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How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind over Muscle
How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind over Muscle
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From the Publisher
Master the Mental Game of Endurance Sports
Discover how elite athletes use mental toughness to shatter limits. Based on real race stories and cutting-edge science, How Bad Do You Want It? shows how to cultivate the psychology of performance and push past what you thought possible.
Gripping Race Stories That Reveal Mental Fortitude
Step inside epic races in running, cycling, triathlon, and rowing. Matt Fitzgerald captures the drama and insight of elite athletes as they confront fear, fatigue, and failure. These vivid narratives expose the mental patterns and techniques that shape peak performance—and how you can apply them.
Learn How Mind Over Muscle Wins the Race
Backed by the latest research in sports psychology, Fitzgerald explains the psychobiological model that redefines endurance. Discover how adjusting your perception of effort, belief in your training, and emotional control can significantly enhance performance, on the course and in life.
Strategies from World-Class Athletes
With insights from legends like Greg LeMond, Jenny Simpson, and Steve Prefontaine, you'll uncover habits and mindset shifts that lead to success. Whether you're a competitive athlete or just striving for your personal best, this book offers actionable tools to build resilience, sharpen focus, and go farther.
Unleash Peak Performance Through Mental Mastery
Based on elite competition and cutting-edge science, this guide empowers athletes to harness mental strength and outpace physical limits.
In How Bad Do You Want It?, Matt Fitzgerald presents a compelling look at what separates champions from the rest: not training volume, but mental strength. This book weaves powerful stories with scientific analysis to explain how perception, belief, and emotion shape endurance. Through the lens of the psychobiological model, Fitzgerald offers tools to help athletes train their minds as rigorously as their bodies. From learning how to brace for pain to maintaining composure under pressure, each chapter delivers evidence-based strategies rooted in real-world triumphs.
Mental Fitness Principles That Give You an Edge
- Discover the new science behind endurance performance
- Learn from over a dozen Olympic and pro athletes
- Use race preparation to boost performance by 15%
- Apply the same mindset in life and sport
Excerpt from How Bad Do You Want It?
“Doing research to understand what limits endurance performance is not just an academic exercise. It also affects the way endurance athletes are tested, the way they train, and how they prepare for competitions. For the first 100 years in the history of exercise physiology, endurance was thought to be limited by muscle fatigue caused by energy depletion or inadequate oxygen delivery and consequent acidification of the locomotor muscles. As a result, endurance athletes wear heart rate monitors during training and have their ears pierced to measure blood lactate, erythropoietin use has plagued cycling and other endurance sports, and tons of pasta and rice have been consumed before competitions. These are only some examples of how exercise physiology has had an impact on the lives of endurance athletes.
Then, in the late 1990s, Professor Tim Noakes came up with the Central Governor Model (CGM). This model proposes that endurance performance is limited by a subconscious intelligent system in the brain (the central governor) that regulates locomotor muscle recruitment so that the speed/power output sustained over a race never exceeds the capacity of the body to cope with the stress of endurance exercise. The hypothesis is that if this safety system didn’t exist, a highly motivated endurance athlete might exercise beyond his/her physiological capacity and threaten his/her own life with
heat shock, myocardial ischemia, and rigor mortis.
The CGM was revolutionary because it convinced many exercise physiologists that the organ that limits endurance performance is the brain, not the cardiovascular system and fatigued locomotor muscles. Subsequent research, including our study that inspired the subtitle of this book, confirmed this no longer controversial idea. There is a big problem, however: If endurance performance was limited by a subconscious and intelligent safety system in the brain, what could endurance athletes do about it? The answer would be nothing apart from training the way they have always done to increase the capacity of their bodies to cope with the stress of endurance exercise. Indeed, the CGM has not had any significant impact on the way endurance athletes train and prepare for competitions.”
Elite athletes have known this for decades and now science is learning why it’s true. In his fascinating new book How Bad Do You Want It?, coach Matt Fitzgerald examines more than a dozen pivotal races to discover the surprising ways elite athletes strengthen their mental toughness.
Fitzgerald puts you into the pulse-pounding action of more than a dozen epic races from running, cycling, triathlon, XTERRA, and rowing with thrilling race reports and revealing post-race interviews with the elites. Their own words reinforce what the research has found: strong mental fitness lets us approach our true physical limits, giving us an edge over physically stronger competitors. Each chapter explores the how and why of an elite athlete’s transformative moment, revealing powerful new psychobiological principles you can practice to flex your own mental fitness.
The new psychobiological model of endurance performance shows that the most important question in endurance sports is: how bad do you want it? Fitzgerald’s fascinating book will forever change how you answer this question and show you how to master the psychology of mind over muscle. These lessons will help you push back your limits and uncover your full potential.
How Bad Do You Want It? reveals new psychobiological findings including:
- Mental toughness determines how close you can get to your physical limit.
- Bracing yourself for a tough race or workout can boost performance by 15% or more.
- Champions have learned how to give more of what they have.
- The only way to improve performance is by altering how you perceive effort.
- Choking under pressure is a form of self-consciousness.
- Your attitude in daily life is the same one you bring to sports.
- There’s no such thing as going as fast as you can—only going faster than before.
- The fastest racecourse is the one with the loudest spectators.
- Faith in your training is as important as the training itself.
