USING RITUALS TO MAXIMIZE YOUR GAINS

USING RITUALS TO MAXIMIZE YOUR GAINS

By Shane Robert

Athletes have long had a reputation for being superstitious. If you’ve ever seen a baseball player, or whole team as happens from time to time, go the season without shaving, then you are familiar with this idea. Spending half your year not shaving or trimming your beard is an extreme example of something that happens every day in all realms of athletics to some small degree. Perhaps it is eating the same meal before a game or contest, or only chewing a certain type of gum during games, or any number of other things.

It may sound silly and I’m sure that the big dumb meathead stereotype is closely connected to these superstitions in a lot of people’s minds. They would be very wrong, however. What we call superstitions could actually be called rituals which should be called behavioral training. These rituals are amazingly powerful for training our brains and can be used for good or for ill, depending on how you utilize them.

THE POWER OF RITUAL

Our brains are amazing. They are able to do massive amounts of calculations every second of every day of our lives, both while awake and asleep. Part of how it does this is by chunking information and creating ‘default modes.’ In other words, our brains store commonly encountered information in a way that we don't have to actively think about it. Two examples that most people can relate to are where things are in your refrigerator and reading. If I asked you to tell me, for example, where the milk is in your refrigerator, or the mustard, or whatever staple you usually have in your fridge in the same spot, you’d be able to tell me without really having to think about it, even if the fridge isn’t in front of you. Certainly when you go to grab the milk, it is an almost unconscious action. Reading is similar. We reach a point of literacy where we don’t ‘read’ words so much as recognize the like pictures. If I hold up a picture of a duck, my brain thinks ‘duck.’ If I hold up a card with the word ‘duck’ spelled out, my brain automatically thinks ‘duck’ just as fast as it did in the picture. I don’t have to look at the letters and sound out their noises.

Habits, or rituals, can have a similar effect on our brains and the associations that it makes. This was famously established by Ivan Pavlov and his research with dogs. To show how humans are no different than a hungry dog, we can look at smokers. Many smokers will combine their smoking with other actions, such as pairing their cigarette with coffee. When they give up smoking, long after the actual nicotine withdrawal has abated, they will feel a craving for a cigarette when they drink coffee. It’s classical Pavlovian conditioning.

3 WAYS TO USE RITUAL FOR GAINS

1. Create a bedtime ritual

We all know the importance of sleep in every aspect of physical and mental performance. There is no debate at this point, and getting quality sleep should be a top priority for all of us. For innumerable reasons, many people struggle to fall asleep. Ritual can be harnessed to help alleviate this issue. Anyone who has ever cared for a child for 24 hours or more knows that this is a thing. There is a reason it is so common to eat dinner, have a bath, brush, cuddles/stories/songs/etc, then the kid is zonked out and ready to sleep. It is about more than simply needing to do these tasks before bed. It creates a ritual that tells the kids' brains, once they step into the bath, that sleep is coming soon. We, as adults, can do the same thing with our bedtime. There is no single way to do this, but if you always floss and brush 60 minutes before the time you intend to get in bed, then read once you are in bed, the action of flossing will be a trigger to your brain that sleep is 60-90 minutes away.

It’s important that the bed is only used for 3 things, and two of those should be lying down to read and then, shortly thereafter, sleeping. Anytime you use it for something else, you start to train your brain that your usual ritual no longer applies. If you can stick to the ritual for long enough, going to sleep becomes very easy, even if it isn’t at your usual bedtime.

2. Create a lift ritual

If you have ever heard the expression, “never miss in the gym,” this is related. If you watch the best lifters lift, they do the same series of movements before initiating a lift, no matter how light or heavy it may be. This means if they set their feet, they set the same foot first every time. If they are gripping the bar, they grip with the same hand first every time. If they have some little idiosyncrasy like a stomp or butt wiggle, they do it every time.

By doing the same action every time, and combining this with never missing, these lifters train their brains that when they do these actions, they successfully lift the bar. Since this is done with all weights, even warm-ups, it ensures that the overwhelming majority of lifts are successful. Once they get to truly heavy weights, the brain doesn’t get weird, it simply does what it always does and makes the lift.

3. Create a PR ritual

Along the lines of number 2 above, creating a ritual around PR’s just might help condition your brain to make more successful maximum attempts. As above, following a lift ritual will be important, and never missing it will be important. If we now throw in a ritual around the occasional days that you go for a PR, whether a new 1RM or any sort of rep PR, when you go for a true max, max style of PR, then it will be easier and more likely to happen.

Eat the same meal as close to the same time interval before lifting as possible each time. Wear the same shoes and tie them in the same order. Listen to the same PR song before lifting or (if you aren’t competing) while lifting. When you never miss lifts in the gym, including PR attempts, and train your brain to associate a specific series of events (the same meal, the same shoes, the same song, etc.) with always hitting new personal records, you’ll approach each PR attempt mentally primed for success.

Using rituals to train your brain isn't superstition or bro-science. It’s based on genuine science and can have a profound impact on your success in the gym. There are many aspects of our lives where we can condition our brains to make associations from our behavior. As with smoking and coffee drinking, it isn’t always for the good. With a little forethought, we can use this tool for good and avoid the bad. And get stronger in the process.