Have you ever heard of pop-psychology?
Or, have you ever heard of psychobabble?
I know that you have.
Well, for sport and exercise psychology, the
word motivation is a part of that.
Fitness pros and just everybody throws around
the word as if it is a simple thing and as
if just saying the word means they are "doing
something about exercise psychology."
Some psychologists have argued that the term
motivation is vague and overused when it comes
to the gym, the locker room, or life.
And, I agree.
Every article, speech, or utterance about
the word tends to come from a different definition.
Motivation has become a sports psychology
buzzword for those who don't really have any
other words to choose from.
It's either so broad it pretty much encompasses
the whole field of sports psychology or so
narrow it becomes useless.
Did you know that there are over 30 theories
of motivation?
If not more.
That means that there are over 30 different
organizational or "operational" definitions.
The main thing to realize is that motivation
is not a distinct thing.
It's not as if "you are motivated or you are
NOT motivated."
It's more a process.
If you go to the gym, then you must be motivated
to do that, right?
So to say "I lack motivation" doesn't quite
describe your problem if you have a problem.
A key point to understand is that motivation
is specific, not general.
Your goals are a part of motivation.
You go to the gym.
Showing up doesn't mean you are motivated
to have a good exercise session.
So what did you hope to achieve by showing
up?
Perhaps your primary goal, on the day, was
to avoid guilt!
The avoidance of guilt is not exactly the
same as the desire to achieve something positive.
And this is, by the way, part of why I reject
the use of guilt tactics to get people to
exercise.
The "motivation" that guilt brings is to avoid
the negative emotion of guilt as much as it
is to achieve something.
And this brings us to one big problem with
all this talk about motivation.
People think that motivation is general.
And they think that attitude is general.
Well, no, they're not.
They are both very specific.
Your attitudes about the specific actions
and tasks you undertake in your training are
specific to those things.
Your motivation is a part of your attitude,
as well.
Therefore motivation is specific.
The more meaningful the task is to you, the
more motivated you will be to achieve within
that task!
I really want this to hit home.
You see all those articles about which exercises
or what kind of training is the most effective.
Well, exercising is not like buying an appliance
and checking consumer reports for all the
lowdown.
I guarantee that the thing you enjoy more
will be more effective if that enjoyment means
you will stick to it.
But effective for what?
Well, that's another story…
The next point I wanna make is that even incentives
motivate in a specific way depending on the
situation.
This brings me to the many contests and other
incentives on many websites and social media.
They seek to motivate through an incentive-based
approach.
What you'll find is that while a person might
be attracted to, say, a fat loss challenge,
they may not be attracted to a lifting challenge
even if they are equally interested in both
pursuits.
This underscores that their perceptions and
beliefs about the two things are different,
and their "theory of achievement" are different
for those things.
Let's talk briefly about those theories of
motivation.
I've talked in the past about task-oriented
behavior and being intrinsically motivated,
sometimes called self, or inner motivated,
and extrinsically motivated, sometimes called
other, or outside motivated.
This is also sometimes called an internal
or external locus of control.
As you can see, many terms, many theories.
The terms task involvement and ego involvement
are also used.
Ego involvement may make you think of winning
contests but it should not be confused with
other forms of extrinsic motivation such as
incentives or reward based.
Other labels and slightly different concepts
have also been developed by some theorists,
such as learning oriented versus performance
oriented; or mastery focused versus ability
focused.
Ames and Archer have used the terms mastery
goals and performance goals.
Most all of these are different iterations
of achievement goal theory.
You may not be very interested in any of that,
and I can't blame you, but what I want you
to notice is that even though we are discussing
motivation, the term "goal" is used in describing
the theories.
You are motivated to do something because
of the desire for a certain type of outcome,
or goal.
The point is, motivation is not a one-off
thing.
We tend to think of a person as either being
motivated to exercise, or not motivated to
exercise, but it is highly contingent on the
situation, the environment, and the specific
tasks involved.
As well, motivation to learn, and motivation
to perform, can be quite different.
If you are a trainer, you know the frustration
of trainees that don't have the patience to
learn something new, they want to skip right
to mastery.
They wanna load up the bar and go for broke.
Clearly, they're motivated to lift, they just
aren't motivated to learn the lift and spend
some time mastering it before demonstrating
that mastery.
Some people may not have a general motivation
to learn.
This does not mean that they cannot have a
"state" motivation when the importance of
learning a specific thing is conveyed to them.
Let's talk more about this motivation to learn
versus motivation to perform.
You may wonder why I suddenly started focusing
on your motivation to learn.
Well, it seems to me that while many people
join a gym with a great deal of motivation
to achieve something, they lack something
just as important.
Long-term success in whatever fitness or performance
pursuit you are into involves a process of
self-discovery and learning.
