Health and Fitness Belief Systems of 10 World-Class Performers

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. – J. Krishnamurti

Have you ever wondered how do World-Class Performers believe about health and fitness?

As I wrote in an earlier post , your belief-system is one of the key steps to create lasting changes in your health and fitness levels. The way you believe about nutrition, exercise, health, and fitness can affect the results you get.

Tony Robbins says – “If you want to get certain results in your life, study someone who’s already achieved those results and start modeling them.”

During my research on the belief systems of peak performers in health and fitness, Tim Ferriss came to the rescue. In his latest book, Tools of Titans you get an opportunity to have an in-depth look into what are the beliefs World-Class performers have formed about health and fitness that is yielding them best-of-the-best results.

So let’s have a look at the lenses through which World-Class performers see the world of health and fitness.

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1. Amelia Boone

Amelia Boone (TW: @AmeliaBoone ) has been called “the Michael Jordan of obstacle course running (OCR) and is widely considered the world’s most decorated obstacle racer. Since the inception of OCR, she’s amassed more than 30 victories and 50 podiums. In the 2012 World’s Toughest Mudder competition, which lasts 24 hours (she covered 90 miles and ~300 obstacles), she finished second OVERALL out of more than 1,000 competitors, 80% of whom were male.

She is the only three-time winner of the World’s Toughest Mudder and she won the 2014 championship 8 weeks after knee surgery. Amelia is also a 3-time finisher of the Death race, a full-time attorney at Apple, and she dabbles in ultra-running in all of her spare time.

Is she badass? Yes!

How does one can possibly win an OCR championship 8 weeks after knee surgery and kick some serious ass as a full-time attorney at one of the Tech giants out of Silicon Valley?

Check out one of her fitness belief systems.

I’m not the strongest. I’m not the fastest. But I’m really good at sufferin g. – Amelia Boone

Do you have a high threshold for suffering and pain – both physical and psychological? If you said ‘Yes’, then take note as this may be a strength of yours.

Another of her belief system that is highly empowering –

I love doing training runs in the rain and cold because my competition is probably opting out. This is just my way of rehearsing the worst-case scenario .

If you really want to get in the best shape of your life, then how about using that time during the weekends when you go out to grab drinks with your friend or just chill… you start investing that time into learning real science of nutrition and exercise.

What kind of results do you think you’ll get if you just stopped doing what everyone else is doing and started to do the exact opposite?

2. Christopher Sommer aka Coach Sommer

Coach Sommer (IG: @ GymnasticBodies ) is a former US National Team gymnastics coach and founder of GymnasticBodies . As a world-renowned coach, he is known for building his students into some of the strongest, most powerful athlete in the world.

Here are some of his belief systems –

If you want to be a stud later , you have to be a pud now.

This follows the Buddhist philosophy on having a Begineer’s Mind when you want to gain mastery in a topic.

If the best in the world are stretching their asses off in order to get strong, why aren’t you?

When in doubt, work on the deficiencies you’re most embarrassed by .

A classic example is how a lot of us skip working out our legs because it’s just not fun. Guess who’s guilty of that – yeah that’s me. But now I’m getting back at those kettlebell squats – all thanks to Pavel Tsatsouline who belief systems you’ll check out below.

You’re not responsible for the hand of cards you were dealt. You’re responsible for maxing out what you were given.

This reminds me of the habit you and I can build to choose how to play the game of life without complaining or whining about the circumstances but rather getting better at how we react to a given situation so as to get the desired results.

If you have a chronic back pain, you have to get at your strength training differently compared to your friend who boasts about deadlifting 400 lbs.

Flexibility can be passive, whereas “ mobility requires that you can demonstrate strength throughout the entire range of motion, including the end ranges.

I used to tell my athletes there are stupid gymnasts, and there are old gymnasts, but there are no old, stupid gymnasts because they’re all dead .

Eat and train.

Progress slowly and patiently. Do not rush. For this type of loaded mobility work, never allow yourself to strain, grind out reps, or force range of motion. Smooth, controlled movement is the order of the day.

Slow down, where’s the fire?

This is so prevalent among beginners who want quick results.

If you’ve ever acted desperate to lose weight, here’s a question to you – did you just wake up one day and ended up ‘X’ lbs overweight or did you have to do certain things in order to get your body the way it is today?

Just like Coach Summer believes, you’ve got to practice the habit of slowing down and getting at things from the perspective of a beginner’s mind.

3. Jason Nemer

Jason Nemer (IG: @JsonNemer ) is a cofounder of AcroYoga , which bends the spiritual wisdom of yoga, the loving-kindness of Thai massage, and the dynamic power of acrobatics. Jascon is a two-time U.S. Junior National champion in sports acrobatics and represented the U.S. at the World Championships in Beijing in 1991. He performed acrobatics in the opening ceremonies of the 1996 Olympics. Acroyoga now has certified teachers in more than 60 countries and hundreds of thousands of practitioners.

