The whiteboard says 800-meter run. Before the coach finishes the briefing, someone in the back has already decided how it's going to go.
"I'm not a runner."
They haven't taken a step yet. Their legs feel fine. But the workout has already been scaled, not on the whiteboard, in their head. They'll jog it a little slower than they could, stop a little sooner than they need to, and walk away with one more piece of proof that they're right about themselves.
We see this every day, and not just with running. "I'm not strong." "I'm always last." "I'm just not a gymnastics person." Those little sentences feel like facts. They're actually stories, and they quietly shape how hard you push, how you handle a bad day, and whether you even show up next week.
This post is about that inner story: where it comes from, why it matters more for your training than most people think, and what you can actually do about it. It goes well beyond our walls here at the gym but let’s talk about it does affect what we’re doing in the gym. There is a reason this is built into this article mini series.
Your Self-Image Is a Training Variable
We talk a lot about programming, nutrition, and sleep. We don't talk nearly as much about how you see yourself, even though it's tied right into what you do.
Researchers call this exercise identity: how much "someone who trains" is part of who you think you are. Observational research has linked a stronger physical activity identity with more physical activity. And a 2024 meta-analysis in Health Psychology Review pooled 40 studies and found that identity isn't fixed. Interventions really did shift how people saw themselves as active people, and in the studies that also tracked behavior, people moved more too (Rhodes et al.).
The honest caveat: that review showed identity can change. It didn't prove that changing identity is what causes the behavior change. But the direction is clear enough to take seriously. The way you see yourself isn't a fixed trait you're stuck with. It's something you can train.
What I Learned Working With a Mindset Coach
I've done two short courses with Joel Cochran through our business mentorship. Joel was a longtime CrossFit coach and gym owner who runs Proclivity, a mindset coaching program..
These courses were small, intimate groups - yikes! The first course started somewhere I didn't expect: the words I use. How I talk about myself, out loud and in my own head, and how those words quietly write my story. Talk about uncomfortable! From there, we dug into emotions and how the body signals them, often before the brain has caught up. The second course was built around what Joel calls the Personal Storybook, which meant actually sitting down with the story I've been telling about myself and coming at it from a few different perspectives.
Neither course was a fix, and they aren't meant to be. What they give us are tools to keep using to get better as a spouse, parent, business owner or employee, and a friend. The vulnerability in that work is real. Looking hard at your own story isn't comfortable. But it convinced me of one thing: the story we tell ourselves has a profound impact on how we live, and that includes how we train.
Joel's full coaching program follows four steps: regulate your body, process your emotions, rebuild your mindset, and step out of survival mode. To be clear, it's a coaching framework, not a research study. But when I went digging, every one of those four steps lines up with something researchers have actually studied. So let's walk through them, with a training lens.
Step 1: Regulate Your Body First
Here's the part most people skip. You can't think your way to a better mindset if your body is stuck in "everything is an emergency" mode.
Joel used an exercise in our courses that made this click for me. He had us read a sentence out loud that started with "What if I never..." and finish it with something that really mattered to us. Then he asked one question: where did you feel that in your body?
Try it yourself. "What if I never get my first pull-up." "What if I never feel at home in my own body." Say it out loud and notice what happens. Maybe your chest tightens. Maybe your stomach drops or your jaw clenches. Nothing physical changed in the room. You just said a sentence, and your body answered anyway.
That's the point. Your body reacts to the stories you tell, whether or not they're true. Noticing that reaction, and naming where you feel it, is step one. You can't calm down something you haven't noticed yet.
There's a name for that skill: interoception, your ability to notice what's happening inside your body (Cleveland Clinic). It's how you know you're hungry, nervous, or about to lose your grip on the pull-up bar. You already use it in the gym every day. Most of us just never point it at the stories in our heads.
It's not just stories, either. Your nervous system (the body's wiring that handles your stress response) doesn't really separate gym stress from life stress. A rough week at work, bad sleep, a tough conversation at home. It all goes into the same bucket as your workouts.
