INTEGRITY
“The quality of being honest & having strong moral principles.”
“True athletic integrity requires athletes to remain competitive without seeking methods of advancement that lack morals and ethics.”
“Integrity makes you secure and confident in who you are as a person. When you don’t have integrity, there’s nothing to help your self-esteem since you’re not honest about your morals and values.”
I have wanted to write this blog for a while because, as a coach I see the different behaviours of athletes every single day. Behaviour when they’re doing well, behaviour when they are not doing well, behaviour when they don’t feel great, or when they’ve had a bad day, behaviour when they’ve had a great day and everything in-between. Having integrity is a huge part of behaviour in sport, and is something in particular that I look for in people.
Integrity is also often linked to the concept of ‘sportspersonship’ (Tregas, Cover & Beasley, 2011). Sportspersonship is argued to have four components; equity; fairness; good form of honour and in the sporting context, the will to win (Abad, 2010).
Having integrity can be something as big as not intentionally cheating. For example, people who take drugs in sport –that is obviously a huge breach of integrity. However, having integrity also comes down to lots of little things too… all of the following are also little mini breaches of integrity:
- Cutting corners if you know coach can’t see you
- Missing reps or rounds out to keep up with others in the class
- Walking the last part of a run
- Letting your reps get sloppy when tired and not caring about technique or rep standards
- Pretending you have an injury to get out of something you don’t want to do
Even little things like:
- Not getting your chin over the bar on your last pull up because you’re already dropping off to get to the next movement
- Counting a chest to bar pull up even if your chest doesn’t quite touch
- When the rounds include 10 calories on the bike… you get on for round 2 and see it had ticked over to 11 calories after round one, and you only take it to 20 cals for round 2 instead of 21.
- When you see the wod has 10 seconds left, and thinking “that’s enough” and stopping there.
Obviously, we all have bad days where we might accidently (or accidently on purpose! ;)) do one of these things, which is fine, we’re all human and nobody is perfect. But if you frequently do these things, you may want to try to think about having better integrity in your training.
You might say “But why? I’m still doing something and still working”. But if I take you back to the third quote above: “Integrity makes you secure and confident in who you are as a person. When you don’t have integrity, there’s nothing to help your self-esteem since you’re not honest about your morals and values”. Having integrity will help YOU as a person, without sounding cliché, it will help you be a better version of yourself. Think about the following scenario:
You go to the gym, see the workout on the board, and it is something you find hard. I will use my own personal weakness as an example workout. 21-15-9 Thrusters and Burpees over the Bar. I know that I am slow at these movements. I am tall and my quads burn out too fast. What I could do to make myself feel better is miss a couple of reps out of each section, so that I keep up with everyone else and don’t fall too far behind. Another thing I could do is step over the bar on the burpees to save my quads and again, keep up with everyone else. I could also not squat below parallel to save my quads even further. However, if I did any of those things, then yes, I might get a high five or a well done at the end for doing “so well” and getting a fast time, and nobody will see me being slow in the workout. But in the back of my mind I will know I haven’t done it correctly, and so I won’t be able to feel properly proud of myself on the workout. I won’t get the confidence boost I SHOULD get from completing a workout that I find tough. Equally, my body won’t physically get the results it should have got from the workout. If I cut corners or reps, I’m not training my body to get the desired intensity from the workout and therefore it won’t be improving me as an athlete.
I get it, it’s no fun being last in workouts. Your mind starts telling you silly things like you’re rubbish or “why is everyone else so much better than me”. But that’s just it, it’s all in your mind. You AREN’T rubbish. Everyone else also has weaknesses too. There will be other days and other workouts where it suits your strengths more. Other people might be going lighter than you, or changing the workout around injury. Just focus on YOU and you alone. Show up, do the work that is required, and no matter how long it takes you, guaranteed you will feel more proud of yourself, and see better results for getting the workout done properly than you will if you cut corners. Not only that, other people notice things. People notice if you’re not doing the reps properly, they notice if you skip a few, they also notice if you are working your absolute hardest to get the workout done, and you will have so much more respect from people for doing it that way, than getting a faster time by missing stuff out.
Also, one final thing, if you think coach hasn’t noticed… they have 😉
