PhD, Associate Professor E.S. Sadovnikov
Volgograd State University, Volgograd

Keywords: health and fitness activities, motivation, individual health agenda, self-preservation instinct, emotions.

 Background. In the process of the individual motivations being built, “a subject persistently strives to find the best solutions within the future motivational field, and these solutions shape up the relevant motivational systems in the present motivation field where the immediate personal impulses are controlled by the opposing specific tier of necessitating motivations” [1].

The process of the young people’s motivations for health and fitness activity (HFA) being formed is to be designed on the assumption that a motivation is determined by the individual subject activity development level in the relevant activity domain. The subject of activity determines the relevant motivational structures based on the individual motivational self-identification (by the intrapersonal agreements in the motivational domain) designed to remove internal conflicts and test the feasibility of and opportunities for the life goals being attained, with the relevant motivational structures that include genuine, active and firm motivations of the subject personality.

Objective of the study was to design a set of educational tools to build up due motivations for health and fitness activity (HFA) in young people.

Study results and discussion. Generally the young people’s motivations for HFA include a variety of constituents from the biological motivational aspects driven by the self-preservation instinct to habitual individual health agenda. Self-preservation driven motivations include a variety of risk avoiding levels: direct, remote and potential exposures to pain, fears and anxieties, with the individual HFA-related motivations being largely driven by the risk-avoidance behaviours including the sickness/ disability/ death avoidance agenda, in the context of the relevant HFA missions and goals.

The direct risk exposure level is signalled by a sickness or pain syndrome with the associating pathologies typical for one or another disease. It is not unusual that a sickness or pain is largely due to the little if any attention having been given to health and fitness activity, and efficiency of the relevant motivational and cultural effects in the direct risk exposure domain may be increased by specific situations triggering a spiritual pain. Not too many things are as painful and fearful for a human as the feeling of own perishable nature associated with death fear and spiritual pains.

The remote risk exposure driven self-preservation behaviour forms a basis for the HFA motivations geared to develop a set of abilities to avoid health risks in future. The rational behavioural models driven by the remote risk exposure preventing motivations may be indicative of “the person being prepared to analyse and collect the experience related to the potential risk conditions and situations, the preparedness being structured in specific and active motivations-building mechanisms; and these mechanisms are largely based on the instinctive responsive fears and snapshots of the things that triggered them” [1]. Therefore, the remote risk exposure level of the HFA motivations building system is to be designed on the knowledge and experience of individual fears, anxiety and actual health risks including specific knowledge about the relevant diseases and other negative effects provoked by unhealthy lifestyles. However, such knowledge will never be effective and efficient enough unless the students are offered some emotional switchovers. Such emotional switchovers in the education process (when their attention is turned to a new content and fixed on it) may be referred to as the universal motivations building mechanism.

To secure the emotional switchover tool being efficient enough, it should include the relevant educational effects. The educational effects geared to build the HFA motivations may be classified into the prescribing and substantiating motivational components, the first indicating the subject for activity and the second offering the responsive actions to affect the latter. The prescribing component of the motivational effect, in its turn, includes the values-driven and activity-centred constituents that are largely determined by the general design of the motivational structure. The second constituent is designed to substantiate the prescribing component of the actions to provide due facts and grounds for the motivational element.

The potential risk exposure driven self-preservation behaviour forms a core for the healthy lifestyle and HFA motivations building process. Anxiety viewed as a constituent of the self-preservation instinct and manifesting itself in carefulness and alertness in face of a potential risk i.e. in the situation when the risk is only possible albeit may still be avoided – may be described as the natural heritage of the human phylogenesis process. It is the potential risks of diseases, disabilities and even death that mostly motivate people for a variety of preventive actions and practices geared to protect and improve health, with the physical training and health activities that are being given a top priority.

For the last five years, we have offered and tested special educational games to build up due motivations for health and fitness activities in students under the optional academic Healthy Lifestyle Technology and Healthy Lifestyle Self-design disciplines and standard academic Healthy Lifestyle Basics discipline. An educational experiment to test the educational game method in the academic education process yielded statistically significant differences of the Study Group versus Reference Group progress rates in building motivations for health and fitness activities [2].

Conclusion. Fully-fledged motivations for health and fitness activities may be effectively built up in young people only via the persistent motivational and educational actions aimed at every self-preservation level i.e. the direct, remote and potential risk exposure related ones. The specific educational effects are to be driven by a set of special educational situations modelled in the academic education process.

References

1. Vilyunas V. Psikhologiya razvitiya motivatsii [Psychology of motivation]. St. Petersburg: Rech publ., 2006, 458 p.
2. Sadovnikov E.S., Popandopulo O.A. Opyt formirovaniya zdorovogo obraza zhizni molodezhi v protsesse organizatsionno-obuchayushchey igry v kontekste razvivayushchey, mysledeyatelnostnoy pedagogiki [Experience of healthy lifestyle formation among young people during organizational and educational games in context of developing pedagogics of mental and action approach]. Fizicheskaya kultura: vospitanie, obrazovanie, trenirovka, 2015, no. 5, pp. 13-15.

Corresponding author: evgenisadov@mail.ru

Abstract

The article considers the most efficient ways to build up young people’s motivations for physical health and fitness activities in a wide range from self-preservation instinct to individual health agenda i.e. from the biological motivations to the habitual and determined health and fitness activity. It was the original motivation building concept by V. Vilyunas based on ideas of the leading past and present psychologists and giving a top priority to emotions that express human motivations as direct precursors and reasons for behavioural models that provided a theoretical basis for the present study. The motivations building model of the author making a special emphasis on the emotional domain of motivations and offering a set of special training games was tested as beneficial for the young people’s motivations for health and fitness activity.