The word " motivation " is of Latin origin and is derived from the verb " moveo ", which translated into Russian means " to move ". Taking this fact into account, motivation can be defined as a process of a psychoactive nature that is driven by a person who wants to achieve a certain goal. Motivation plays a vital role in all spheres of human life, including sports.
The issue of motivation is relevant not only for those involved in sports for the purpose of self-development, but also for professionals. Because everyone experiences a lack of motivation at one time or another. There are days when a person simply doesn’t even want to get out of bed, much less go for a run or go to the gym. And if such a feeling is given slack, then there is no simpler way to talk about success in sports. In sports there is no place for a happy or random coincidence of circumstances. Everything depends solely on one’s own willpower, desire, and stems from the athlete’s motives and motivations.
Why is motivation needed in sports?
Motivation is one of the key moments in sports, to which even training is second in importance. To achieve truly great achievements, skill and talent alone are not enough. Without iron willpower, perseverance, and a strong character, it is simply impossible to achieve any heights in sports. And even if such great athletes as Romario say that training is only for weaklings, this should be taken solely as a joke.
Getting the desired result in sports allows you to be completely dedicated and get out of your own comfort zone. This applies not only to those people who strive for such heights as Olympic gold, but also those who want to have a beautiful, sculpted body and bring their weight back to normal. Regardless of what goal a person wants to achieve, the result will be equal to the efforts made and expended.
What is sport for?
The initial step of motivation is a specific answer to the question posed - what are sports activities for and what do they ultimately give. There can be many and completely different reasons:
- Confidence – sport is closely associated with certain things, such as overcoming one’s fears and weaknesses, the ability to do something more, the ability to train willpower, strengthen one’s character, and so on. Sports activities not only train the physical body, but also help in working on an internal level. A person who regularly exercises feels confident and has a strong character.
- Health status – sport has a beneficial effect on health: it increases endurance, resistance to stressful situations, physical strength, improves the body’s immunity and its resistance to numerous diseases. The digestive system and cardiovascular activity improves.
- Sexuality – playing sports contributes to the formation of one’s own body. They allow you to lose or gain weight at your discretion, build muscle mass, and create a beautiful body. A sexy body not only attracts admiration from others, but also provides many different benefits.
- Recognition – people who play sports command respect and are popular among others.
- Discipline - sport requires regular performance of specific actions: going to training in cold and bad weather, getting up early and doing morning exercises and jogging, following a diet, and even if you don’t have the strength, doing a variety of exercises. These actions instill discipline, strengthen character, and certain results depend on them.
- Well-being and mood – during training, the body releases hormones of joy. Thanks to them, after classes you feel pleasantly tired, well-being and have a positive outlook on life. And a person who looks at life positively fills his world with only joyful and happy events.
Everyone has ups and downs and it is impossible to maintain high motivation all the time. However, there are many methods that encourage motivation. Each person is the master of his own life and it depends only on him whether there is motivation or not. And you should always remember that you are capable of much greater achievements than you think. What is being done today will definitely allow tomorrow to be proud of your successes and be in the forefront.
Motivating factors
Important points that allow everyone to find the willpower to not lose interest or desire to play sports. They are quite simple, and their clear presentation in front of you allows you to constantly feel the desire to move forward and only forward:
Achieve success
Being successful, regardless of the sport, is something that brings true pleasure and self-satisfaction to every athlete, allowing them to be recognized for all the effort and time spent on training. And the more difficult the path to true success, the higher the degree of satisfaction experienced.
Confession
When the results become noticeable and significant, and the people around them recognize them, this certainly affects the athlete’s self-respect, allows him to feel his own dignity, and in some cases gain confidence.
Growth and development
Long-term goals and prospects give confidence not only in the present, but also in the future.
Quality training content
To avoid boredom and reluctance to start another workout, you should carefully select exercises. They should be interesting and varied. This has a positive effect on sporting achievements.
Self-discipline and self-improvement
These are the two main keys to achieving full self-realization in sports, regardless of the global nature of the tasks you set for yourself. And these are quite difficult moments, because you have to make certain sacrifices. If walks, parties, hobbies can interfere with your usual routine, you need to be able to refuse them.
Of course, this will be very difficult to do. But only such difficulties and a clear awareness that the rejection of “excesses” gives an iron will. Without it, it is impossible to achieve anything worthwhile in life, to rise to heights that one could only dream of. When this happens, nothing can compare with this feeling. It completely justifies all the difficulties experienced. It costs a lot to be a winner in life!
To be motivated, you must always have the desire to keep yourself in good shape, feel a charge of strength and energy. And this is the true truth. Athletes belong to that category of people who are proud of what they do. They constantly feel a surge of strength, full of energy, look to the future with confidence, and have a clear idea of their intentions and goals. This allows you to find a clear meaning in life, which is to live in order to achieve something. Such an attitude distinguishes an athlete from the general gray crowd. Being active and playing sports means living an eventful life.
Quotes about sports for girls from successful athletes
“A fit woman always achieves what a woman in a robe can only dream of”
- said journalist and presenter Evelina Khromchenko.
“The ability to overcome oneself is without a doubt the most valuable property of sport”
- a super quote about sports from Olga Korbut, Soviet gymnast, four-time Olympic champion.