Let’s take a peak into his belief systems.

Let go of what’s not working and really asses what is working and ‘what can I be excited about?’

This one reminds me of my friends who are sweating their asses off at the gym but are still fat. When you keep doing things a certain way, you’ll keep getting the same results. Now if you’re not satisfied with the results you’ve been getting in your health and fitness levels, then does it make some sense to take a look at what have you been doing so far?

How about doing a mini-analysis on looking at the things that are working and things that are not?

Once I realized that running was causing stress on my SI joint and thus leading to inflammation and muscles spasms, I stopped running. And guess what? I haven’t had any pain since then.

Play! Play more. I feel like people are so serious, and it doesn’t take much for people to drop bak into the wisdom of a childlike playfulness. If I had to prescribe two things to improve health and happiness in the world, it’d be movement and play. Because you can’t reallly play without moving, so they’re intertwined.

Treadmills kill your spirit. There are reasons and times to do treadmills, but if that is your only way of moving your body, you’re selling yourself short. There are much cooler ways to move your body, way more fun things, and I just happened to have the good fortune to learn a lot of these really cool things. So play.”

His last 2 quotes go hand in hand.

Imagine how you would feel if you viewed your workouts as playouts? That’s actually the lingo we use at Powered by Habits where we trick the brain to stop thinking of workouts as work but rather as play. This isn’t backed by science but it seems to be working.

When it comes to exercising and moving your body, find that training method which makes you enjoy the time you invest in that activity. Because if it’s not fun but is painful, your brain will keep resisting to the negative reward and you’ll have a hard time forming the exercise habit.

4. Peter Attia, MD

Peter Attia, MD (TW: @PeterAttiaMD ) is a former ultra-endurance athlete (e.g. swimming races of 25 miles), a compulsive self-experimenter, and blogs at Eating Academy . He earned his MD from Stanford University and holds a BSc in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He is one of the leaders who’s helping raise awareness on the benefits of the ketogenic diet for longevity and cancer prevention.

Here are some of his health and fitness related belief systems –

The likelihood of doing comprehensive testing and finding everything ‘normal’ is low, so don’t have testing done unless you’re willing to accept the uncertainty that comes from needing to make decisions (or not) with incomplete – and at-times conflicting – information.

This reminds me of that time when my doc and I were trying to do multiple blood tests to figure out the cause of my chronic lower back pain. The test helped us spot my acute Vitamin D deficiency which then led me to change my belief systems about supplements.

See, I grew up thinking that supplements are not good for you but is only there to make money for the company. That belief system was sabotaging my health and keeping me in pain for years.

After the diagnosis, I got myself into the habit of taking a 5000 IU Vitamin D3 capsule every morning and in 3 months my levels got back to normal. Surprisingly, my low back pain also subsided.

So if you’re open to the idea of doing quantified tests, you have to go with the mindset that you’re not going to ignore facts but rather work on how you’re going to act.

Nothing drops my heart more than seeing that person who’s struggling to lose weight who thinks that they need to run 20 miles a week. They have no desire to do it, their knees hurt, they hate it, and they’re not losing weight. And I’d like to say, ‘Well, I’ve got great news for you. You don’t ever need to run another step a day in your life because there’s no value in that.

As I wrote earlier about my friends who spend hours running on the treadmill and the elliptical but are still, if you haven’t lost a significant amount of fat after years of running, may be it’s time to reassess your running and look into other methods of training that will actually help you.

I think the most important type of exercise, especially in terms of bang for your buck, is going to be really high-intensity, heavy strength training. Strength training aids everything from glucose disposal and metabolic health to mitochondrial density and orthopedic stability. That last one might not mean much when you’re a 30-something young buck, but when you’re in your 70s, that’s the difference between a broken hip and a walk in the park.

HIIT is what I used to burn my abdominal fat. The best part about it is that you can create your own circuits with body-weight movements and keep your heart rate in your aerobic zone and promote maximum fat burn during and after your training session.

Success is: Do your kids remember you for being the best dad? Not the dad who gave them everything, but will they be able to tell you anything one day? Will they be able to call you out of the blue, any day, no matter what? Are you the first person they want to ask for advice? And at the same time, can you hit it out of the park in whatever it is you decide to do, as a lawyer, as a doctor, as a stock-broker, as a whatever?

Isn’t this an amazing way to view success in life?

5. Charles Poliquin

Charles Poliquin (TW: @StrengthSensei ) is one of the best-known strength coaches in the world. He has trained elite athletes from nearly 2- different sports, including Olympic gold medalists, NFL All-Pros, NHL All-Stars and Stanley Cup champions, and IFBB bodybuilding champions. His clients include America’s first-ever Olympic gold medalist in women’s wrestling, Helen Maroulis, long-jump gold medalist Dwight Phillips, NHL MVP Chris Pronger, and MLB batting champion Edgar Martinez, among many others.