Experimentation itself is a type of learning.
If you are motivated to achieve a certain
type of goal but you are not motivated to
engage in a process of discovery that leads
to that achievement, you may ultimately fail
to adhere to the pursuit of your goal.
I hear the phrase, "just do it" all the time.
Well, then what?
It all comes down to trying to shove people
in the right direction.
Let's back up and talk about incentives some
more.
I don't want to sound like I am completely
against this.
They're big for fat loss and all of that.
Lots of sites are continually doing promotions
and "body transformation" challenges or other
contests or incentive-based initiatives to
motivate people.
I know some people who I respect who do this
kind of thing.
So the contestants get some reward like a
free book.
Sometimes incentives are a short-term means
to help achieve something more long-term but
sometimes, to me, ultimately, it's a lack
of what people really need.
And it is usually a short-term thing.
You have to realize that an achievement focus
for an athlete, who is continually competing,
is different from a temporary state for a
non-athlete where the competition is fleeting,
itself.
For the athlete, this may give them a competitive
edge, but such an edge is dependent on there
being a competition!
So, once it's ove, the value is fleeting and
its impact is fleeting.
No contest no motivation.
Now, I am not saying that people are wrong
for doing that kind of thing and it is certainly
fun and you may attract the attention of a
few people here and there who will end up
"internalizing" some of it and achieve lasting
change.
But I think that people have been misguided
into thinking that motivation equals excitement.
And vice versa.
However, while excitement can be an impetus
once the excitement or novelty is gone where
is the impetus?
To me, the mistake in that kind of thinking
is believing that what people really need
is a little shove in the right direction.
If that is all things were about then everybody
would be in shape and nobody would be obese.
Because we get little shoves all the time.
Just seeing somebody in shape when you're
out of shape is a little shove.
A bunch of little shoves can end up backfiring
after a while.
People end up pushing back.
They end up pushing back with attitudes that
are the opposite of what the "incentives"
were supposed to cultivate.
I picked out two words that I think are key
to what I've been saying.
Value, and fun.
I am all about strength training or fitness
pursuits being fun.
In fact, I think that is one of the main keys.
But the way I go about making it fun is to
do things that have personal value.
Also, I said that it doesn't give them what
they need.
So what do I think strength trainees need?
Well, the first thing is tools.
If you don't have the things you need to be
successful but have to rely on others for
it then it's difficult to be continually motivated.
You know people think I rail against cookie
cutters for practical training reasons, but
that's not true.
I rail against them because they don't give
you the tools.
They don't allow you to experience your training.
You can't be intrinsically motivated by your
training if you are a spectator to it.
It must be experiential.
The second thing is non-monotony.
If it's not, at some level, a creative process
you can never hope to be internally motivated
by it.
Something that involves a creative component
is, by definition, non-monotonous.
The experience and the rewards it brings must
be sufficiently varied.
The third thing is that you have to be in
charge.
You have to be in charge of your training
or your exercise at least some of the time.
I used to daily messages asking "what should
I do" and sometimes I reply, "what do you
want to do?".
Most don't want to hear that and I could just
go on giving instructions, you know, to the
best of my ability.
And, if I were getting paid I'd do that.
But when I was no longer in the employ of
the trainee, where would they be if they'd
never made a decision?
Sure, the might have reached their initial
goals, after all, they have me as a trainer!
But they would be beholden to me or others
to reach further goals.
Making a decision and then living with it
and learning from the consequences of that
decision is another part of becoming intrinsically
motivated.
The last thing is performance goals.
This is the biggest one to me.
This is the one I repeat over and over and
it goes for everything: Any fitness pursuit,
any performance pursuit, strength training
pursuit, bodybuilding pursuit.
Ah, setting performance related goals is the
number one key.
You had this challenge with pullups that you
had to solve.
You set a goal to fix the issue.
This is a performance-related goal that you
HAD to be motivated internally to do!
Nobody was waiting to carry you out of the
gym in triumph and you didn't have your own
string and horn section playing in the background.
You know, I wrote a post a post related to
achieving goals and I called these Rudy moments.
There are very few Rudy moments in life and
in training.
Most of what we accomplish only we ourselves
are aware of or even care about.
If you don't get that how can you hope to
keep going?
To sum it up, motivation is not about catchy
slogans.
It's highly complex and individualistic.
It's so complex that the very word motivation
can be useless unless we are very clear on
the why's and wherefore's.
You know, I could go around telling people
to just do it and stop making excuses, too.
I wrote an entire article on the word excuse.
Telling people to just do it and stop making
excuses would really be more about me and
how I feel than about other people.
What do you want to do?
What is meaningful to you?
All these catchy slogans are other people
expressing themselves.
How do YOU want to express yourself?
That is the first question to answer.
