Intrinsic And Extrinsic Motivation In Sports

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Motivation in other words can be described as a will or being dedicated to focus on achieving a certain goal/objective with a person’s inner drive or with outside factors. Which is basically called Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation comes from within a person. For example an intrinsic motivation of mine could be to perfect my back-to-back turn in swimming as I am not that good at it and also as it helps to reduce the time wasted when moving on to the next length. Other examples of this type of motivation are; having pride in performing a certain skill, the desire to overcome a certain task, desire to overcome a problem, etc. Extrinsic motivation comes from an outside factor which may encourage the athlete to perform at …show more content…

It can be broken down into three broad categories based on how it is viewed by a particular person. The trait centred view is when a person believes that his/her own personality which includes their own ambition or needs, is what affects motivation. When my coach calls me “very competitive”, I would tend to believe that I am more capable of being a success rather than a failure. This is because hearing the word “competitive” would give me an extra boost of motivation in winning. The situation centred view is when a person’s motivation is based on the current situation or environment. If my swimming coach adds on very interesting yet educational training programmes to my schedule, it is more likely that I would be motivated so in this case, since I liked the fact that there was a change in my training programme I would be more motivated to perform better during training. Lastly, interactional view is a combination of both personality and the environment. If I am very competitive and if my coach tries to motivate me more by letting me swim with swimmers who are much older and talented than me, I would be more motivated to show everyone that I am capable of swimming better than my other opponents no matter what age. In order for an athlete to increase his/her motivation, he/she must set goals. The goals should …show more content…

Intrinsic motivation is usually long-lasting as it comes from an inner drive towards achieving a set goal. The sportsman is able to concentrate and to be more focused as there is no chance of being punished and this was studied by the University of Vanderbilt. I have seen that whenever my parents or my coach or my peers don’t pressurise me in swimming, and that I myself focus on achieving a particular task, it is more likely that I succeed or if not, it is less likely that I would be disappointed if I don’t achieve it. So as you can see, intrinsic motivation will affect any sportsman in a positive manner however there are certain drawbacks of it. It would take more time to make decisions and to prepare as there wouldn’t be anyone or anything to give you a certain strategy in achieving it. When it comes to me, I tend to think a lot when planning my level of strength I long distance swimming (whether I should star slow and end fast or vice versa or set my speed at a certain level.etc). This may affect me mentally because if I don’t achieve my goal, I become more stressed because I think of all the possible choices that I could’ve taken instead of a certain one because in the end, it didn’t help me at all. So having someone or something to guide you towards achieving something would be much more helpful if the sportsman is really competitive and this is an advantage of extrinsic motivation as the

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