IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD
Motivation is the foundation of all athletic effort and accomplishment. Without determination, desire and the willingness to go further to imporve your riding performance, confidence, mental strategy, intensity, focus and various emotions will suffer in consequence. To ebcome the best cyclist you can be, you must become more motivated than ever before to maximise the ability to push further and harder in order to acheive your goals.
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What Is Motivation?
Motivation, simply defined as the ability to initiate and persist to achieve a desire goal or task. To perform at the best of your ability, you must first have the complete desire and want to constantly improve and maintain the highest effort possible to achieve your goals.
Motivation in a cycling sense, is one of the most important factors when in training and racing, you must be willing to push and force your body to break down in fatigue, boredom and pain.
Motivation will impact everything that influences your riding performance; mental preparation, technical and tactical training, physical conditioning, and general living factors, such as sleep, diet, study/work and relationships.
The reason motivation is a key to success in cyclist is due to the fact that this is the only contributor to riding and racing that you have control over.
Things that affect the performance of one self can include, your ability; which includes physical, technical, tactical and mental capabilities. As ability is noted to be something you are born with, you cannot change your ability; therefore, it is out your control.
Secondly, the difficulty of the competition in which you desire to race or measure your progress against. Contributors to difficulty include the ability of the opponent and external factors such as new terrain, new disciplines and tactics, weather, things that you do not have control over.
Finally, a factor that you do have control over, motivation. Motivation will directly impact the level at which you push towards your desired goals and ones that are ultimately achievable.
If you are highly motivated to improve performance in yourself, then this will result in the ability to put more time and effort into training and striving towards the ultimate goal.
Motivation will also influence the level of performance at the beginning of a race or competition of the like. If your competitors are competing against someone they fear of near equal skill and fitness level they will not be able to confirm a resulting outcome for the end of the race. Due to the level of confidence you pose in your attitude for the race will disturb there overriding thoughts of domination as they desire.