Abstract
The social relevance of endurance sports has increased people’s motivation to engage in these particular physical activities, associating their practice with a particular lifestyle (e.g., feeling victorious and a feeling of self-improvement). Therefore, the dark personality traits (not because they are negative but because they are more hidden), understood as a personal and adaptive response to the psychosocial relationships that athletes establish while practicing these sports. Following these arguments, Grit has been used to trace the response of athletes in their quest to improve performance and endurance in the face of common setbacks suffered as a result of long hours of training. Empirical studies should help to discover how these personality traits can pose real challenges to their adaptation, and what the impact of their psychological response may be in a functional or dysfunctional way [e.g., exercise addiction (EA)], in order to classify them as risk or protective factors. Through transversal design, the present study sought to explore the relationship between Grit and Dark Traits of Personality regarding the appearance of EA in a sample (N = 241) of amateur endurance sport athletes (Mage = 31.80; SD = 9.87). The results show that men not only score higher for addiction levels but also for narcissism (grandiosity feelings) and psychopathy (coldness) factors. If signs of narcissism and Machiavellianism increase, perseverance efforts grow too, and the likelihood of EA increases considerably. The conclusions drawn on the basis of the results allow us to place consistency of interest as a protective factor for the EA, whereas Dark Traits of personality – especially Machiavellianism – constitute a risk factor.
Highlights
“The more the merrier” – it seems like a really common statement among amateur athletes, especially between those who practice endurance sports (e.g., 5 and 10-km runs, half-marathons, marathons, triathlons, ultra-endurance races, mountain trails, cycling, ironman races, etc.) and other recent sport modalities like CrossFit, which combines aerobic and anaerobic exercises with the ultimate goal of improving fitness and physical performance (Glassman, 2007; Belger, 2012; Lichtenstein and Jensen, 2016)
Significant differences were observed for the group of athletes with lower levels of Exercise Addiction” (EA) (
The comparison scores of the three groups of EA indicated significant differences in Machiavellianism, narcissism, and consistency of interest according to levels of addiction, while psychopathy and narcissism were shown to be significant according to gender
Summary
“The more the merrier” – it seems like a really common statement among amateur athletes, especially between those who practice endurance sports (e.g., 5 and 10-km runs, half-marathons, marathons, triathlons, ultra-endurance races, mountain trails, cycling, ironman races, etc.) and other recent sport modalities like CrossFit, which combines aerobic and anaerobic exercises with the ultimate goal of improving fitness and physical performance (Glassman, 2007; Belger, 2012; Lichtenstein and Jensen, 2016). The practice of an endurance sport (e.g., running or cycling) implies a series of vigorous physical efforts, in which it is necessary to preserve resources and beliefs, maintained at high levels of energy and activation (Lukács et al, 2019) This is combined with the emergence of impulses and the consequent need to regulate them both, emotionally and behaviorally (González-Hernández et al, 2019a). We live in a system that hardly enables us enough time to meet our fitness goals, and we try to compensate by signing into shorter but more intense training programs with the rationale of achieving visible benefits in the short/mid-term On this matter, endurance sports (especially running or CrossFit) fit perfectly within today’s packed schedules because they provide high intensity training (Holt et al, 2014; Predel, 2014; Davies et al, 2016; Köteles et al, 2016; Lichtenstein and Jensen, 2016). As with the rest of the addictions, EA can be identified by six components (or patterns): salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, personal conflict, and relapse – i.e., the tendency to return to excessive activity after periods of abstinence or control (Brown, 1993; Griffiths, 2005)
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