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Types of motivation (a recap)

Sports psychologists have identified three broad categories of motivation, as follows:

• Amotivation - amotivation is the absence of any kind of motivation.  The athlete displaying amotivation doesn’t really know why they engage in the sport and they don’t see any benefit in playing.
• Extrinsic motivation – extrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from an outside source.  Where athletes perform because of a desire to win awards, financial benefits or simply because they have to do what their coach tells them, they are extrinsically motivated.
• Intrinsic motivation – intrinsic motivation is motivation that is derived from the desire to perform that activity or sport for its own sake and out of the athlete’s own volition.

Types of motivation and elite performance

Today, I’m going to look very briefly at a study that explores what happens to motivation when elite athletes begin to receive rewards for their high level performance.

In Motivation and elite performance: an exploratory investigation with Bulgarian athletes, Chantal, Guay, Dobreva-Martinova and Vallerand, International Journal of Sports Psychology, 1996, 98 elite Bulgarian athletes (including both men and women) were studied.  The performances of the athletes were documented over a period of two years and the athletes also completed a questionnaire designed to establish their levels of motivation over the same period.

The conclusions of the study were that the most successful athletes were most likely to display higher levels of amotivation and extrinsic motivation.

This is very interesting, as the prevailing wisdom is that intrinsic motivation is more powerful and capable of propelling athletes to greater success.

In their discussion of the results, the authors of the study wondered whether the fact that the Bulgarian sporting climate was a very competitive environment that financially rewarded winning rather than effort or task mastery was conducive to selecting for those athletes who were naturally motivated by rewards and financial gain.

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My thoughts

I would have been interested to see the motivation profiles of the same athletes before they began to receive their rewards, to see whether their profiles were similar before they began to receive benefits.

It is a well-documented psychological phenomenon that you can alter people’s perceptions of their actions by paying them (see Sidentop and Ramey, Intrinsic rewards and extrinsic motivation, 1977, where a retired psychology professor stopped children from playing outside his house by paying them to play there and then ceasing to pay them.  They went and played elsewhere when he stopped paying them because they had come to believe that the payment was the reason they were there).

I therefore suspect that it is the winning (and the rewards that come with it) that causes the amotivation and extrinsic motivation.  If that’s not a defence of amateur sport, I don’t know what is…

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I’m going to do a couple of research reviews on similar sports psychology topics and I’ll put them up on this sports psychology research page.

With that in mind, I’ve been doing some reading recently about sports psychology in general and motivation particularly (see Sport Psychology: Concepts and Applications, 5th edition, Richard Cox).  Here is what I have uncovered…

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Self confidence

Self confidence is not the same as motivation but it is closely linked.  Sports psychologists have found that highly motivated athletes tend to be very self confident and vice versa.

However, sports psychologists have noticed that athletes do not always display the same level of self confidence in every situation.  Also, they have noticed that just because an athlete displays high levels of self confidence off the field, they can experience self doubt in certain circumstances on the field.

They therefore say that there are two types of self confidence: global self confidence and situation-specific self confidence.

Global self confidence – this is the general self confidence that enables us to function in daily life and helps us to feel comfortable trying new things.

Situation-specific self confidence – this is the confidence that an athlete experiences when they are confident of achieving a particular task or goal.  This kind of self confidence is key to performing well under pressure.

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How to develop self confidence

A number of eminent sports psychologists have come up with ideas about what drives (particularly sports-specific) self confidence.

Successful performance – Albert Bandura proposed that self confidence (he calls it self efficacy) is generated by four factors: from the experience of successful performance, from vicarious experiences (watching their coach perform successfully), from verbal encouragement by peers and coaches, and from optimal emotional arousal, Bandura, Self-Efficacy, the exercise of control, 1997

Competence – Harter suggested that people are motivated to be competent at tasks.  Under this theory, athletes try to achieve mastery and are either motivated by subsequent successful attempts or disillusioned by unsuccessful attempts, Harter, Effectance Motivation reconsidered: towards a developmental model, 1978

Personality and competition – Vealy suggested that sports specific self confidence is dictated by two factors: the personality trait of self confidence, and the personality trait of competitiveness, Vealy, Conceptualisation of sport confidence and competitiveness, 1986

From these models, it seems to me that the main driver of situation-specific sports self confidence comes from the experience of successful attempts at a particular tasks or skills.

This reminds me of an interview with the English rugby player Jonny Wilkinson in which he described the insane amount of time he spent practising free kicks so that he could perform consistently under pressure.

Personally speaking, I can certainly say that my training motivation changed significantly from when I was taking part in a sport in which it was hard to tell from week to week whether I was getting any better (swimming) to when I started training for powerlifting and I can see the weights going up every week.

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Goal involvement

While it is easy to think that motivation is all simply about mastering tasks and achieving competence, sports psychologists are keen to note that it is not as simple as that!

Goal involvement personality orientations

Sports psychologists have noted that some individuals tend to be goal-focused on task mastery and other individuals tend to be goal-focused on social comparison.

For the task-motivated individual, their self-confidence is built upon continual improvement.  Their goal is to improve on their previous scores, times or lifts.  On the other hand, the athlete who is focused on social comparison is only satisfied when beating other people.

In general, task-focused athletes are thought to be more well-balanced and effective.  Athletes who are highly skilled but socially motivated tend not to try or train unless they are forced to do so by stiff competition.  Competition that is too stiff may lead them to give up before even trying.

These two factors are not mutually exclusive, however, and the most successful athletes often show high levels of both task mastery goal orientations and social comparison goal orientations.

Personally speaking, I find it interesting to learn that I must be as task-focused athlete, as I was half-decent at swimming despite being quite small for the sport, and I am pretty average as a powerlifter, with a squat that Dave Tate would probably classify as a rounding error.

