Winning Ways

Randall J. Strossen, Ph.D.

Mind over matter: consider the image. Youre standing over your barbell or a stone or at an arm-wrestling table, or youre holding a Scottish hammer, or even a golf club or a tennis racket, and youre contemplating the task at hand. The long and short of it is, either youll succeed in your task or you wont, and the reason lies not in your strength or technique but in your head. Sure, your physical condition and performance capabilities are half the battle--without them your barbell still would be on the ground--but what matters most is whats going on between your ears. Your mind is an all-powerful tool and an integral part of your training arsenal. It coaxes you through your workouts, allows you to adapt to changes, enables you to meet challenges and reach your goals, and gets you through rough patches--or NOT!

Winning Ways: How to Succeed In the Gym and Out will help you harness your mind to accomplish the tasks at hand. Comprised of the final 85 original "IronMind" columns written for IRONMAN magazine, the book combines psychological theory and research with practical ideas for making progress in the gym and out. Learn how to set and reach goals; develop mental toughness, confidence, and inner strength; overcome training problems and distractions; and harness creativity for change and growth. Use "chunking" to help handle big, overwhelming tasks. Optimize "flow" to get through tough workouts. Understand your "locus of control" to manage your outcomes. Listen to your mood to modify your workout. Get bigger gains with "grinders." Discover the critical differences between "winners" and "losers" and what makes a champion. What exactly is a "just noticeable difference" and how will it fairly measure your progress? What about sleep? Responsibility? Stress? Change? Hard work? Expectations? Its all there and so much more. Randall Strossen combines a Stanford University Ph.D. in psychology with his bone-deep involvement in the iron game, and in the spirit of IronMind, the result is dramatic: fresh, new approaches to how you think and what you do. Winning Ways are real and powerful and can be applied not only to your strength training, but also in your life in general--at work, at play, at home. Become the winner youve always wanted to be! 216 pp.