How self-control affects our training and nutrition goals: A comparison between overweight women and bodybuilders.

Abstract The psychological and dedication in bodybuilding has a significant impact in these athlete’s lives, supporting self-control and individual’s social realization. Moreover, their motivation is an important key during the pre competition period, when high levels of self-control contribute to achieving goals and performing under pressure. Purpose : the aim of this research is to study the differences between the locus of control of overweight women and bodybuilding athletes.Methods : The current study was designed to compare two groups (n=18); female bodybuilders (n=10) and overweight women (n=8). Data were collected by survey monkey URL link, composed of 12 questions involving nutrition and training lifestyle, each with 3 possible columns with answers: relying on reward / relying on others/ relying on me. Participants were requested to answer by classifying how the sources of control affect each item with ratings from 1 to 5. The average result of each question and column was calculated with comparison purposes.Results : The column “relying on me” had the same average rating 4.9/5 rating for bodybuilders and overweight women. For “relying on others” the athletes’ average rating was 1.2/5 and for non-athletes 1.4/5. The major difference was regarding “relying on a reward” with an average rating of 2.7/5 for the group of bodybuilders and 1.9/5 for non-athletes.Conclusions : We concluded that a source of reward is much more significant to athletes, which can refer to either intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. keywords: bodybuilding, motivation, locus of control