How To Foster Equanimity In Your Training

By Kirsten Ahrendt

Why Foster Equanimity?

If you are at all experienced or seasoned in your training journey, you know that no training journey is a linear progression of improvement; Small setbacks, failures, plateaus, and frustrations are common and more frequent than the big wins. So without equanimity, we may be unnecessarily swayed and pulled into emotional distress or overly frustrated states…and “ain’t nobody got time for that!” Because nothing stunts long term progress like unnecessary amounts of short term frustration. Enter: equanimity!

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Equanimity Defined:

The dictionary defines equanimity as mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation. Buddhists understand equanimity as “a balanced reaction to joy and misery, which protects one from emotional agitation” (Bodhi, 2005). And if stoicism and radical acceptance is more your cup of tea, you’ll appreciate Epictetus who is quoted in Meditations, “Man is affected not by events, but by the view he takes of them.”

Equanimity in the context of training

To have equanimity in your training simply means you are not at the mercy of any one particular day’s training experience or outcome – positive or negative. The key is to understand that no single workout, PR, lift, or training session is all that important.

Say what?! I said what I said.

No single session is all that important.

Which means if you have a bad lift, don’t match a previous week’s effort or improve on a retest, that single occurrence doesn’t carry THAT MUCH WEIGHT.

The opposite is also true.

If you hit a PR, have a stellar workout where you crush everything, get 5 unbroken reps of a skill you just learned, remember…THAT ALSO doesn’t mean THAT MUCH (on its own). It’s a nice indicator of improvement but not an arrival at a state of mastery.

How to Foster Equanimity

In the overall pursuit of growth and improvement, we look for an upward trending progress line. But zoom in and there will unequivocally be micro ups (wins) & downs (regressions) in the overall trend. While a few random “fails” or poor performances warrants equanimity, repeated failures or a downward trending line of performance over time is a trend that carries weight and should warrant not only equanimity but a redirect in action and approach.

We can take the sting out of individual training data points by focusing on 2 things:

Consistency
General trends over time.

In the big scheme of things, trends carry more weight than individual occurrences. But it’s unreasonable for me to think that just by telling you about equanimity, that will diffuse the emotional-charge so many of us have with daily training outcomes. So how can we productively engage with day-to-day wins and failures?

When a micro-failure occurs:

Feel the frustration.
Process what happened.
Reflect on what caused it.

The old adage comes to mind – you’re only losing when you stop learning.

When a micro-win occurs:

Acknowledge it.
Enjoy it.
Don’t confuse it with arrival at a final destination (such as mastery).

Humans are notorious at disproportionately magnifying their weaknesses or failures in comparison to their wins and successes. If you find yourself wildly impacted by your training, fluctuating between feeling on top of the world to feeling like a total failure, mumbling statements like:

“I suck”

“I lost X skill”

“I’m getting worse”

‘I’m getting weak”

These are signs that you may be disproportionately affected or swayed by your training; While it might appear that you’re just a passionate person, you’re actually at the whim of something you don’t control…an outcome. When you realize that you only control effort and process and commitment, you can decrease the amplitude of your reaction, and with it decrease the mental and emotional weight of any single day’s results.

I think it is important to note here that equanimity is an important virtue closely associated with radical acceptance, non-attachment, and non-reactivity. But it is not to be confused with the other end of the spectrum of “not giving a shit”. Equanimity doesn’t preclude one from having passion or drive. Equanimity has more to do with our response to an outcome/result rather than the source of our effort.

To summarize:

Zoom out. Get perspective. And recognize that EVERYTHING is a long-game.