When considering how you feel about your last week of training (or life), be sure not to limit your vocabulary (and thereby your options) to simply “good or bad”. I understand the otherwise potential utility in keeping the language this simple, and I admit that I sometimes remind my athletes to think of their training program as keeping a scorecard for each week in terms of whether the week was a “win or a loss.” So I recognize the potential contradiction I just offered; however, my point in encouraging athletes to think about their training in terms of a win-loss record is related to zooming-out and looking at the week as a whole, versus focusing on one or two aspects that didn’t go 100% according to plan. The latter could sabotage the entire week. And when this occurs week after week, then you have an athlete that keeps putting unnecessary dents in their own armor.
When you consider the entirety of the week, using both objective and subjective data points, then the overwhelming majority of your weeks should be “good weeks”…a victory! You could even use a word other than “good,” as in reporting that the week went “great!” If you don’t believe that it was a great week, or even a good week, then why not? To take it a step further, just because it wasn’t a “great week,” does that automatically imply it was a bad week? Probably not.
Even if you don’t think it was a great/good week of training, expanding your vocabulary in that regard means you’ll have many more words to choose from that have a positive connotation from which you can label a particular workout or week. The practical application of the bigger vocabulary is that you won’t be so quick to label a workout in a negative manner, and then you get to score one in the win category! For example, a long run done in the summertime with high heat/humidity isn’t going to be your fastest run, so it will appear relatively slow on paper, yet does this automatically imply that the run was “terrible” and you’re “losing progress.” Of course not.
Our thoughts are framed by the exact words we use. “We think in terms of language”—George Carlin. Elite athletes who frequently use mental imagery and develop such “scripts” for races are demonstrating this element of psychological skills training. Specifically, they practice the exact words/phrases (cue words) they want to say at various points in the race/course (or game) in order to keep the self-talk positive (or at least neutral) and to keep the attention task-specific.
It is a skill that takes deliberate practice to develop. Bottom line: Develop a bigger vocabulary and you’ll be better able to cognitively reframe your endeavors.
Train smarter, not harder!
Mike