How Your Mental Toughness Will Transfer To Your Physical Toughness in Fighting

In fighting, being mentally tough means more than being able to take a punch. You’ve got to be resilient and strong in your resolve to defeat an opponent. Furthermore, it takes a lot of mental fortitude to make the commitment to training that is necessary to become a great fighter. Here are some of the ways that your mental toughness can translate to physical toughness in fighting.
Conditioning
Putting tons of time and energy into training didn’t come easily to all of the greatest fighters. Some of them had to work on mental conditioning in conjunction with conditioning in order to hit their training goals. In contrast, plenty of fighters with an abundance of raw natural talent have stopped well short of their potential simply because they didn’t have the self-discipline to immerse themselves in structured training.
A challenging conditioning program like 75 Hard requires steadfast determination. To get the results that you want from your regimen, you’ve got to keep up with it consistently. You can’t choose your training activities piecemeal or waver in your resolve. You must stay committed in order to fully reap the benefits of your conditioning and become a stronger fighter.
Neutrality
One of the toughest parts about fighting is deciding whether to stick to your game plan or make adjustments when things don’t go your way in a match. In general, you need to be adaptive in order to effectively thwart your opponent’s game plan. While you need to be ready to make changes, you have to approach them responsively rather than reactively. What does that actually mean? In effect, you can’t react instinctively or impulsively when something unexpected happens. Instead, you need to be able to process what happened neutrally and objectively.
Neutral thinking makes you more capable of responding with purposeful precision rather than reacting to a low blow in a manner that is overly reactive or maybe even driven by emotion. Your opponent may be trying to stun you and get you to do exactly what anybody’s first instinct would be after a certain type of strike or combination. If you act impulsively, you might be doing the very thing that your opponent is counting on you to do in order to get the better of you.
Staying neutral reinforces your problem solving skills and helps you analyze how to outmatch your opponent objectively. Neutrality empowers you to examine your options without emotions like frustration or fear and simply concentrate on putting your best foot forward to finish a round strong.
Confidence
While it’s good to be neutral, staying conscientious about negativity biases doesn’t mean that you should go into a fight with a neutral attitude about who’s going to win. In fact, you should presume that you’re going to outfight and out-strategize whoever you’re fighting. Visualizing your victory will help you put your plan to get there into action.
Trusting yourself entails more than thinking that you’re stronger or faster than someone. You want to trust yourself to be able to make the right decisions throughout each phase of a match.
Lastly, it’s important to recognize that getting hurt during a fight can really drag you down. Adrenaline may dull some of the extent to which you’re processing pain, but there’s no getting around the fact that getting hit hurts. Applying mental toughness to put mind over matter is going to help you when you’re trying to make a quick recovery from a hard blow. Acknowledge something hurt but move on right away. Whatever hurts is probably still going to hurt later and you can think about it then. While you’re in the ring, you want all of your mental energy to go toward defeating your opponent.
Mikkie is a freelance writer from Chicago. She is also a mother of two who loves sharing her ideas on interior design, budgeting hacks, and DIY. When she’s not writing, she’s chasing the little ones or rock climbing at the local climbing gym.
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