"Forcing MIND into the MUSCLE"

Force Your Mind Into Your Muscle

"Put it on 130."

I did as I was told, and then watched in amazement as my coach did rep after rep, curling 130 pounds with each arm.

"Put it on 150."

I obeyed—and watched him do it again.

I knew my coach had been a professional boxer, on top of international football, swimming, and diving. I found myself feeling a little sorry for anyone who'd ever had to share a boxing ring with him.

"Take it to 190, or whatever the max is."

I obeyed. And I stared in absolute awe as this remarkable human curled 190 pounds with each arm. The intensity in his eyes, the energy pouring off of him—whatever he was thinking was almost visible in the air. In that moment, I knew something in me had shifted.

This, he told me, is what it means to "force your mind into your muscle."

Mind into muscle

Earlier that day, he'd taught me the idea using boxing. When you train, he said, you don't aim at the surface of the heavy bag—you visualize punching clean through to the other side. That's what putting your mind into your muscle means. And everything I was about to do, he told me, would require exactly that: sending my mind into the right muscles, on purpose.

For two weeks straight, we'd barely lifted anything heavy at all. We'd spend two or three hours together, and 20 to 30 minutes on each single exercise, making sure I was firing every correct muscle and none of the wrong ones. It's been one of the most fascinating experiences of my life. I can't even walk into a gym anymore without spotting someone doing a movement the hard, wrong way.

It feels amazing to be trained by a true champion, and I thank God for the opportunity. He hadn't taken on a female athlete in over eight years. Why me? Because he saw a potential in me that I couldn't yet see in myself.

From zero push-ups to fifty-pound curls

When I first joined his group course for business owners, I was obviously the weakest one there. On day one, I couldn't do a single push-up—not from lack of strength, but because my brain wouldn't send the signal to the muscle that needed to fire. (I was still healing from a long neurological illness.)

But over those weeks, my coach saw something in me: sheer determination. There was the day I was fighting to unclip a piece of equipment—something he could have popped off in a second—and when he reached over to help, I blurted out a flat "No." I'd promised myself I would not give up until my own hands obeyed my own brain. I was so locked in that "no" was all the words I had to spare. I felt like sobbing as my fingers wrestled with the signal. When I finally got it free, I slumped back in relief and explained why I'd waved him off. He'd just backed away and watched, quietly taking it all in.

That determination is why he and his wife decided to invest in me. They've seen me at my lowest, and they wanted to be part of my climb back. His one steady piece of advice? Do not quit. He's pouring everything into helping me become who he's certain I can be.

After that jaw-dropping 190-pound demonstration, he had us trade places.

Minutes earlier, I'd tried the curls myself. Ten pounds—I could barely manage it. Thirty pounds—I could hardly lift it with one arm. But now, after watching him, he set the weight at thirty and told me: force your mind into your muscle. I visualized it. I breathed out slowly. And to my utter shock, thirty pounds came up like it was five. I lifted it over and over.

Then he moved it to fifty. "Try again."

I fixed my mind on the single thought that I could—and I lifted fifty pounds on each arm, several times.

Oh dear God. Forever changed.

"That," he said, "is what you do with every aspect of your life."

Chills ran through me and my eyes stung. "You think it's hard," he said, holding my gaze, "but it isn't hard. Change your perspective, and life gets easier." Then he added, with a grin: "Training correctly is exhausting—mentally and physically."

Mind over matter.

The Barkley

This past weekend, I was having a hard time, and to keep myself from sliding downhill, I went looking for something to lift my thinking. I opened a trail-running group I follow online, and got completely swept up in the drama of the 2016 Barkley Marathons—one of the most brutal races on earth, roughly 100 miles of savage Tennessee terrain that, in thirty years, only a handful of humans have ever finished.

I was glued to my phone for hours, refreshing for updates, crying as we all cheered the runners on. A woman from Utah was in the field, with a real shot at becoming the first woman ever to finish it. Runners dropped with injuries. The conditions were merciless—at one point, only three people had completed the second lap in twenty-two hours, an all-time low. She made a brutal cutoff by the skin of her teeth, with ten minutes to change and force 1,500 calories down before heading back out. She eventually tapped out—and out of the roughly 800 people who've ever been invited to attempt the Barkley, with only fourteen finishers in three decades, that is an astonishing showing.

And then, that evening, the news came: one of the men had crossed the line as a three-time finisher—one of only fourteen people in history to finish it even once.

I sat there in tears, cheering for total strangers who had just shown me, in real time, exactly what my coach had been teaching me in the gym.

Your terrain

Most of us will never run the Barkley. But every single one of us has our own terrain—our own steep climbs, our own mental and physical mountains, our own unexpected storms rolling in off the ridge. And the shift my coach put into words is the same one those runners live by: when you hit the wall and everything in you wants to say this is so hard, try telling yourself instead—

This is doable. I've got this.

Force your mind into your muscle. Change your perspective. And whatever your terrain today, say it with me:

You. Can. Do. This.

I'll be saying it right along with you.

With much love,

Steffi