How to leave your comfort zone, and how Mountain Bike can help you

It´s true: mountain biking is a great solution for something psychologically as necessary as leaving your comfort zone. In all senses, both sportingly and personally and psychologically.

What is the sports comfort zone

The professionals define it as a comfort zone because the symptoms are clearly of apathy: you conform with your current state of physical form and with your results, and you lose the aim, as well as the aspirations. You are comfortable at the point where you are and aren´t looking for the next level, the next challenge. If this happens, you have fallen to your sports comfort zone.

It isn´t so serious, there is nothing to worry about: the human being tends to look for comfort and it´s something natural, so the mountain biking it wouldn´t be different. Of course, in sports you have a serious problem, because go into the comfort zone will lead to disconnection, loss of ambition and eventually demotivation and even abandon the cycling. And it usually happens when you repeat the same exercises constantly, those kind of routes or exercises which you are better or control more than the rest. But it's easy to get out of it if you're a mountain bike lover. See how Peter Sagan does it.

How to get out of your comfort zone on mountain bike

Mountain bike lovers have it easier. Because regardless of the discipline you practice, it always has a lot of dynamism. The routes are totally different and the exercises to improve are infinite. The first advice is that: change your route and, above all, change your exercises periodically. Don´t dedicate yourself to go to the same paths and always train the same faculties. Do even the opposite of what you usually do.

Change even the technique of your workouts, alternate intense weeks with relaxed, even with your family. It varies even the use of certain stretches: if you usually work hard on a specific climb, spend a week working balance on the same climb. Don´t you pigeonhole in the sectors, or they will make you bored: you can rediscover a sector doing something different in it. But don´t forget your responsibilities.

You must train by objectives, and not by sessions. It isn´t enough to go out four times a week on your mountain bike if you do almost the same week to week. Set yourself goals of time and pulsations and that will help you to measure your performance and encourage you to improve to the next step, to the next aim. That´s, even if the route has to be the same for two weeks in a row for any reason, try to measure everything possible in the first one, in order to try to improve yourself in the second one.

Consider the following: it's about expanding your comfort zone. Doing a different activity will allow you to eventually also dominate it perfectly, and will become part of your comfort zone and your skills on mountain biking. It will make you a better cyclist, and that means a constant effort to reinvent yourself. It is an exercise of imagination, which keeps you creative when you go out with the bike and it prevents you from being monotonous and lack of enthusiasm for going out to ride.

Ride in group. It's fundamental. A peloton or a group constantly alter your pretensions and vices. They go faster, or slower than you usually go; change the routes or don´t do them for the same way you usually do; they share their experiences and their tricks, which gives you other points of view, other ways of taking a curve, or how to place the body on your bike, or climbing an incline or of stopping at a certain point. Enrich and improve you as a mountain biker.

And of course, your mountain bike will help you get out of your personal comfort zone: this dynamism as a cyclist is nothing more than your own personality away from the bike. If you are creative, dynamic and motivated on mountain biking, leaving your personal and professional comfort zone is a breeze.

Because don´t forget: everything can always be improved.