And that bucket affects your results, not just your mood. In a 2008 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 135 college students did the same 12-week strength program. The ones dealing with high life stress gained significantly less strength in the squat and bench press than their low-stress classmates (Bartholomew et al., 2008). A 2014 follow-up from some of the same researchers found that after a hard leg workout, maximal strength bounced back in about 48 hours for low-stress participants, but took the full 96 hours for the high-stress group. The stressed group also felt more sore, more tired, and lower on energy for longer (Stults-Kolehmainen et al., 2014).
Same workout, different outcomes. The only difference was what was going on outside the gym.
So what helps? Some of the simplest stuff. A 2023 meta-analysis in Scientific Reports pooled 12 randomized trials and found that breathwork lowered self-reported stress by a small-to-medium amount compared with control groups (Fincham et al., 2023). The authors were upfront that the studies were small and the results should be read with some caution. Still, it's free, it takes two minutes, and the downside is basically zero.
On the gym floor: Get to class a few minutes early. Before the warm-up, do a quick check: where am I holding today? Then use the warm-up to actually arrive, not just to move. After the workout, lie down for a minute or two of slow breathing before you grab your phone. It's not soft. It's recovery.
Step 2: Process Your Emotions, Don't Bury Them
You hit a workout you were excited about and it went sideways. You missed a lift you've made before. You finished last. Now you're frustrated, embarrassed, maybe a little mad.
Most of us do one of two things with that: pretend it doesn't bother us, or let it spiral into "see, I'm just not good at this." Neither one helps.
There's a simple middle path that's been studied: name it. In a well-known 2007 study in Psychological Science, UCLA researchers found that labeling an emotion in words, literally saying "that's frustration," reduced activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain tied to emotional reactions (Lieberman et al., 2007). It's an older study and a lab setting, not a barbell, but the idea has held up and it's easy to try.
Enter the Emotion Wheel
In my house, the emotion wheel is a running joke. IYKYK.
If you don't know: it's a circle with a few core feelings in the middle, like mad, sad, scared, and happy, that branch out into more specific ones as you move toward the edge. "Mad" might break down into frustrated or disrespected. "Scared" might break down into insecure or overwhelmed. It looks like something from a middle school guidance office. It's also surprisingly useful once you stop laughing out of discomfort.
Researchers call this skill emotional granularity: being able to tell your feelings apart in specific terms instead of lumping everything into "bad" or “fine.” A 2015 review in Current Directions in Psychological Science pulled together studies showing that people who do this well tend to handle tough feelings better. In one two-week diary study, they reported about 30% more ways of dealing with negative emotions. In another, they drank less alcohol when stressed (Kashdan, Barrett, & McKnight, 2015). Most of that research shows a link, not proof of cause and effect, but the pattern is consistent.
Here's why it matters in the gym. "That workout was bad" doesn't give you anything to work with. Compare that to:
"I'm embarrassed because I finished last."
"I'm frustrated because I missed a lift I've made before."
"I'm drained because I slept four hours."
Those are three different feelings with three different fixes. Embarrassment needs a perspective check. Frustration might need a technique conversation with your coach. Drained needs a bedtime.
On the gym floor: After a rough one, give it one honest, specific sentence. "I'm frustrated because I wanted that lift." Then let it be information instead of a verdict. A coach is a great person to say that sentence to, by the way. That's part of what we're here for.
Step 3: Rebuild the Story (and Quiet the Inner Critic)
This is where the "I'm not a runner" voice lives, and it's exactly where my first course with Joel started: with the words. Joel calls that voice the inner critic (or imposter), and everybody has one. The question is whether it's coaching you or just yelling at you.
The research here is some of the strongest in this whole post. A 2011 meta-analysis in Perspectives on Psychological Science pooled 32 studies and found that self-talk strategies (the deliberate cues you say to yourself during a task) improved sport performance by a moderate amount (Hatzigeorgiadis et al., 2011). A 2023 update with more than 18,000 participants landed on almost exactly the same effect (Corcoran & Steele, 2023, preprint).
There's a common fear that if you go easy on yourself, you'll get lazy. The early research on athletes doesn't back that up. A 2018 study of 82 women athletes found that higher self-compassion (treating yourself the way you'd treat a teammate who's struggling) went along with better perceived performance, while self-criticism didn't help performance at all (Killham et al., 2018). It was a small study and the effect was modest, so take it as a promising sign, not the final word. But "be harder on yourself" has no evidence on its side either.