“When I go out onto the court, I don’t pay attention to who my opponent is. Although I respect every opponent, my only desire is to win.”
If you go into a tournament thinking that someone else will win, you have a serious problem.
— meaningful statements about sports from one of the best tennis players in the world, Maria Sharapova.
One of the shortest motivations is quotes about sports from the world famous tennis player Serena Williams:
“He who sleeps gets nothing but dreams.”
Where to look for inspiration for motivation?
A source for motivating yourself to play sports in order to achieve high results can be watching a variety of motivational videos. They can be dedicated not only to famous and outstanding sports and film stars, but also to ordinary people who were able to achieve their goals, changed their lives for the better and want to share their experience of overcoming the accompanying difficulties and obstacles.
Looking at those who managed to completely overcome themselves, achieve one hundred percent dedication and self-discipline, it will be difficult to find another excuse not to exercise. Remember that missing a workout instantly sets any athlete back two steps, no matter how hard they worked out before.
Arnold Schwarzenegger speech that will change your life / This video blew up the Internet
Tips for motivation
Motivation is an important matter, because achieving the desired result without it is quite difficult. Sports activities are always necessary, but we start them only when we need to change something: get rid of excess weight or increase endurance. And starting to correct all this, you have to face difficulties, since it is not at all easy to force yourself to work on something that you have not done before.
The main thing is to clearly understand that nothing can be achieved just like that. To get the first result, you need to sweat for at least a month, or even several. But this is only the initial stage. A noticeable result comes only after six months of daily, hard work. But having worked fruitfully, you can see your various capabilities, improve your health, look at the successes achieved and happily show them to others.
You can never say that I will start on Monday or another day, you need to start now. To achieve more, you need to overcome more obstacles that arise. In sports, you have to work hard and hard to achieve records and victories.
Ways to overcome the period of “breakdown”
Every athlete faces a moment when his motivation begins to wane, and his further desire to exercise steadily declines. This can happen both during the active period of achieving a goal, when all the difficulties seem to be left behind, and after complete triumph - obtaining the cherished result.
This stage has clearly defined “symptoms” of a decline in motivation:
- self-pity, which leads to the fact that the athlete simply stops giving one hundred percent in training;
- lack of any pleasure from training, which becomes a routine rather than a tool for self-development;
- a gradual reduction in the duration of classes, when, instead of the allotted time, the training lasts much less.
Overcoming this recession is not very easy. The main thing is to pull yourself together and not give up. Not many people succeed. After all, a huge number of people start playing sports, but only a few manage to achieve real success. Only seven percent actually achieve their goal; the rest are simply wasting their time. It was these lucky seven percent who were able to abandon the word “want”, replacing it with “need”.
If an athlete has real motivation, he will never be stopped by a period of breakdown or failure. He always goes further and knows how to work on his mistakes. This is real willpower, which lies in the fact that difficulties and obstacles do not break, but strengthen them even more. In addition, there is one trick that allows you to quickly overcome the “rift”.
To get out of a period of low motivation, you need to monitor your progress. There is no universal training program that suits absolutely everyone without exception. Therefore, if classes cease to bring results, changes are necessary. Otherwise, the pleasure from training will not return. You need to experiment and find exactly what suits you.
What motivation for sports will not work?
The root cause of all your victories and defeats is you.
On the Internet you can find a lot of the same type of advice, wandering practically unchanged from one blog to another. The problem is that they are ineffective, in many ways even self-deception. The main opponent when trying to apply them will be your mind, which will instantly notice any catch and use any gaps in the theory of such techniques against you. For example, let's look at several common motivations for sports that can be found on almost every thematic site.
Promise yourself a reward
Train for real, not virtually.
Just promise yourself to buy, for example, your favorite ice cream after training, and that’s it – your body will happily get up from a comfortable chair in front of the fireplace and run to the gym. In fact, the first thing your mind will do is send a reasonable message to your body: if you can buy ice cream after a workout, then why not skip the unnecessary intermediary between ice cream and the body - the workout - and buy it now? Most likely, this will happen: you will eat ice cream and not go to the gym.
Think positively
The only true motivation is the one that will force you to act
. The idea is to motivate yourself by visualizing the end result. We imagined six-pack abs instead of a beer belly, thought how great it would be, and went ahead and pumped up our abs. The ineffectiveness of this technique was demonstrated during an experiment by New York University psychologist Gabriel Ettingon. The idea is that a person burns out emotionally, daydreaming on his couch. This emotional energy should be spent on real training, not virtual training.
Quotes from great athletes
It doesn’t matter what is written here, because Bruce Lee won’t go to the gym for you.
In fact, after watching a couple of videos or memes, a person will most likely say: “Yes, that’s cool, I’ll definitely start going for morning and evening jogging... starting tomorrow /since Monday, because today I have so much to do.” We all know the value of the word “tomorrow”.
I’m not saying that these methods didn’t help anyone, I’m just saying that their effectiveness tends to zero for very specific reasons - to use them you already need to have sufficient willpower to motivate yourself without any deals or rewards. What should those who want to study, but cannot overcome themselves, do?
To do this, you need to force your mind, which usually seeks the path of least resistance, to perceive training as something obligatory, and equate missing a workout with a real loss and experience really negative emotions from this loss.
