could come down to “just” a few pounds of body weight getting between you and striations. It could “just” knock you down from third place to fourth, or down from the top ten. “Just” makes participants, not champions.

It Is Never “Good Enough”

If you’ve been working out for years thinking your results are good enough, it’s hard to break out of that pattern. But the people placing in the top three and taking away awards don’t think in terms of good enough, so why should you? If your body is not the best it could be, why are you stopping instead of throwing in those extra reps into your sets? If you do one extra rep per set, you could be getting an extra half an hour of time on the machines every week.

Those extra reps add up, just like those minutes slacking add up.

Watch Mr. Olympia Champions: Jeremy Buendia, Phil Heath, Flex Lewis