What is a Mental Fitness Trainer?

We are all familiar with a physical fitness trainer and we see them in every gym around the world. Their role is to help you increase your strength & condition to increase your physical attributes.

However, I believe in most cases physical fitness is done more so for the ego as opposed to the health benefits. The reason I say this is because when training at a gym it gives you a reason to go shopping for sportswear and to also be seen in that sportswear at the gym. In most gyms around the world you will see pictures and videos being taken for social media in between every set, to let everyone know they are indeed at the gym.

Yet we see the prevalence of mental health issues all around us. This is why I believe there should be more mental fitness trainers in the world to help counter the imbalance present in our society.

A mental fitness trainer is someone who helps optimise your thinking patterns in order for you to maximise your efficiency & productivity.

A successful training program allows you to observe your actions from a fresh perspective, thus increasing the scope of understanding your life path.

I began seeing the need for mental fitness training in 2016 when I was in Perth, Australia. At this time I had started offering on-court personal training, but in the back of my mind I knew there was something missing.

As a professional basketball player, it became very apparent to me that to get the edge over your opponent the battle must be won mentally because all athletes more or less partake in a similar physical training regimen.

This is evident when you hear a coach tell his or her players to focus during a timeout, especially towards the end of the game. The same instructions can be heard in classrooms and meeting rooms around the world to get everyone attentive on the task at hand.

However, during my 25 years of playing basketball from age 4 to 29, not once was there a discussion or implementation of mental fitness training.

It is easy to tell someone to focus, but if the technique to focus is never explained or practiced, what expectation do they have for their demand of focus?

This void became more apparent after I had retired from the game of basketball in 2018 following my season in Germany. As I started my travels, I realised this issue was not localised to the world of sport, but it was an issue of the world itself.

The average person was no longer doing simple exercises to stay fit; it had expanded to exercises I previously thought were reserved for high-performance athletes. On its own that is not a problem because people are simply increasing their physical fitness. However, when you see the rise of mental health issues, I believe the time spent on longer workouts should be allocated to mental fitness.

Personally, I believe 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and 100 squats daily is all you need to stay physically fit.

But as we all know physical fitness is only one piece to the puzzle of an overall healthy state of being. The other piece we are well aware of is nutrition. But even real nutrition has been replaced with powders to compliment the physical fitness training. These two receive all the attention, which leaves perhaps the most important piece neglected, mental health.

It is not a coincidence anxiety & depression are slowly becoming the foundation of our society. It all goes back to feeding the ego and neglecting the true self.

Mental fitness training is a solution that can help us recalibrate our minds on a deep level.

What type of exercises is involved with mental fitness training?

Meditating

Journaling

Manifesting

Those are just a few exercises, but I would like to give a specific example of each so you can begin to explore a bit beneath the surface level of mental fitness training.

Breathing -WimHof Method

Meditating- 6Phase Meditation byVishenLakhiani

Journaling — Dream Journal(morning), Daily Journal, Grateful Journal(night)

Thinking — Allocate 30minutesperdaytositwith yourthoughts

Focusing- Sit still in achairandstareat onespotfor 5minutes(startwith1minuteandprogress)

Manifesting- Visualisation while listing topositiveaffirmations

Aligning — Listen to binaural beats with headphones on

The most important part of mental fitness training is staying consistent. Insight Timer is a great tool to use to track your daily meditating, manifesting and aligning as the app features many meditations including my suggestion, as well as affirmations & binaural beats.

As Ghandi said, “be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Therefore, I created a 4-week mental fitness training program called Perth Mind for those striving to reach their full potential.

Take care of your overall well being and use this lockdown to create new habits to become the best version of yourself.

Originally published at https://www.brandonjmcgill.com on April 1, 2020.