How do you deal with setbacks? What happens if you get injured or become sick? What if you fall off your diet? Do you just give up and say, “Oh well. This is a chance for me to relax and wait until I recover. I’ll do something after.” or are you proactive, try to grow from it, and always try to improve?
I love the stories where athletes get injured, say maybe they injured their leg, and all of the sudden they have all of this time to focus on their upper body. They become very good at upper body pressing or upper body pulling. Whatever it is, they take the time to work on what was formerly a weakness and bring it up to a strength. The same can be said if you injure your upper body and have a shoulder injury. You can work on your running or you can work on some form of assisted squatting. Always focus on getting better vs using it as an excuse to stay home and not train.
What if you’re sick and you can’t train? I think a lot of us would use that as an opportunity to eat ice cream or eat those comfort foods because you don’t feel well, but you should actually use it as an opportunity to dial in your nutrition. Unless you have a stomach bug, it’s the one thing you can control. You could use it to heal your body quicker. If you’re eating the right foods with a lot of nutrients and vitamins your body could recover a little bit quicker. So, there’s no sense in making it worse when you already can’t train. You don’t want to add extra calories or eat unhealthy and make it something you have to work off that much harder when you get back to the gym.
What about your diet? This is probably one of the most common setbacks. What happens if you cheat on your diet or you eat way too much during the holidays? Do you just give up and say, “Well, this just isn’t for me.” or do you get back after it the next day? For me, it’s always a running joke that the diet starts Monday because weekends are usually the hardest part for me. You’ve got to have the mindset that you’re never going to give up. You can persevere and it just takes time.
One thing you can do when you’re off your diet is to learn from it. What triggered you to overeat? For me, it’s typically waiting too long to eat after the first signs of hunger, or not having a plan for the next meal and getting hungry. If I have no clue what’s for dinner, I’m home and it’s late afternoon, I start getting hungry so I go look in the pantry and everything is fair game. If I have a plan for dinner I can wait until then and eat a salad or piece of fruit, something to tide me over until dinner time.
I think the key to dealing with setbacks is always trying to improve. Always have the mindset of trying to make yourself better. In any negative situation you can always find something positive from it and try to improve some aspect of your life in one way or another.
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