Your Brain is Playing Tricks On You — Read This If You’re Having an “Off Day.”
Why “off days” Happen and How to Regain Control Fast
Use you 100% brain
My dad once taught me a lesson that I will never forget. I was probably 12 or 13 at the time, and it was a Saturday morning.
I was down in the basement with my brother and my dad, and my dad had built an entire gym. He had us work out with him most Saturdays.
We also had to work out a few times a week. He was a strict dad, and he made us lift weights.
1. My Personal Story
But I remember that Saturday morning, I was telling him, Dad, I’m not really feeling into it today.
I feel like I’m having an off day. And I’ll never forget what he said to me. He said, sometimes.
You have an off day, and then you hit a personal record anyway, so don’t give me that bad attitude.
Do your warm-up sets, and let’s get going. Now, around this time, I had been lifting for maybe a year.
It was pretty casual, but I was struggling with the first big milestone that a lot of people have when they’re lifting weights, which is bench pressing 135 pounds.
That’s the big 45-pound plate on each side of the bar. I had tried to hit it a few different times, but failed each time. I had this, I guess, mental block, really. I thought I couldn’t hit it.
So I was warming up. I was working up to what I thought was gonna be my working set, and my dad said, Aditya, I want you to go into a different room.
I’m gonna put weights on the bar, and I don’t want you to look at what’s on the bar. So I go out of the room, and then I come back a few seconds later.
At a little glance, I couldn’t help but look a little bit, and I realized that there’s a ton of random weights on the bar, a bunch of little 2.5-pounders, 5-pounders, 10-pounders, but I can’t tell what’s on the bar.
I get under it. He unracks it for me. I hit one rep, put it right back, and he says, congratulations, you just hit 135 pounds.
On the day that I had told my dad, ” Hey, it’s an off day, I don’t think I’m gonna do well, I did, in fact, hit that personal record.
Some days you think you’re having an off day, and then you hit a PR anyway.
2. The Two-Way Road
I have now reinterpreted that to realize that some days you think you’re having an off day, but you really aren’t.
What is happening instead is you have not yet given your body and your mind time to properly warm up, to get ready for the challenge that you are throwing yourself into.
And when you do, you can take what feels like an off day and turn it into a day where you perform at your absolute peak.
And that is because there is a two-way relationship between your perception of your capabilities, your perception of how you’re feeling, and the actions you actually take.
Unfortunately, a lot of people think that this road is actually a one-way road.
Where I perceive that I have a certain level of energy today, and they let that dictate the actions they take.
In reality, that road is two-way. And when you spend some time getting into the flow of things, spend some time, if you’re a writer, just writing gibberish on a page that you know is going to be garbage, or if you’re a lifter, spend some time actually doing warm-up sets like you’re supposed to, sometimes the actions you take get you into a different frame of mind.
And it’s not just a cerebral change. It’s not just, “oh, I guess I was actually capable of more than I thought I was today.”
It’s a more emotional change, too. You start to feel better. You feel more capable because of the actions you took.
Some days you’re sick. Some days you just aren’t feeling it, and that’s okay. But I truly believe, at least for me, but you as well, that more than 50 % of the time you think you’re having an off day, it’s just a day where you have not yet warmed up enough.
So let me now talk a little bit about the art of warming up.
3. The Art of Warming Up
I want to share two principles that will help you warm up more intelligently and more successfully for whatever it is you’re trying to do.
#1. Stop trying to perform during your warm-ups.
This is something that I have to remind myself of all the time when I get into the gym. And right now, the working set that I’m working on is three reps of 275.
So I’ve got several different warm-up sets that I’m gonna do before I get up to that.
And when I’m doing those warm-ups, I often go through this little mental exercise.
Where I first think, why not get a little bit of extra work while I’m doing the warm-ups?
So I’ll throw the 135 on there, and I’ll be tempted to do like 20 reps. But that’s not the point of the warm-up sets.
The point isn’t to perform there. The point is to simply get your body warmed up.
And in exercise science, there’s this principle of effective reps. If you do a set of 10 squats, say, maybe only the last three reps are effective.
They are actually challenging you and causing your body to prompt a growth response in your muscles.
The other reps are just sort of getting you to that effective rep range. You shouldn’t be using your warm-up sets to try to generate effective reps.
And the same thing applies to non-physical work. If I sit down to write and I realize that I’m not in a writing mood and I need to warm up, I shouldn’t be trying to edit my writing right away.
That’s a big principle for writing, or for art, or any kind of creative work. When you’re warming up, when you’re trying to get into the flow state, turn off that editing brain.
Just let yourself get whatever’s in your head onto the page, even if it is complete garbage, and you know it, because the point isn’t to perform during the warm-up. The point is to warm up.
#2. Give yourself the time you need to warm up
A lot of us have more off days than we would like to because what we’re doing is shoving our day full of so many different tasks and scheduled activities that we have this anxiety that we’re not going to be able to perform them.
Because we have to do this, and then go to this, and then go to this. And I’m guilty of this as well.
Even though I’ve talked about the rule of three and all kinds of principles around giving yourself the time to do a proper job.
I’m still guilty of thinking I can shove just one or two more things onto the to-do list for the day.
A little bit of compression with your schedule is good, but if there’s no time to warm up, you’re not going to be able to do it.
You need some time to warm up. So schedule less in your day and give each task the time it properly needs for you to get into the flow state and then for you to perform.
You need a little bit more time to properly carry out the task. But most importantly, when you feel like you’re having an off day, ask yourself:
- Have I warmed up?
- Have I given myself that opportunity?
Because if you haven’t, then there is a high probability that this actually isn’t an off day, and you have the potential to turn it around.
