Ott Kiivikas is a man you can really call the real-life 💪🏼 emoji, he gets up early and manages to find time for himself even with his busy training schedule. As a bodybuilding athlete, the man who has won the European Championship gold medal is, in one form or another, etched in the memory of almost every Estonian. But how will Ott look at life, mistakes and well-being after his professional career?
In part #14, we talked about Ott’s day, (m)Otivation and more.
- Is an ordinary Thursday the day of his dreams?
- What has been Ott’s motivation in sport and has he ever ran out of it?
- Meeting his heroes
- Excessive strain
- New challenges in sport
Listen more about the life and times of Ott Kiivikas in Stebby’s podcast #14 on Spotify HERE or Apple Podcastist HERE.
Some tease from the podcast:
What is motivation?
If I have tried to summarise it briefly, it is still the driving force. So if there is no motivation, whether it is a physical activity, a mental activity, or just an activity that is necessary for life, it will not happen. Perhaps motivation triggers a process. Behind every action or movement, we can actually write ‘motivation’ because it gets us somewhere or performs a specific task.
The addiction for success was a driving force
I wouldn’t have won so many competitions in my life if I hadn’t wanted to win. I wouldn’t have bothered to try so hard – winning was definitely one of the most important things. But the other was still self-fulfilment through sport and achievement. Maybe you set your sights on something and when you achieve it, one thought is ‘oh, I’ve got a gold medal, that was awesome’, but on the other hand look how hard I worked, I believed in it: it was being proud of myself and the sense of satisfaction that came with it, I wanted that all the time.
The rush of euphoria and adrenaline you still got from it made you do it again. If you get up the next day, it actually goes away pretty quickly. The feeling of elation versus the preparation that goes with it is a disproportionately short time.
Nothing was left undone, but rather over-exerted.
I even have the feeling that maybe if I had done less, I could have done better, even though every effort was, in a way, a step up to a new level. But today, when I look back and try to assess how hard my own training was today, I wouldn’t even dare to prescribe the kind of training I did to anyone.
I think today that my coaches didn’t prescribe this kind of load to me either: in my head I basically doubled what was prescribed to me. Maybe I was still ice-brave and had the conviction that if you put more down, you’ll get more up. Now with life experience and wisdom, I see that I probably burnt myself out both mentally and physically and training more just doesn’t give a better result – I could have at least got the same result with a lot easier schedule. At the end of my career I was already getting that, when I was basically training half as much.
“Samm-sammult heaoluni” podcast is run by Ott Pluum.
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