I workout. I am a scientist. I understand behavior.
I can’t help but notice when the term “ego” gets thrown around the gym.
“Look at that ego!”
“She got injured because she had a big ego.”
“The ego made me do it.”
“His ego makes him difficult to coach.”
Ego defined
There is nothing inherently good or bad with the term ego. Sigmund Freud created the term, along with id and superego. Ego, defined as a person’s sense of self-worth or self-esteem, is said to guide and cause much behavior.
Big egos. Little egos. No egos at all.
My only challenge with the term is that you cannot observe the ego in the gym. Our vocabulary treats ego as a thing that is readily accessed by all.
At best, ego is a placeholder that comes before a deeper analysis of behavior.
What you observe is behavior
Is the ego always there? Present on Mondays? Absent on Tuesdays? How so?
More fittingly, ego is rather a descriptive term that indicates how likely you or I will engage some behavior. In this case, performance in the gym.
The intersection between behavior and environment.
If not ego, then what else?
An ego substitute
By thousands of repetitions, learning from mistakes, and following rules. Ultimately, reinforcement and punishment shape an athlete’s fitness repertoire.
By extension, we can substitute this description as a probability of some performance.
Now, we can give better functional definitions of ego. Improved definitions of the behavior and environment relationship.
Athletes tend have an “ego” if they:
- Do not follow lifting protocols
- Load the barbell heavier than they should
- Attempt advanced skilled movement beyond their fluency
- Tend to not follow coaching instructions
Only then do, we say,
They have an ego!
Ego as an Analysis Stopper
As a coach, I can’t do anything with the term. The label does not tell me anything about the performance conditions that led that athlete, or bystanders, to doling out this label.
Instead, I ask pointed questions instead like:
- Was there something about the lifting protocol that was misunderstood?
- Can the athlete explain the miscalculation when loading the barbell?
- Did the coach miss something during instruction?
The gym functions as a performance environment to be analyzed. It is loaded with information beyond a simple label and provides you more information about the learning conditions.
I’d hate to hear that one fellow human didn’t help another out because a silly label halted some fruitful intervention.
Check your ego at the door. Rather, don’t even worry about it, because it is a fool’s errand anyway.
