Many parameters play a role in sporting success, such as workplace, lifestyle, state of mind, environmental or time constraints. To reach your goals faster and improve your performance, create the conditions for your own success. To do this, determine the criteria that you can influence and plan strategies to carry out your plans and protect yourself from anything that can slow down your progress.
What is a Performance-Enhancing Environment?
The environment in which you exercise has a significant impact on the success of your physical activities. You can optimise your environment with these simple tips:
- Arrange your training space, ensuring that you have enough room to perform your movements safely and that all your equipment is within easy reach and ready to be used when you need it.
- Get the right tools: fitness equipment, accessories, mats for floor exercises, and also multimedia equipment, headphones, shoes, clothes, etc.
- Find reliable sources to inform you and learn new exercises: virtual coaching applications, podcasts, YouTube channels of confidence coaches, books and so on.
- Develop healthy habits by taking care of your diet and sleep, limiting sources of stress and working on the regularity of your sports practice.
- Other beneficial activities.
Consider yourself as an actor in your fitness project: by writing your own rules, you give yourself the means to create the right conditions for your success.
Eliminate Doubt Factors and Feel Confident
The quality of your environment also depends heavily on your perception of it. Once your fitness space is ready, and your life rhythm is set, it’s time to gain confidence and take stock of your state of mind:
- Protect yourself from anything that makes you doubt. Among the remarks you receive and the advice you are given, only retain what is constructive and helps you to move forward.
- Keep track of your progress so that you have a numerical and objective basis for judgement: the number of repetitions of a fitness exercise, distance covered, weight lifted, etc. This will help you to make better decisions and adjust your training conditions effectively. You will soon realise that you have no reason to underestimate yourself: your record will speak for itself!
- Start from reality rather than from an ideal and formulate concrete objectives: by taking into account your constraints (time, space, means or even those linked to your state of health and physical condition), you will minimise frustration and achieve faster progress in the long term. The only right pace is your own pace!
- Surround yourself with positive partners who share the same goals as you and support your progress.
You Hold All the Keys to Build Your Own Success!
By removing negativity and anything else that hinders the development of your sport, you create a space in which everything is possible. Of course, you can’t control everything around you that affects your performance. The weather, the behaviour of your opponents during a match or the occurrence of injuries, for example, are among the elements that are difficult to control. However, you can take into account as many eventualities as possible to act preventively. By anticipating and observing your surroundings, it is easier for you to be calm, more confident, improve your thinking and cope with difficulties. The key to your success also lies in your ability to adapt: always remain open to possibilities other than those you had imagined at the start. Question yourself, learn and bounce back.
To create a really virtuous loop, try out the visualisation techniques used for the mental preparation of athletes: picture the athlete you want to be and you will see results! Surround yourself with role models and examples to follow, become passionate about your favourite athletes, make a note of all the quotes that make you feel good or that make you think. All of this helps to create the right conditions for your next victories!
Check out our Fitness & Training page for more advice.