Mike Mahler just had an intriguing interview with Testosterone’s magazine. As usual, he gets into the nitty gritty of what it really takes to be a fitness warrior. He provides awesome workout tips and strategies to lose fat and gain muscle.

Here are some snippets of that interview:

T-Nation: Mental toughness goes along with something we’ve written about here at Testosterone before: self-talk. What is that exactly?

Mahler: Well, one of the great potential benefits of hard training is it teaches us how to use our minds to push forward. If you give up mentally, it’s over. You could have the best training technique in the world, but if you’re not mentally tough, you’ll give up when things get arduous.

We’re all constantly having internal dialogues without ourselves. If you’re telling yourself that you’re weak and that it’s time to give up, that’s exactly what you’ll do. On the other hand, if you tell yourself to keep pushing forward, that’ll drastically increase your odds for success in your workouts and in life in general. The dialogues that we have with ourselves are “self-talk.”

I learned about self-talk from Richard Machowicz, author of Unleashing The Warrior Within.

When Richard went through Navy Seal training, he saw a lot of physically impressive people give up because they weren’t mentally tough, an example being when his group was ordered to run several miles. Just when everyone thought it was over, the instructor ordered several more miles. Half the class collapsed on the spot.

Were they defeated physically at that point? No, they probably could’ve kept going if they were mentally prepared for it. They were defeated mentally. Richard pushed through not just with great physical conditioning but by giving himself the right messages via self-talk. No matter what was happening to him, he knew that he was going to pass. He burned his bridges with failure and there was nowhere left to go but the other way, to success.

I look at strength and conditioning training as much more than just being impressive physically. We all want to look good, be in shape, and be strong, but what’s the use if it doesn’t carry over to other areas of life such as business, integrity, and our personal lives?

When you push through hard workouts and learn the discipline of training consistently in order to reach a goal, you have very powerful self-knowledge and skill sets which can help you push through in other important areas of life. However, if you compartmentalize who you are as a trainee from who you are in the rest of your life, the benefits won’t carry over. That’s a travesty!

Ironically, I see many people train the way they should be living their lives and many people live their lives the way they should be training!

T-Nation: So give us an example of mental toughness training.

Mahler: Ori Hofmekler has a system called Controlled Fatigue Training where you purposely put yourself in a fatigued state before strength training. For example, go do ten 100 yard sprints, then go do your strength-training workout. That fresh strength you normally have is gone and now you have to push through mentally.

In the beginning you’ll be weaker and many will say screw it and give up. Others will push forward, and once you adapt your strength comes back and goes up.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE HERE! 

WOW!