This comes from ex-Canadian Olympic Coach Bogdan Poprawski and looks at the different zones we can find ourselves in in various aspects of our life of which there are 4.
#1 - THE COMFORT ZONE
- Feels Safe
- You have a lot of control over what happens and when
#2 - THE FEAR ZONE
- You'll have a lack of self confidence for a specific task
- You'll find excuses to not try your best or not try the task at all
- You're highly affected by the opinions of others putting even more pressure on yourself to perform at nothing else then a high level even if your mastery level is well behind that leading to a "why bother" thought process
#3 - THE LEARNING ZONE
- You deal with challenges/problems head on
- You love to acquire new skills
- Is an extension of the comfort zone
#4 - THE GROWTH ZONE
- You are constantly finding new purpose/motivations to try new things
- You live your dreams
- You constantly set new goals
- You conquer objectives
Now that we have the different zones down it's also important to understand that you don't have to be in the growth zone for everything which seems to be the way for fitness goes all over.
At any 1 time in your own fitness program you can be in all of these zones at the same time and you probably should be.
My programs are definitely set up like this so they move up and down throughout each zone in each individual session.
Here's a quick example.
Comfort Zone - over 4 weeks we may have introduced a new exercise that took some learning to make it fit your movement intricacies, wants and needs but we've modified what we needed to and now your very comfortable with the exercise now.
Fear Zone - in the preceding 4 weeks there was some apprehension as the exercise just didn't feel right and coupled with your current belief systems gathered from reputable and not-as-reputable sources, you were reluctant to initially try it and then continue with it once you did try it.
Learning Zone - You are now very comfortable with the exercise and are willing to increase the difficulty of the exercise (load, volume, technical difficulty etc) every chance you get leading to great progress over time.
Growth - the experience from this 1 exercise opens up great possibilities for you now in other facets of your life from overcoming the initial fear of this exercise and now turning it into 1 of your strengths. This can carry over into the workplace and family life too.
A quick exercise that you can do is to highlight the 4 main aspects of your life and rate them on the zone scale from above.
Knowing what nails each zone, put a plan in place to reach the next zone in the month or so, then reassess and go again.
