The Cardinal Sin of Coaches
Imagine your boss said to you, “alright, today we’re going to do some totally boring work.” You hesitate with a feeling of dread. He continues, “I’m serious. It’s going to be incredibly lame and I expect you to give 110%. Do it with a smile or I will absolutely bore you to tears!” This would be an unusual leadership approach in most industries. Yet, in the sport context, a tyrannical coaching style is common and it leaves a list of negative consequences in it’s wake.
Raise your hand if your coach or PE teacher punished you with running, push-ups, or other exercises. The experience is quite common. I vividly remember my coach lining us up to run “suicides.” Let’s consider the message a coach sends with such a label on running . . . that I’m going to make you run to kill yourself . . .
WOW. That’s pretty disturbing. And- no, I’m not an over-dramatic softy.
I agree that hard work is necessary to improve fitness, and I am in support of challenging athletes to step outside their comfort zone to grow themselves. Furthermore, I’m competitive to a fault. So, this is not a suggestion to finish practice drinking tea and admiring the clouds.
Instead, this is a call for coaches to pull our heads out of these ingrained traditions and consider a better way. Like lemurs, we blindly follow the unsubstantiated practices of the coaches from our youth, and we coach as we were coached. Let’s stop, and think critically about the effects of exercise as punishment.
The Truth
The truth is that coaches say that they use running to punish their athletes. However, running is not inherently a punishment. Remember that the athlete signed up for the sport to run and play because they like it, it’s fun! In reality, coaches are actually using public humiliation, shame, and dominance to punish their athletes.
For example, Johnny is late for practice. His coach has him run laps while everyone else is … you got it– running on the field/court while doing a drill. They all came to practice to run. Running is not a punishment until we use it as a punishment and teach athletes to hate it by associating it with negative emotions like shame, embarrassment, and powerlessness.
Furthermore, let’s examine the classic example of punishing the losers with running or exercise. How many people like to lose? Very few. Losing is already inherently a punishment. Adding exercise as a punishment is a way of embarrassing the losers and rewarding the winners with an experience in social dominance. The saddest part of a punish the loser approach is that both teams could have truly done their best, working as hard as they could. Yet, it’s a game. Someone is going to lose. Punishing the loser when they’ve done their best undermines their motivation, self-confidence, and cohesion of the team.
In sum, public humiliation is not a way to earn respect or motivate athletes. Instead, it breeds resentment, hurts motivation, and leads to dropout.
The Solution
- Set clear expectations.
- Catch them being good. Praise behaviors you want repeated.
- Ignore what you don’t want.
- When you can’t ignore, intervene in the least attentive way possible.
Finally, if you are a person who’s had negative exercise experiences and have ever said, “I hate running, running’s a punishment. I don’t run unless I’m being chased!” It’s time to reclaim exercise for your own. It’ll take time, but when you re-associate exercise with positive emotions, you can change your attitudes and enjoy exercise.
Click here for a guide on: How to Like Exercise.
Thanks for reading! 🙂
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References:
Ekkekakis, P., Zenko, Z. & Werstein, K. M. (2018). Exercise in Obesity From the Perspective of Hedonic Theory. In Razon S., & Sachs, M. L. (Eds.), Applied Exercise Psychology (pp. 289-315). New York: Routledge.
Ladwig, M., Vazou, S., & Ekkekakis, P. (2018). “My Best Memory Is When I Was Done with It”: PE Memories Are Associated with Adult Sedentary Behavior. American College of Sports Medicine.
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