I'm still working on it, but once that's out of the way my 'Zone' will be the perfect storm.

Does this mean you will be picturing George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg on a boat fishing before a lift?

It's not a vulcan thing.

Hahaha as a star trek fan I appreciate this.

Good article and good topic. Personally I just try to empty my head before I lift or press anything. And I think I've had the greatest success by just taking things as they are. If I make the lift, awesome. If I miss? There is always next time. I try to keep ego and all that out of the equation. I just try to do the best that I can do with what I've got. I've tried getting "pumped" before a lift (with music or something) but I have never found beneficial results consistent. Now when I bring an mp3 player into the gym its for drowning out the outside noise and poor music choices in the gym. Which reminds me that I pulled my first 405lb deadlift the other day with NSYNC playing in the gym.

For me anxiety has come into play with shoulder pressing. I really hurt my shoulder a couple months ago and its taken a long time to get myself comfortable with pressing heavier weights. And this is entirely in getting my head straight. I just keep calm and focus on making sure I am set up right.

So, skipped today and everything is now pushed back by one day.

This sucks.

So you know how I've been feeling pessimistic about my Deadlift..I looked back on my log (my real life log - not the e-Log) and in March at some point I did something awesome for Deadlifts: 405 for 3 singles and then a double. Infact, in March I was able to do the most numner of attempts with 405 and 425.

Well, I looked over my videos and I remembered that at the time for me to be in the "Flow" I was very calm. No fear. I was aware of the lift and there was probably a bit of anxiety but no fear. And recently being afraid has become a big thing to me. Everytime I aproach the bar I am always scared that what if I fail? My failing will prove how weak I am and how I am just not capable of getting strong.

BUT, over the last week I have learned to deal with this. I am going to test this out today when I do go and deadlift, but my new solution to these hindering thoughts is that: I am not in a race. I don't have to prove anything to anyone. I am doing this for myself. This is not the last time in my life I am going to Deadlift. So it is OK to fail. It is NOT the end of the world at all.

Thinking about it like this will hopefully calm me down. Like you said, Eric: there has to be an inner sense of excitement but I cannot be too anxious because I think that is what causes me to fail th most: I get scared and in this, I tense up (like you described) and when my body is stiff how can I go through a lift? I cannot. So I need to loosen up and not take things too seriously. I forget sometimes that there will always be a next time.

SO, today, I am going in with a different mindset. I hope it works and I am able to meet my mini-goals for today's workout.

I like this post, Eric. Good article. I need to read it more often so I don't have these panic attacks.

This is just the first part of I don't know how many posts on this because I haven't even begun to probe the depths of it but let's just say that where a lot of people go wrong is thinking that there is no such thing as being too "pumped up".

Think of the level of the emotional component as arousal. Anxiety, etc, is not ALL bad. But there has been an emphasis by most trainers and coaches on the "psyched up" component and that is what most lifters have learned. Basically thinking that the more arousal the better the performance. Wrong! Absolutely wrong.

Now when we were discussing this before I mentioned that we should seek a middleground. That is, that there is something to be learned from the people who get all psyched up and there is something to be learned from those who seek a calm, quiet place, so to speak. However, I did NOT mean that the optimum level is therefore always right smack in the middle of the scale.

Because if you REALLY think about past lifting performances and the cognitive states that have accompanied success and failure you will start to realize that it's almost like 'bad medicine'. Meaning you have a sweet spot that is right for you BUT anything to the left or right of that does not result in these incremental performance declines, which is how it would be if the sweet spot was always in the middle of an arousal scale. What you have instead is technical failure or "castostrophic" failure on either side of it. So we are talking about a threshold.

But I truly think that most need to learn how to 'bring it down' rather than notch it up.

I mentioned the guys that really get psyched up and CHARGED before a big lift. You know the kind of thing I'm talking about. Go look at some videos of that and look at how this psyching up process affects their BODY. This is all about mind/body connection and the key is muscular tension.

You know, I'm always telling people to relax the neck. Usually they think it is all about avoiding injury and that is part of it but it is mostly about when I see inappropriate tension. I may see it in the neck but I imagine it travelling down the kinetic chain.

My focus has been shifting to a sort of happy medium between "The Zone" and a splash of emotional arousal. My main problem is ALWAYS the anxiety of approaching an attempt with a weight that I have never attempted or attempted successfully. I'm still working on it, but once that's out of the way my 'Zone' will be the perfect storm. :P