Mind and Muscle: Can Doubt Hinder Muscle Growth?

By now, we are all familiar with the Placebo Effect and what it is can do for mind and muscle.  If not, you can find a great post about the subject on the Mind and Muscle Placebo Effect.

Also, this is Part 2 of a 3 part series.  You can view part 1: Mind Over Muscle right here.

The placebo is usually used in the medical practice when a patient is in need of medicine and gets a placebo, or a substance with no active ingredients.  After the “drug” is taken, the patient feels real, positive results.  The patient knew the drug healed people and believed he would be healed, and sure enough, he was healed.

The Placebo Effect

Obviously it wasn’t some random non medicine that healed the person, so the question remains, what healed him?

The answer is, he healed himself.

The power of the human brain is absolutely amazing.  It made your body and can heal it.  The thing that really healed the person was his strong belief that he would indeed be healed.  It didn’t matter that he thought it was the “medicine” that healed him, it was his belief that healed him.

The Placebo Effect heals people because they believe they will be healed, but there is also an opposite reaction, the Nocebo Effect.  This is when a person totally believes that they won’t be healed, so they don’t get healed.

What Does This Have To Do With Muscle Building?

The placebo and nocebo effect can also be found when trying to gain muscle.  People do or don’t become healed based upon their beliefs, and people can gain or not gain muscle based on their beliefs.

This is really a problem in the fitness industry and it’s more prevalent with guys trying to gain muscle. I’m not exactly talking about the placebo effect being prevalent, but in a person’s faith in their physical abilities.  So many people get on an exercise kick expecting immediate and mind blowing results, but once those results don’t occur overnight, the person’s faith in what they were doing will plummet and doubt will set in.

Just as in the Placebo or Nocebo Effect, a person can often receive physically what they believe to be totally true mentally.  This can include sickness, health, fat, or muscle.  The ability to change your body can be the same way.  When you really believe that you will gain muscle and do the things you should, you probably will gain muscle. It can also work against you, if you don’t think you can gain muscle, you probably won’t, and you are working against yourself.

When you start believing something with all you have, you set the gears of progress in motion in your mind. This activates your brain to do what it needs to do to get you what you want.  The bad part is, it also works in reverse, when you lose your faith and let doubt come in, those same wheels screech to a halt and will usually shift into reverse.  It’s like having a lot of basketballs in your hands and right before you get where you want, you start to doubt that you’ll make it and all of the basketballs fall out of your hands and go bouncing away.

The best way to keep the forward progress going is the stay full of positive thoughts and not let doubt set in.  Below are a few easy, basic steps to keep the muscle building success going:

1. Positivity:  This is as necessary as it is obvious and simple.  If you are constantly thinking positively about your muscle gains, then you leave no room for doubt.  I don’t want to turn this into a therapy session, just keep it simple.  With all of your thoughts about supplements, nutrition, and training, think about how they are positively creating muscle building results.
2. Reinforcement Visualization- You should not only think positively about your efforts to gain muscle, but you should also visualize your success.  Imagine yourself looking how you want to look, lifting how you want to lift, or dating the person you want to date.  Don’t just imagine this, interact with it.  Make it a mental movie that you are the star of and feel how great it feels to accomplish your goal.  Where you go in your mind, you’ll go in the body.
3. Believe in Your Abilities:  You must always believe that you can and will accomplish your goal.  Never doubt that you can gain strength and size.  If you don’t believe you can build muscle, you will quit way before you actually do.

Winning the muscle building mind game is just one part of success.  You have to have a solid training, nutrition, and rest and recovery plan in place to really take full advantage of your mind and muscle connection.  Your mind can control your brain, and your brain controls your body.  Use your mind and muscle connection and use your positive thoughts for your advantage.

A few vidoes to sum it all up: