Your energy gets zapped either before you start exercising or while you are exercising!
You walk into the gym half sluggish because you're thinking about your day you've had and thinking about getting through your workout to face the battles in your life. You already feel drained of energy before you start exercising.
Or it might be you are working out and you look around. The set you are performing, or the duration of your cardio suddenly becomes harder to complete.
In both cases, your energy becomes zapped because you are focused on the past and future events. Or you find yourself looking around the gym rather than being in the moment and focusing on yourself.
Rather than focusing on what goes on outside the gym or looking at others, redirect your attention to being "in the moment" by focusing on yourself. After all, it's all about YOU!
‘Flow’ is a concept that utilizes process goals to help make exercising intrinsically motivating and enjoyable. ‘Flow’ builds self-confidence that allows to develop the skills to enhance exercise focus to exercise well and optimize training performance.
The motivation of exercising to optimize training performance is the self-satisfaction of the skill that produces it. The skill that produces an optimal training performance is called a “flow experience.” Repeated instances of flow experiences can enable us to focus single-pointedly on performing an immediate task of a particular exercise movement at that moment and, therefore, optimize training performance.
To produce a flow experience, center your focus and energy on an exercise movement and not on something else. Suppose a person, for example, is focused on keeping up with another person next to him. He may produce more internal stress (anxiety), which can negatively affect his behavior and diminish his workout. A person, however, can change his or her construal of the environment by focusing on him or herself and the movement of the exercise he or she is performing, which can positively affect behavior and enhance the workout, and not obsessing about what is going around so it prompts a different and unfavorable behavior.
“Flow” is characterized by an “intense and focused concentration on what one is doing in the present moment” unimpeded by contrary pleasures (e.g., past and future directed thoughts or looking around the gym), which only reduce the flow. Flow experiences are described as being fully engaged in a goal-directed activity requiring the investment of “psychic energy” and is intrinsically rewarding after overcoming the challenge. If the goal is to improve fitness, then one will suffer through the hard work of exercising and use flow to overcome the discomfort because “flow” is its own reward.
Flow experiences is a skill in acquiring a razor-sharp single-point unhindered concentration by focusing on the movement of a limb on the body in every stride, revolution, step, rep and set in an instant of time while one is exercising. It is optimizing training performance and enjoying the experience at the same time in that instant of time.
A distinctive feature of flow are people who become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing and sense that they have become one with the activity itself.
Focusing on what you are doing at a particular moment increases the efficiency of both parts of the brain working together and helps keep your attention on a single goal to carry out a specific task. A good but crude example of experiencing an unrelenting focus to optimize performance and accomplish a specific task at hand is the character John Wick.