Friendly competition occurs within teams when you are competing against teammates. It is a vital piece to you becoming the best athlete you can be and your team becoming the best it can be.
However, competing against your teammates can be scary for some. Especially if you are afraid of being judged negatively or embarrassing yourself in front of your teammates and coaches.
But as I said, friendly competition takes your game to the next level. Which is why you want to be sure you are embracing it as much as possible.
In this article, I’m going to dive deeper into how friendly competition increases your performance and how you, as an athlete, can embrace competition against teammates.
How Friendly Competition Increases Your Performance
To reach your full athletic potential, you must be challenged.
There is little chance of you becoming the best you can be if you are not pushed and if there is no resistance.
It’s like when you’re weight training, you need resistance in order to grow stronger. The same is true on the field or court. You need resistance from others to challenge you to grow.
When you embrace this challenge and you compete during practice and go head to head with your teammates, it will increase your performance in many ways. With the main ways including:
- Forces you to get better
- Highlights weak areas of your game
- Helps you view challenges as opportunities
Forces You to Get Better
Competing with your teammates during practice forces you to get better because you are going head to head against other players who are likely around your skill level, or better.
Imagine you’re a hitter in baseball and you take live at bats against the best pitcher on your team. You are forcing yourself to get better in order to succeed against him.
It may not happen immediately, but if you keep facing him, naturally your skills will improve.
This is the great part of competition in practice: you push yourself and are constantly striving to improve.
It’s easy to get caught in a rut of monotonous training without actually challenging and pushing yourself. Where you go through the same drills each day.
Going through the same drills is important to stay consistent and fine-tune mechanics and the fundamentals, but you want to be adding in friendly competition as well.
This type of competition against teammates forces you to push past your limits and get better with each day you compete.
Highlights Your Weaknesses
Building on the previous benefit, when you face good competition in practice, areas of your game that are currently weak are highlighted.
Take a basketball player who guards the star point guard during practice as an example. The point guard is trying to drive to the basket and get by her defender.
The defender gets beaten because the point guard exposes her weakness defending to her left.
Yes, it’s frustrating for the defender, but she embraces friendly competition. So, she recognizes the need to work on defending to her left. She then focuses on doing so outside of practice and especially during practice.
As a result, as time passes, her defense to the left improves.
Helps You View Challenges as Opportunities
The basketball player in the previous example could have viewed getting beaten to her left as a setback. She could have allowed this challenge to tear down her confidence and leave her wanting nothing to do with competing during practice.
Getting beaten to the basket rep after rep is frustrating and she may have felt a bit embarrassed.
However, she didn’t let it get her down. Instead, she viewed it as an opportunity to improve. And that is the third major benefit of friendly competition: it helps you view challenges as opportunities.
Rather than allowing challenges to be seen as setbacks, you want to see them as chances to get better. Opportunities to improve your game and become a better player because of the challenge you experienced.
This is a fantastic mindset for any athlete to be in. And one that comes from embracing friendly competition during practice.
Embracing Friendly Competition During Practice
How can you embrace this type of friendly competition during practice, especially if it currently scares you?
It’s natural to be worried and afraid of competing with your teammates. But as discussed above, accepting this form of competition is crucial to unlocking your potential. It will push you to get better.
It’s as necessary as any other form of training or practice. And so we need to be sure you are embracing it and putting yourself in as many positions as possible to compete in a friendly way.
Accepting the challenge that will force you to grow.
There are three tips to keep in mind and apply that will help you embrace this type of friendly competition:
- See Competition as Growth Not Judgement
- Learn from Defeats
- Be Proud of Your Effort
See Competition as Growth Not Judgement
When friendly competition during practice is avoided, competition is seen as a time when you’re judged. You may feel judged by your coaches, your teammates, or yourself.
When competition is taken as an opportunity to be judged, fear forms and there is a need to avoid the competition since you want to avoid being judged negatively.
However, friendly competition is not a time to be judged. It is an opportunity to improve.
If you can view it as such, you will be utilizing friendly competition in a productive way.
Learn From Defeats
When you compete in practice against your teammates and you lose, you must learn from the defeat instead of getting down on yourself. This automatically becomes easier once you see competition as a growth opportunity.
If competition is a way to be judged, if you lose or fail it’s easy to feel embarrassed and get down on yourself.
However, we want to see competition as an opportunity to improve. One way you use it to improve is by learning from each defeat and taking what you learned to help you grow as a player.
Be Proud of Your Effort
If you base the success of friendly competition on the outcome, you’ll find yourself frustrated more times than not. The reason being, friendly competition is supposed to challenge you. If it challenges you, it will be difficult to succeed each time.
If you base your feelings of success on the result, the competition will have the opposite of its desired effect and will result in lower levels of confidence.
However, if you can feel proud of yourself simply for your effort and the challenge you accepted and took on, you will use the friendly competition as a way to boost confidence in yourself.
Leading to more success and more growth as a result of competing with your teammates.
Final Thoughts
One of the main goals you should have as an athlete is working to become your best. You should always be striving to improve.
Friendly competition provides you with the opportunity to improve each and every practice.
To make the most of this friendly competition you want to focus on these three tips:
- See Competition as Growth Not Judgement
- Learn from Defeats
- Be Proud of Your Effort
If you’re interested in one-on-one mental performance coaching, please fill out the form below or click here to schedule a free introductory coaching call.
Focus on friendly competition as a way to increase your skills and accelerate your growth as a player. Thank you for reading and I wish you the best of success in all that you do.