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Goal involvement environments

Sports psychologists have also noticed that some coaching environments tend to be goal-focused on task mastery and some tend to be goal-focused on social comparison.

Task mastery climates – in these environments, athletes receive positive reinforcement from coaches when they work hard, demonstrate improvement and help other people learn.

Competitive environments – in these environments, athletes perceive that poor performance is punished and that high-ability athletes will receive the most attention and recognition irrespective of their work ethic.

A lot of educated people in the strength and conditioning world have commented that the thing that amazes them most about Louie Simmons is his ability to get a group of alpha male athletes all pulling together to improve the results of the whole team, rather than just paddling their own canoes.  Reading that list of attributes for a task-mastery climate, I think I can conceive of how he approaches it…

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Summary of key factors driving motivation

After much deliberation, sports psychologists have concluded that the key factors that drive motivation are:

• Competence – this is discussed above.  Athletes are motivated by successful achievement and improvement in their abilities.
• Autonomy – competent athletes who perceive themselves as such can still be demotivated by a lack of self-determination.  This often happens when a coach becomes overly controlling and starts to dictate to their athletes exactly what to do all of the time.  This is also one of the most frequent sources of demotivation in commercial environments, as managers receive little or no training in how to manage people, which is astounding really.
• Relatedness – while social comparison goal orientation can be a poor motivator without some level of task mastery goal orientation, all human beings are social animals and athletes are no exception.

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Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

Once again, sports psychologists are keen to emphasise that things are not quite as simple as that.  They believe that motivation comes in different varieties, from amotivation at one end through to intrinsic motivation at the other.

• Amotivation - amotivation is the absence of any kind of motivation.  The athlete displaying amotivation doesn’t really know why they engage in the sport and they don’t see any benefit in playing.
• Extrinsic motivation – extrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from an outside source.  Where athletes perform because of a desire to win awards, financial benefits or simply because they have to do what their coach tells them, they are extrinsically motivated.
• Intrinsic motivation – intrinsic motivation is motivation that is derived from the desire to perform that activity or sport for its own sake and out of the athlete’s own volition.

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I’m going to do a few posts on similar topics over the next couple of weeks and I’ll put them all on this sports psychology page.

Physical limitations

On WSL, as it is becoming known, the article suggests that some physical limitations can have a mental component.  The example given is of someone who accidentally picks up the 35lb dumbbells instead of 30lb dumbbells but still manages to grind through their set number of reps.  I find this amazing.  I know for a fact that if I add an extra 2.5kg (5lbs) to my pull up ahead of time, it will absolutely floor me.

The extra weight feels different.  Not just heavier but fundamentally different.  Like the difference between swimming in a pool and in the sea.  It is not the same as the difference between 40kg and 42.5kg.  It feels strange and new.  I feel its uncomfortable presence as acutely as I do the feel of a new pair of jeans after I’ve just taken off the old army trousers that I wear when I wash the car.

And this is with 55kg (or thereabouts) and 75kg of bodyweight, for a total of 130kg.  So the 2.5kg increase represents less than 2% of the total weight.  It is almost unworthy of mention.  But for me it is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  And I know the feel of that straw intimately. But is it all in my mind?  Am I afraid of the heavier weight?

Fear is the mind killer

One of the first comments on the WSL blog post was simply “fear is the mind killer”, a quotation from Frank Herbert’s Dune, and the motto that Paul Atreides learns when he joins with the desert people and becomes the chosen one.  Great book. Great film(s).

We all know it’s true.  Often, the effects of fear can be more of a danger to us than the thing that we fear.  But is it really as simple as saying that we should work to remove our fear of lifting heavier weight?

Fear of lifting heavier weight

I have been in the situation where I started to dread a workout as it came around.  It happened when I was on a cycle involving large doses of barbell squats and deadlifts.  My conventional deadlift was sitting at around 170kg (375lbs) and I badly wanted the 187.5kg (415lbs) that would enable me to claim 2.5x bodyweight.

As the weight climbed higher with each workout, deadlift day started to wear me down even before I lifted.  Hours before I got into the garage, I was worrying about the lift.  I slept badly the night before.  The relief afterwards was blissful but all too soon it was on my mind again.  Eventually, I recognised that it was doing me more harm than good and I gave up the goal and moved onto something else.

For me, this was a great learning experience and the one that pushed me towards the concepts of deloading and assistance lifts.  I believe that my body was telling me that I was driving my central nervous system too hard too soon and that I was wasn’t addressing my weak links.  Deloading regularly and attacking my weak links with supplemental exercises would have addressed this.

So my fear of lifting was caused by my mind trying to push my body too fast too soon and in the wrong way.  It was a feedback loop created by the stress I was placing on my body.  It wasn’t a phantom of my imagination or fear of something that wasn’t there.

Feeling the weight 

As I chase my goals today, I am not afraid of my next workout.  In fact, I am looking forward to hitting my numbers.  I have confidence that they will continue moving upwards, especially as my bodyweight goes down.  I don’t know why I feel this way but I will take advantage of it until it goes away.  When it does, I’ll deload, change the workouts around and start again.

For me, feeling that extra weight isn’t about fearing it, or being limited by it.  It is coming to know it.  By exposing yourself to the new weight, you learn something about it and about yourself.  And the next time you come across it, it is not new anymore but familiar.  In time, you learn to get along and then, before you know it, you have moved on again to new places.

A natural progression

So I believe that it is necessary to go through a natural progression.  I don’t think that there are any short-cuts to lifting heavier weights.  I think you have to learn the feel of bigger weights and get to know them before you can progress.  I think you have to let your body grow physically to adapt to the new stresses and strain.  The body needs time to adjust and so does the mind.