Every athlete who works and trains hard will have bad days where we stumble and we have to find a way to pick ourselves up and move forward! But how you do this is very individual to each person!
Some can stand up, use what happened as a learning experience and carry on but for some it is not this easy and excuses start to appear for reassurance and emotional reasons!
Stumbling, falling, bad training days, and even failing, is not a bad thing and it happens to all of us a lot more than we would like! But how we deal with it is key!
For me, I find it hard when I fall/fail at something or have a bad day training but the biggest thing I have learnt is to think about it at the time, find out what went wrong and then learn from it and leave it behind at the gym!
Days when I would take my training dramas home with me just led to me being in a massive sulk for the rest of the day which is not pleasant for anyone – trust me!
Leaving it all at the gym is not my way of ignoring what has happened but me realising that it does no good to dwell on something or to make excuses for it! Yes, I may have trained a lot before it, I wasn’t feeling strong, I had had a busy day working but who knows what you will have done before hand in a competition and it is likely that there are many people out there who exactly the same as you.
Too many times I see athletes posting on social media, here is my last set of muscle ups excuse, the bad technique I had done this this and this before. Today’s training was bad because I didn’t hit my max lift today; where has my strength gone?
Writing excuses and negative comments on social media leaves a lasting negative thought in your head around your day’s training and makes you believe it was OK to do badly. Yes it is OK not to max lift everyday or have a bad gymnastics session but you should not need to make excuses for it! If you did your best that is all you could do that day!
Every training session for me gets my full effort, even if it is just for that day! No one is going to feel 100% everyday, so as long as you give all you can each session then you are improving and doing your best!
Never beat yourself up for having a bad day! Embrace what you have managed to do and realise how lucky you are to be able to do it!
Negative thoughts leaving the gym leave lasting negative thoughts around an exercise or lift so never leave feeling that you didn’t do your best.