How to Increase Athlete Performance

By Oytun
for NBA-Basketball.org

Published: October 30, 2009

You know what’s a really stupid and really overused sports cliché? Well, all clichés are pretty idiotic but one that particularly annoys me is the saying: “We gave it a hundred and ten percent..”. First of all, there is no such thing as over 100% in real life, it’s impossible by definition. 100% is the most that you can get from something if every possible things works without a flaw. Machines are able to operate at near 100%, but humans? Not even close. Thats what I want to talk about today, the limits of a person, but more specifically the limits of an athlete.

I’m gonna go ahead and forgive that little cliché we use about working in overdrive, but something more concrete to ponder over is whether athletes really play up to anywhere near their capacity, and my belief is an astounding no. Don’t believe me? Then read on.

The regular season of most sports league is one area where we see players constantly playing way below their potential. Any single tough and physical game where players really seem to care about is referred to as a ‘playoff intensity’ game. Now why would players intentionally play at below their levels and perhaps more importantly how can teams who pay them millions of dollars just stand by and do nothing about this unacceptable behavior. Especially teams that probably won’t make the playoffs should be playing games like it’s the last game of their life right? I’m not even going to talk about the huge discrepancy between players’ performance in contract years as opposed to other years, its a subject that makes my stomach ache.

Let’s assume for a second that athletes play a notch below their ‘hardest’ during the regular season so they avoid injuries and keep energy for more important games that will come in the post season. Ok.

The thing is, I also don’t think the level of competition being played in playoff games, or even finals games is anywhere near what the athletes are capable of either. I absolutely don’t believe it when players say ‘we played our hardest’ or ‘we gave it everything we had’. Nonsense. If you had kidnapped the families of the players in question and told them if they didn’t win, they would kill their families…don’t you think they would have hustled a tiny bit more out on the floor? Don’t you think they would be chasing loose balls like their life depended on it? Do you think any player would show a hint of selfishness at the cost of the greater goal? They might not win, but I’m willing to bet that they would do better than if they weren’t motivated in such a way.

It’s a scientific fact that people produce adrenaline in times of extreme danger or excitement. Imagine a woman lifting a very heavy object to save their kids’ life. You know what I’m talking about.

There will be some that argue that people can’t perform well under such extreme pressures because they will be too scared to do something wrong. If that’s the case then the right sort of ‘punshiment’ needs to be found in order to motivate these players to really play closer to the 100% level they are capable of. I remember my days playing basketball in high school and university, when our coach threatened to make us run suicides if we made mistakes. Immediately, the amount of mistakes would go down, people would focus more, and we played better. Did it take out some of the fun, and made us more uncomfortable? Sure, but people perform at their highest level not when they have fun, but when they are intimidated.

The theory is that this kind of extrinsic motivation has some serious negative aspects which I’ll quote below:

1. It’s not sustainable – As soon as you withdraw the punishment or reward, the motivation disappears.
2. You get diminishing returns – If the punishment or rewards stay at the same levels, motivation slowly drops off. To get the same motivation next time requires a bigger reward.
3. It hurts intrinsic motivation – Punishing or rewarding people for doing something removes their own innate desire to do it on their own. From now on you must punish/reward every time to get them to do it.”

Sure, its not a nice thing to constantly pressure your athletes and punish them. It will quickly kill of the team chemistry and motivation of ever playing on the team. But at the same time, sports is a billion dollar industry where teams are constantly looking for the slightest of advantages they can find over their opposition and this often times is enough to translate to victory and success.

Look back at some of the successful basketball teams of the last decade. Besides the overly talented Lakers and Boston squads, you only have the Miami Heat, Detroit Pistons, and the San Antonio Spurs who have won the championship. The three coaches in question: Larry Brown, Greg Popovich, and Pat Riley are widely known around the league as the some of the most serious and strict coaches in the NBA. It seems like discipline, and a sense of intimidation does result in higher levels of play. Contrast this with ‘loose’ teams that have a care free attitude like the Warriors, and you will see immediately that focus decreases and players hustle less, commit more turnovers, and overall play at a lower level than they are capable of.

The lesson of all of this is not that every team should go out and adopt a draconian system where players are treated like lab rats and tortured until they can produce at their optimal level. The more constructive idea to take out of all of this is that there is definite room in sports for better management of athletes’ performance levels. Whether it is flexible and custom motivational schemes, player specific psychiatrists, and more correlation and trends analysis of what makes different players ‘take nights off’ or have ‘career nights’. Teams that do so have better chances of making the most of the players they have, and in an industry where games and championships are decided by a single point, isn’t it all worth it?