Introduction:
Sport psychology is devoted to research in sports and how psychological factors affect the performance of an individual, and how performance affects psychology. It is important to understand and know what is making professional athletes in team sports to keep on pushing themselves to the limit whilst others stop as soon as they feel pain or tiredness. What psychological factors influence this kind of behavior and why is vastly different in people.
Most athletes push themselves to the limit and keep improving themselves in order to achieve a goal which they set for themselves. This can be explained by looking at the athletes’ motivation. Motivation is defined as a cognitive process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behavior. Its stimuli vary from athlete to athlete and person to person. The performance of an athlete can possible be affected by the amount of motivation he / she is experiencing. These small variations can determine whether an athlete performs better because he / she is motivated or performs worse due to lack of motivation.
An athlete can be internally or eternally motivated. Internal motivation can come from his passion for the sport
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It is reasonable to assume that female’s motivation can have a bigger impact on their performance than a male motivation can have on their performance since female intrinsic motivation is higher than males. However, it may not be the case since there was no research done on whether the amount of motivation has a different affect on the performance. Also variations may occur depending on an athlete’s status whether he is on scholarship, a professional, amateur, in a relationship or single, and etc. For example a scholarship student would be more motivated to succeed because he / she want to show that he / she deserved the