The Fitness Mindset PDF – Brian Keane: When I was about seven years old, I remember watching a talk show with my grandmother and seeing this man with big muscles, who, in my eyes, looked like a superhero. I recall being engrossed in every word that came out of his mouth and listening to how he used to do hundreds of push-ups in his small bedroom in Austria when he was nine or ten.
The Fitness Mindset PDF – Brian Keane
I remember running to my room to do as many push-ups as I could – which turned out to be maybe one, possibly two! But I went to bed that night dreaming that someday, I would be big, strong, and muscular like the man on TV. That man went on to become one of the top-grossing movie stars of all time and the Governor of California.
His name is Arnold Schwarzenegger. That night, the seed of my love for fitness was sown. I was born into a massive sporting family and grew up on a small farm in Connemara in the West of Ireland. I wasn’t very scholarly at school: from the age of six to 17 or 18, my entire life circulated playing sports, especially Gaelic Football, Ireland’s national sport, which was my personal favourite.
My closest friends like to joke with me that I’m the living embodiment of ‘ If it isn’t a priority, it doesn’t get done,’ and there’s a lot of truth to this. From an academic standpoint, I just about got through school, but from a sports standpoint, I made it into every team I tried out for, spending hours every evening practising skills and drills to improve my performance.
The Fitness Mindset PDF – Brian Keane
To master my football techniques, I would learn to kick equally well with both feet, hang car tyres in front of my home-made goals, and try to kick the ball through them. I wouldn’t enter the house until I passed the ball through the tyre 10 times in a row. I did everything to improve my game. My schoolbag was a glorified doorstopper for most of my teens.
School was never really a focus for me, so I never excelled until my early twenties. I regularly had teachers tell me I was going to be on welfare for life unless I turned professional in one of the sports I played. I remember one time when I was picked up by the ear and kicked out of the class for mapping out my workout routine during the time allotted to some other task.
And I recall walking down the long, narrow corridor to the principal’s office with my heart in my mouth. It was the third or fourth time I had been sent that week. I’ll never forget the conversation we had that day. My principal, also named Brian, sat me down and told me that although I obviously should be doing the allocated tasks and not calculating my 10 rep max during class, I was going to be fine in life.
The Fitness Mindset PDF – Brian Keane
He had seen my work ethic and dedication to football and talked about my ability to lead others on the pitch. He said that I had the personality to do big things with my life and never to let other teachers’ opinions of me change who I am at the core. I don’t remember much of the conversation, but I can never forget the feeling I had when I left that office.
‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel’ (Maya Angelou), and I think even at a subconscious level, that’s where my ‘just do you’ life philosophy comes from. That was the first time I had an authority figure, besides my mum, tell me that I was going to do something with my life, and I’ll be forever grateful for the belief that conversation instilled in me.
It is rightly said that great teachers can inspire you to do great things. I’ve since gone to university, received an honours degree in Business, completed post-graduation in teaching, won an All-Ireland medal with my club, travelled the world as a professional fitness model, and run my own business that works with and serves thousands of people every year.
The Fitness Mindset PDF – Brian Keane
This book is a culmination of everything I have learnt over the last 17 years of training and nearly 30 years of life. The book is split into two sections. The first half contains everything about fitness and health: nutrition, training, supplements, sleep, alcohol, and hydration. These are the essentials you need to get into incredible shape, increase your energy, and reap the results of understanding how your body works.
I nearly quit fitness several times during my early twenties from sheer information overload. There was so much conflicting material out there that I didn’t know what to believe, what to try, or what worked. I’ve used my personal 17 years of training and nutrition knowledge to try to find a shortcut for your journey. I effectively wrote all this for the 22-year-old me who nearly quit a hundred times.
The second half is focused on cultivating the mindset to get great results, using step-by-step strategies to help you implement them. It discusses everything from creating habits, setting goals, and reducing stress to maximising your energy levels, and my own personal stories of dealing with stress, anxiety, and worry in my own life.
The last section is entitled ‘Practical life tips’ and is written for my daughter. None of us truly knows how much time we have on this planet, and the life tips are a culmination of personal philosophies that I want to pass on to my daughter in case anything ever happens to me.