Here are some of his belief systems –

The rule is: The basics are basics, and you can’t beat the basics.

This so reminds me of that time when I did heavy weight lifting during my college days. I was squatting wrong. Deadlifting with a crooked, bent back.

While I lost a lot of weight through this process, it did came with a side-effect of chronic lower back pain for 3 years and degeneration of the nerves around my SI joint. So if you’re just getting yourself into exercise, please focus on building a strong foundational knowledge.

What you put in your mouth is a stressor, and what you say – what comes out of your mouth – is also a stressor.

Just because you exercise doesn’t mean you deserve sugar water. The most important thing I’ve learned about nutrition is you need to deserve your carbs… to deserve [hundreds of kcal of carbs] post-exercise, you need to be sub-10% body fat.

I love this rule.

What if you set a rule for yourself where you would deserve your food vices only once a month or after burning a significant amount of fat?

6. Pavel Tsatsouline

Pavel Tsatsouline (TW: @BeStrongFirst ) is the founder of The School of Strength . He is a former physical training instructor for Spetsnaz, the Soviet special forces, and is currently a subject matter expert to the U.S. Marine Corps, the U.S. Secret Service, and the U.S. Navy SEALs. He is widely credited with introducing the now-ubiquitous kettlebell to the United States and is the author of Kettlebell: Simple & Sinister.

He believes –

Strength is the mother quality of all physical qualities. It is a skill, and, as such, it must be practiced.

I see this all the time. Skinny people who can’t do a single pull up or pushups and get injured easily.

You’ve got to realize that your health and fitness is beyond the aesthetics. Yes, aesthetics is fine as long as you’re not going after it at the expense of your strength. So don’t focus on being skinny but rather focus on getting stronger. #strongnotskinny

Anything more than 5 reps is bodybuilding … If you want to be strong, you want to keep your reps at 5 and under. If you are training for strength, you want to try and avoid the burn altogether. The burn is your enemy.”

This one was a new one for me. These days I stay mindful of whether I’m training for endurance (more reps) versus when I’m training for gaining strength (5 or less reps).

Training is something that should be enjoyed.

And then finally, this is a belief system all of us can benefit from. If you’re not feeling awesome during and after your workouts, then your brain isn’t getting a positive reward.

When the brain continues to get a negative reward, it doesn’t crave for the routine much and thus you won’t be able to form the habit.

So if you’re getting yourself into training, make sure you do enjoy the process.

7. Laird Hamilton

Laird Hamilton (TW: @LairdLife ) is widely considered the greatest big wave surfer of all time. He is credited with the creation of tow-in surfing (using a Jet Ski to pull surfers into enormous waves), as well as the rebirth of stand-up paddle boarding.

Laird believes –

A lonely place is an unmotivated place.

Do you agree with this? If you were to be totally honest, you know that loneliness is a motherf*cking bitch that tries to suck the life out of you.

So if you’ve been suffering for motivation to workout, don’t try to find it in a digital form but rather get with your friend who is into health and fitness and then go train with him.

All you flexible people should go bang some iron, and all you weight lifters should go do some yoga… We always gravitate toward our strengths because we want to be in our glory.”

This is so true. I tried to run away from yoga because I believed it to be for girls. Guess who was going through chronic lower back pain?

Once I incorporated yoga (movement + breathing), it also helped greatly relieve my lower back pain.

If you’ve been too hard-headed about your singular training method, read the above quote by Laird 3 more times.

Fun fact – The day I read this was also the day I had already scheduled my first Acroyoga class.

Stop drinking now. Stop drinking right now and patent all your ideas… and exercise compassion every day.

I stopped drinking alcohol because I f*ckin love the way I feel without consuming it. It just how my body reacts without alcohol. If peak performance is your goal, see if refraining from alcohol helps boost your performance or not.

If you want to lose a lot of fat, stop drinking. Period!

8. Kelly Starrett

Dr. Kelly Starrett (TW: @MobilityWod ) is a performance coach who has trained CrossFit athletes for more than 150,000 hours and 11 years at San Francisco CrossFit, which he founded with his wife in 2005. It is one of the first 50 CrossFit affiliates, out of a current 10,000+ in the world. Kelly has trained Olympic gold medalists, Tour de France cyclists, world record holders in Olympic lifting and powerlifting, CrossFit Games medalists, professional ballet dancers, and elite military personnel. He also wrote a NYT Bestseller – Becoming a Supple Leopard .

Men, if you wake up and don’t have a boner, there’s a problem. Yes or no? One or zero? Boner, no boner ?

I loved this line and started tracking it every morning. Today is Day 4 and my score is Booner 3 – 1 No Boner.

