When I was a teenager and first began training, I was carrying around a lot of emotional baggage from school phys ed class traumas. Though I really enjoyed my workouts, I was haunted by the thought of looking weak or clumsy or stupid to the rest of the gym. I guess everyone feels this way to some extent. It's not really a productive way of thinking, but in my case it did have some positive side effects.
Since I was afraid of looking like I didn't belong, I was determined not to betray the actual effort I was putting in -- I had to make it look easy, even when it wasn't. As I played the part of someone breezing through with the tough exercises and heavy weights, I began to internalize the "easy, breezy, beautiful Cover Girl" approach, and it really felt effortless. Before my muscles really started to grow, the bigger guys at the gym always noticed that I was really strong for my size. I would tackle the same weights they were huffing and puffing through, and act like it was no big deal.
When you hit a plateau in your training progress, I think that most of the time your body is ready to make the leap up to the next level, but won't do it until you mentally take that step. If you're emotionally and mentally ready to grow, you will grow. And conversely, if you think you can't achieve any more, you're certainly not going to surprise yourself and make that breakthrough.
In many areas of personal challenge, from weight loss to martial arts training, a big tool is visualization and affirmation. I personally think a lot of self-help programs go way overboard on these two techniques -- I remember when est was the rage in the 70's and early 80's, and lots of my friends were visualizing themselves curing cancer and affirming that they were CEO's of Fortune 500 companies. If you happened to mention to them that visualizing and affirming alone might not be enough to make it so, you were immediately banished due to your negative vibes. A decade or two later, hindsight doesn't reveal any of them making the front pages or the history books.
And have you ever seen the "Baywatch" bikini photo body on a friend's fridge, with their face pasted on? Just picturing yourself with your ideal physique, sadly, doesn't make it happen. But what does make it happen is recognizing your own limitless power, leaving open the possibility of achieving all your goals through your creative imagination, and using these techniques and others as a part of the arsenal you have at your disposal. When you use positive mental reinforcements along with the concrete physical work necessary to achieve your target, techniques like these can focus, guide and inform your efforts and speed you on your way.
Even before there was an AAARRGH!!, I used my own brand of positive thinking. (Describing it out loud makes it sound so wacky that I must seem childlike and kind of pathetic. But fortunately, that "looking like a fool" issue is one that I've grown out of by now.) I remember increasing my bench press by imagining a red laserbeam-like shaft of light rising up out of the earth and pushing me along under the elbows like a weird, metaphysical firehose. (See, I've been thinking superhero plots all along.) Another image I have used to focus my energy in a standing military press is to picture my body as a tree rooted in the ground, with that same irresistible, inexorable push upward to grow. That image helps keep my legs and trunk (literally) strong and motionless as I push the weight up overhead.
In the comic books the mechanics of super strength always have these strange baroque methods -- Lightning Lad directs megavolts of electrons, Star Boy uses the colossal mass of a collapsed star, etc. Figure out the underlying source of your superhuman strength and it will always be there for you to use, inside, where all your progress really starts.
