4 Tips From Wil Fleming To Build A Champion Weightlifter Mindset

After attempting it for years, one 47 minute conversation helped me clean 300 pounds. 

It wasn’t some ra-ra believe in yourself type conversation, or a deep dive into weightlifting technique that unlocked the secret. 

It was actually pretty simple, and something I swore didn’t work for me for years. 

In this article I’ll break down four mindset tools I learned from my interview with Senior International Coach Wil Fleming. 

Get ready, we’re diving deep into mindset today.

Tool 1: Journaling

One thing I noticed about Coach Wil is that he values journaling on the same level as tracking your workouts. 

When you write your workouts down into your training log, he likes to use this time to also journal on some valuable questions. This pre-workout journaling can be used to focus your mind on the workout or week ahead. 

Here’s a journaling prompt he recommends…

“When I’m at my best as a lifter, I see myself as someone who…”

Rather than journaling about the number you want to hit, focus on characteristics you want to embody. 

“…, I see myself as someone who is resilient in the face of setbacks”

“…, I see myself as someone who is coachable and willing to learn”

“…, I see myself as someone who is capable of hard things”

But pre-workout journaling isn’t the only time you should be journaling, in fact there’s one journaling prompt coach Wil recommends everyone do after every workout. 

“What did I like about today’s workout, and what did I learn from today’s workout?”

This prompt gets you to not think in terms of “good” or “bad” workouts, which are all very outcome centered, but assumes that every session is beneficial, regardless of outcome.

If you didn’t lift the weight you wanted to, that doesn’t mean the entire session was useless. There were ten working sets that even if you didn’t like, you can still learn something from them. Maybe it’s a technical takeaway, or a mindset shift, or just a mental note that you need to remember to eat more before your training.

There’s always something you can take away. 

It also forces lifters who tend to have a more negative perfectionist mindset about their training to identify something they liked about the session. Putting it down on paper makes it real, and that’s important. It’s easy to be a pessimist and say everything sucked. It’s harder to admit the things that went well, but when you do, you can focus more energy into the actions that lead to those positive outcomes. 

Takeaway: Try these pre and post-workout journaling prompts every day for a week and see if it improves your mindset around training. 

Tool 2: Visualization

Another tool Coach Wil finds incredibly valuable is something you’ve probably heard of called “visualization”. 

This tool exists under an interesting premise…

If you cannot imagine yourself doing it, how will you do it?

You want to clean 100 kilos, but you’ve never done it before. Instead of trying to figure it out when you get there, try imagining yourself doing the lift. Like really imagine it. Picture how the chalk feels when you get ready. Imagine the feeling of tightening your belt, putting your hands on the bar, setting your hook grip and setting your back. Pushing with strong legs that feel fully prepared to rip the bar off the ground and stand up with ease. 

When you first start trying visualization, you’ll probably find it to be a challenge. 

Maybe it feels awkward or silly at first. Maybe you can't picture the lift and every time you imagine it, something goes wrong. You drop the bar, the lift feels harder than you expected, you fail the lift! This will take practice to get good at, but I promise it’s worth it. 

In fact, the day of the interview, I decided to put this into practice, I had a heavy clean on my program later that day.

Every warm up rep I would walk up to the chalk bucket and practice the lift in my head three times, then start my lift. In the earlier warm up reps, my visualization was clumsy, and not all that helpful. In fact, most of the time, the lift I imagined was always kind of bad. But towards the heavier lifts, the visualization got easier. I started making the lifts in my head the first time I pictured it. This gave me a little bit of confidence that stacked up each rep. It wasn’t until I was at my top end weight that it really felt intentional and perfect, but I ended up hitting 15lbs heavier than I expected AND set a 10lb PR Clean at 300lbs, a weight I’d attempted at least a dozen times over the last three years. 

Visualization is not some fluffy mindset trick, it actually works, but it does take practice, and it will pay off big time. 

Takeaway: Start visualizing your lifts, perform 3 reps in your head before every 1 rep in real life. 

Tool 3: Routine

Another tool Coach Wil describes is one you hear plenty of high level athletes talk about - building a routine. 

You probably already have a routine, you just don’t know it yet. 

Think back on every one of your best workouts. I bet there’s a few things you did that day across all the days. Maybe it was a certain amount of caffeine, or the music you listened to on the way to the gym. 

Regardless of what it is, the most useful thing you can do with your routine is to write it down and do it on purpose. When you do this, you can use the routine to your advantage. A routine can give you confidence because you always know what will happen. Every time you blast Creed on the way to the gym, you’re in a better mood. When you’re in a better mood, you lift better. Once you know that, you can make it repeatable. 

Here’s how to build a routine that works for you.

Start with small routines and expand over time. 

Develop your pre-lift routine. Where do you look when you approach the bar? Do you grab the bar left hand first or right hand first? Do you do one hip pump and go, or do you use a dynamic start? Once you get this down, you can expand this routine beyond the lifts. 

What’s your routine in between sets? Do you scroll on your phone or do you sit down and focus on the next set? 

Once you’ve got your between sets routine, then it’s time to develop your gym routine. Do you show up to the gym, grab a foam roller and roll out for 15 mins, or do you start a dynamic warm up?

Continue this pattern of creating routines further and further removed from your training. Do you go to bed and and wake up at the same time every day? Do you drink the same amount of water every day? 

We want to start building the routine with the most immediate impact on your next lift, and depending on how seriously you want to take the sport, you can create routines for your entire life, but all of this is to better create predictability in your training. 

Takeaway: Write down your pre-lift routine and stick to it for an entire session, then for an entire week and pay attention to how your focus in training changes. 

Tool 4: Confidence

Confidence is perhaps the single most important mindset to develop. 

Most people think you should just “Fake It Till You Make It”

Coach Wil says…

“Fake it till you make it doesn’t work, it’s not real. I believe that confidence is earned”

Earned confidence comes from actions you have taken that you can look back on to say “I did that”. 

Want to Snatch 100kg at nationals?

Doing it in training once will give you confidence you can do it again. Doing it in training 5 times gives you confidence you can do it at a local meet. Doing it at a local meet gives you confidence you can do it in a bigger meet. Doing it at a big meet gives you confidence that you can do it at nationals. 

If you want to be confident in the lifts you take, the attempts you choose in competition, or the lofty goals you have in mind, look back on what you’ve actually done as proof of what you can do in the future. 

Takeaway: Think of a goal that seems just out of reach. Write down all the reasons you could achieve it right now. If you can’t think of any reasons, then write down the reasons you would be able to achieve that goal, and start working towards completing them. 

If you found this helpful, you can watch the full interview below!

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