3 Gym-Based Mental Fitness Training Tools

By Rob Shaul, Founder

Early on in my coaching career, I harshly and unfairly judged athletes who struggled with the mental fitness element of completing intense, multi-mode work capacity events. I’m embarrassed and ashamed by this.

I snapped out of it, however, and came to do my job: to help coach the mental side of physical stress. Here are 3 mental fitness tools I deployed in the gym to great effect.

1. Work Capacity Event Rules

I coach three “rules” to help athletes through hard, intense work capacity events like this one:

9-Minute AMRAP

• 5x Power Clean @ 75/115#
• 5x Burpees
• 4x 25m Shuttles

Rule 1: No rest in transition between exercises.

This is the hardest to follow. When athletes move from exercise to exercise, the natural inclination is to rest before starting the reps of the new exercise … in this case, pause or rest after the burpees before beginning the 25m shuttles.

The body doesn’t need the rest. Even if the athlete thinks they are smoked after the prior exercise, their body is only smoked from that exercise, and is relatively “fresh” for the change in mode. But the mind sees this change as an opportunity to rest/pause—and the mental fitness side of this is to not pause or rest, but push through. This takes practice and training, and as a coach I state this before these sessions and remind athletes as they work through it. Often they surprise themselves with their ability to begin the next exercise in the circuit without rest.

Rule 2: Stop to rest with 1 or 2 reps in the tank—i.e., don’t go completely to failure before stopping to rest.

This may seem counterintuitive to coaching mental fitness, but the ultimate goal is to finish all the work as quickly as possible. If the athlete goes to complete failure, it simply means they have to rest longer before starting again. So I always coached not to do this, but to stop and rest just before this point, which will allow the athlete to take a shorter rest and ultimately complete the entire event faster.

This is also something I learned from the high-level mountain guides and alpinists I work with—on the mountain, they are careful to always keep a little in the tank, especially when things are dangerous. They always want that little bit of turbo effort left if needed.

Rule 3: If you have to rest, limit your rest to just 5 breaths.

So, in the event example above, say the athlete, on minute 7, gets to the power cleans, manages three, and has to rest. This rule means they consciously count their breaths after dropping the barbell, and after five—pick it up again, even if they can muster a single rep. I’ve used this 5-breath rule with my athletes, and myself, both in the gym and in the field hiking uphill or backcountry hunting to great effect. But you have to be strict, and in the gym I’d watch the athletes and help them count their breaths—I was that strict.

2. Don’t Look at the Clock

This is a great mental fitness training tool to use for extended work capacity (20–30 minutes) or gym-based endurance (40–60 minutes) efforts.

Here is an example event:

40-Minute Grind

• 10x Sandbag Clean & Press @ 40/60#
• Run 200m with Sandbag
• Rope Climb

What I would do is set up the countdown timer on the big digital wall clock, then challenge the athletes to complete this session without looking at the clock or their own watches. This is much more difficult than you’d imagine, and the mental fitness goal is to set your mind to “grind mode,” not “finish mode.” Personally, this is the one mental fitness training tool I find the most difficult—especially for the first half of the session.

3. Change the Finish Time at the Last Minute … and Gauge Reaction

This is a pretty “dick” move—but super effective. Take either of the example sessions from above, and announce to your athletes 30–60 seconds before the time ends that they need to keep going, and don’t state how long.

Then gauge their individual reactions—it will be obvious. The mentally fit won’t flinch. Those less mentally fit will grimace, whine, or bitch.

You don’t need to extend the session much beyond 60 seconds. The mental fitness learning moment is in the initial reaction to the session extension.

This type of thing happens often in the real world—a false summit, getting lost on a long mountain event and having to retrack, unexpected weather that slows, a tactical mission that goes way past the planned duration.

As a coach, the reaction I was looking for was no emotion—i.e., the athlete didn’t flinch and just kept grinding. Some of my most mentally fit athletes, when I did this to them, would actually cheer!

After I actually end the session, I task each athlete to reflect on their initial reaction when I extended the session. Did they feel sorry for themselves? Were they mad at me? All this is wasted mental energy. The goal is to embrace the unfairness and keep grinding.

Comments/Feedback?
Email rob@mtntactical.com

Here’s More on Mental Fitness:
The 8 Core Attributes of Mental Fitness
The Mental Fitness Self-Diagnostic Tool
Mental Fitness is Mode Specific: Why Mental Fitness in One Area Doesn’t Transfer To Another