Gymnastics Essay

What Are the Motivating Factors for Athletes Specifically Gymnasts
Alexandre S. Wolf
Bath High School
Gymnastics is one of the most taxing sports in the world. Competitive gymnasts are known to train for over 20 hours a week, the equivalent of a part-time job. Being a gymnast requires commitment, discipline, patience, and a lot of strength. Although there are many health benefits of being a gymnast, sports like gymnastics can be a burden on people both physically and mentally. Among the biggest health benefits are increased self-esteem, coordination and flexibility, stronger and healthier bones, as well developing social skills (Healthy Fitness Revolution, 2015). Despite these benefits, gymnastics is a lot of work, which leads us to the primary

4). Simply put it means the reasons why we do something, or not do something. Furthermore there are two types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is motivation from personal interest and pleasure. As Deci et al (as cited in Lai, 2011) observed, “intrinsic motivation energizes and sustains activities through the spontaneous satisfactions inherent in effective volitional action. It is manifest in behaviors such as play, exploration, and challenge seeking that people often do for external rewards” (p. 658). This is different from extrinsic motivation which is motivation augmented from the probabilities of future events. Extrinsic motivation for example would be doing a job only for the money or going to college only to earn your bachelor's degree. Extrinsic motivation can be created from a positive contingency or a negative one (Lai, 2011, p.

In order to figure out what motivates gymnasts to do gymnastics, I interviewed some of my fellow teammates. To see whether the motivation is different between male and females in gymnastics I interviewed both. After all men’s and women's gymnastics are different in many ways. In the interviews I did over phone I asked each person why they did gymnastics and where they find the motivation to do it. Some took longer to answer than others, all with responses varying slightly. There were similarities in all of the responses as well as differences. My initial expectations were that people would say they were motivated by family and because of how much they had invested in the sport. Maybe the investment in the sport had made it so they couldn't stop doing