On the gym floor: Swap identity statements for instructions. "I'm not a runner" becomes "short steps, steady breathing." "I always die on burpees" becomes "step up, five at a time." One is a story about who you are. The other is something you can actually do.
Watch the Soft Talk, Too
The inner critic isn't the only voice worth listening for. One of the most useful ideas I picked up working with Joel is something called Soft Talk: the little words that keep us from fully committing. Maybe. Possibly. Could. Somewhat. Should.
They sound harmless. We use them every day without thinking. Listen to a gym full of people, and you'll hear them everywhere:
"I'll try to make it Thursday."
"I should probably scale this."
"Maybe I'll go unbroken."
"I'm kind of working on my pull-ups."
They’ve infiltrated our vocabulary at an astounded rate. If the inner critic is the voice that tears you down, Soft Talk is the voice that quietly leaves the back door open. Nothing's fully on the line, so nothing's fully committed.
The fix is simple, not easy. Say what you're actually going to do.
"I'll be there Thursday at 5:30."
"I'm scaling to ring rows so I can keep moving."
"Ten unbroken, then a breath."
"I'm doing three sets of negatives after class, twice a week."
You won't hit every one of those. That's fine. A clear commitment you miss teaches you something. A maybe never does.
Step 4: Step Out of Survival Mode
Put the first three steps together and you get to the real goal: training from a place of freedom instead of fear.
Survival-mode training looks like this: every workout is a test you can pass or fail, every bad day is a referendum on your worth, and scaling feels like losing. It's exhausting, and it doesn't last. (If this sounds familiar, our post on why every day isn't game day digs into the training side of it.)
Training from freedom looks different. You show up because it's part of who you are, not to prove something. You scale without shame because you know what the workout is supposed to do. You can have a bad day and come back Thursday like it's no big deal, because it isn't.
That's what "humble" means in our values. It's not thinking less of yourself. It's being coachable, including by the voice in your own head.
Try This This Week
Four small experiments. No journal required.
Catch one story. Notice the first "I'm not a ___ person" thought that shows up before a workout. Don't fight it. Just notice it.
Rewrite it as a cue. Turn that story into one short, doable instruction for the workout in front of you.
Firm up one sentence. Find one maybe or should in how you talk about your training and turn it into a clear plan.
Breathe before you leave. Two minutes of slow breathing on the floor after class. That's it.
The Bottom Line
Your training doesn't start when the clock does. It starts with the story you walk in carrying. Your body hears that story, your effort follows it, and your recovery feels it too.
The good news is that stories can be rewritten. That takes reps, same as anything else.
Try the four experiments above this week and let us know how it went. If you've ever quietly told yourself "I could never do that," we'd love to help you test that story. And if the mindset side of this really grabbed you, Joel's work at Proclivity is worth a look.
Sources
Rhodes RE, et al. Intervention effects on physical activity identity: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Health Psychology Review, 2024. Summary
Bartholomew JB, et al. Strength gains after resistance training: the effect of stressful, negative life events. J Strength Cond Res, 2008;22(4):1215-1221. Link
Stults-Kolehmainen MA, et al. Chronic psychological stress impairs recovery of muscular function and somatic sensations over a 96-hour period. J Strength Cond Res, 2014. PubMed
Fincham GW, et al. Effect of breathwork on stress and mental health: a meta-analysis of randomised-controlled trials. Scientific Reports, 2023;13:432. Link
Lieberman MD, et al. Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity. Psychological Science, 2007. PubMed
Kashdan TB, Barrett LF, McKnight PE. Unpacking emotion differentiation: transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2015. PDF
Hatzigeorgiadis A, et al. Self-talk and sports performance: a meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2011. Link
Corcoran H, Steele J. Self-talk interventions and sport/motor performance: an updated systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis. SportRxiv preprint, 2023. Link
Killham ME, et al. Women athletes' self-compassion, self-criticism, and perceived sport performance. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, 2018;7(3):297-307. PDF
Proclivity / Joel Cochran: proclivity.co