As Tim writes in Tools of Titans, this test is an excellent indicator of sleep quality, hormonal health ( GH , FSH , testosterone), circadian rhythm timing , and more.

Kelly says –

If you can’t squat all the way down to the ground with your feet and knees together, then you are missing full hip and ankle range of motion. This is the mechanism causing your hip impingement, plantar fasciitis, torn Achilles, pulled calf, etc. That is the fucking problem, and you should be obsessed about (fixing) this.

No kidding. I have a lot of friends who were not able to do this. It came naturally to me. As it turns out, it’s about mobility and that is a key indicator if one is prone to injury or not. Go ahead and do this test. Try to squat standing tall and then sit like a caveman around the fire.

If you can’t breathe, you don’t know thy position

This is something I’ve started to incorporate in my training sessions – whether it’s Acroyoga or Calisthenics or Kettlebells, I remember to breathe and also use it as a test so as to not do a movement in an incorrect form. You can also use this test to see if you’re working out in the aerobic or the anaerobic zone.

Anaerobic zone is when you can’t speak or start panting during your workouts – you don’t want to be in this state if you want to burn fat, build muscles safely and get stronger.

Movement and pain get mapped. If you experience pain during a given movement for a month, for instance, it’s a chronic pain condition. Your brain starts to map the pain pathway with the movement motor pathway and those become conjoined. The brain starts to remember the movement that created pain (got you injured), and even if there is no trauma, every time you move that particular way, you still get the pain sensation. So, one of the ways that we’re able to help people get out of chronic pain is to give them a new motor program.

As I look back on how my lower back pain vanished, I can now attribute it to the set of movements I was doing to strengthen my core and hip flexors which today allows me to do this.

9. Paul Levesque

Paul Levesque, more popularly known as Triple H (IG: @TripleH ) is a 14-time world champion in World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). He is also the Executive Vice President of talent, live events, and creative at the WWE.

Here are the belief-systems he operates his world with –

‘Is that a dream, or a goal? Because a dream is something you fantasize about that will probably never happen. A goal is something you set a plan for, work toward, and achieve.

If you’ve been struggling with your health and fitness, run your goals with this filter. A goal is something you breakdown into smaller goals/systems and then get at it. But if you’ve been wanting to get a six-pack abs but haven’t yet created any system around it, you’re just dreaming. Time to wake up if you want to make it come true.

Worrying about it now isn’t going to change a damn thing .

If you don’t do something well, don’t do it unless you want to spend the time to improve it.

If you’re investing your time and money into health and fitness, you might as well do it such that you get the results you want instead of half-assing your way during training session and giving yourself lame excuses to feel like you deserve that doughnuts or ice-cream.

10. Adam Gazzaley

Dr. Adam Gazzaley (TW: @AdamGazz ) earned his MD and a PhD in Neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, then did postdoctoral training in cognitive neuroscience at UC Berkley. He is now the director of the Gazzeley Lab at UC San Francisco, a cognitive neuroscience laboratory.

Adam believes –

I would say to have no fear. I mean, you’ve got one chance here to do amazing things, and being afraid of being wrong or making a mistake or fumbling is just not how you do something of impact. You just have to be fearless.

The way this translates in the world of health and fitness is that too many people are shy to aim for bigger goals.

People say – “I don’t want six-pack abs. I don’t want to build muscles. I just want to lost 20 lbs.”

The fact of the matter is that this way of thinking is how they short-change themselves from the result that is possible and get mediocre results. If you’ve ever found yourself using these lines, you have the option to write new lines for yourself that yields amazing results.

Conclusion

Now that you’re aware of the belief-systems of World-Class Performers, my question to you is – how serious are you to create lasting changes in your health and fitness?

Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits. – Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans

Billionaires, icons, and world-class performers are where they are in their life not just because they worked hard for it. Yes, they did that for sure.

Yet the first and foremost thing they did was to program their internal belief system ; let’s call it the operating system and then they reprogrammed it in such a way that it started to give them the results they wanted.

You don’t succeed because you don’t have any weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.

The role models you have in health and fitness also have flaws that you don’t know about. I remember the time when I first saw my six-pack abs, I was so obsessed with it that I would wake up in the morning and the first thing I would do is to feel it they are still there. While the external world saw me as physically fit, I struggled with health issues that were affecting, both, my physiology and psychology.

So when it comes to your own health and fitness, your goal should be to figure out what are your unique strengths. Once you are crystal clear on that, you relentlessly work on building empowering habits around them and thus get to where you want to get.

Of course, you’re not going to find about your strengths overnight. It needs a level of self-awareness that is often neglected in today’s reactive world.

But then, I hope the above belief systems of World-Class Performers has given you some good reasons to look into your own belief systems and then tweak it to get your health and fitness in order.

You have the whole life to discover your purpose, passion, or whatever is that you’re looking for.