How Coaches Can Help Young Athletes Overcome Motivation to Avoid Pain
The best form of motivation is natural motivation. Research from psychologist Edward Deci suggests that this natural form of motivation or as he calls it intrinsic motivation is a far stronger motivator than extrinsic or external motivation.
When it comes to the average human, the most natural form of intrinsic motivation is to avoid pain. It follows that since most athletes are human (I can’t speak for those elite athletes who perform like aliens), they also have a natural motivation to avoid pain.
However, pain is a requirement to become a better athlete. Unfortunately, in nearly every sport, developing skills to achieve specific results is painful. It requires conditioning, repetition, and learning from failure. So, coaches must have a plan to help young athletes overcome the natural motivation to avoid pain. But the fact is, most youth coaches deal with pain as a random nuisance instead of having a game plan.
The Game Plan for Helping Young Athletes Overcome the Motivation to Avoid Pain
Whether it’s the pain from conditioning, the pain from boredom, or the pain from losing; a patient coach can create a plan to progressively increase an athlete’s tolerance for pain. Furthermore, this plan starts with the use of positive training pain.
Positive training pain is training to intentionally create non-threatening pain. The goal of positive training pain is to improve performance by pushing an athlete beyond fatigue while keeping the pain threshold under the athlete’s control. In contrast, the goal of negative training pain is not to improve performance or to keep the pain threshold under the athlete’s control. Negative training pain is more of a punishment than anything else.
Youth coaches who don’t have patience tend to depend on negative training pain most often. This is obviously a mistake as it does not lead to young athletes enjoying the pursuit of skills and results, which is the ultimate job of a youth coach.
Developing pain tolerance must never be in the form of punishment as that is completely counterproductive. We know kids are already wired to avoid pain. So, when coaches use pain as a form of punishment, it just reinforces this motivation.
What makes the development of pain tolerance possible is that it’s something one chooses to do because of the benefits. Therefore, as part of a coach’s plan they must spend time explaining these benefits before the system to develop pain tolerance is implemented.
In short, if youth coaches don’t have a system to develop pain tolerance, they are making a mistake. Instead of helping their athlete’s get better, there is a good chance that many of their athletes will show more motivation to avoid pain than to get better.