How to prevent the deceptive heart from leading us down a path of overtraining, undertraining or just bad attitude? A traditional coaching path is to adopt some kind of sports psychology training. It's behavioural adaption using a number of tricks. I attended a class once that taught how to identify your mental trigger to be used during training or races. This has some success however it can be only temporal and has side effects.
The thing is if your heart is deceptive, as we examined in the last post, then adopting the mindset of the trickster can hardly be an unhealthy approach. Deception + deception = greater deception. This is a spiral of thought that could lead, and often does, to selfishness. Everythings fine so long as we're all playing according to my tune, my training needs and suppporting my goals. Woe betide the loving wife or girlfriend who routinely supports or even shares in her man's passion for sport who decides she wants to do something different with him.
My submission is that we want to be athletes, not just with healthy and efficient hearts, but also athletes with good hearts. Do you know what makes a heart good? Generosity, compassion, forgiveness and sacrifice makes for a big heart. Every club I have belonged to thrives on the people with big hearts. Those willing to direct their time, talents and energies to supporting others. If you really want a good coach look at the way he treats his wife or she treats her husband. If you see respect, tenderness, gratitude, honour and dignity then you probably have a person worth listening too. If you set you own plan then it's self evident that to succeed as an athlete first you have to love well the people in your life.
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