Why Athletes Make Excuses, and What Helps Them Stop

'I didn't sleep well.' 'My legs feel heavy today.' 'I think I'm coming down with something.' Every athlete has reached for an excuse before a hard training session — and often we say them out loud before we've even begun. Psychologists have a name for this habit: claimed self-handicapping. Two field studies set out to understand why some athletes lean on these excuses far more than others, and to test a small mental exercise that seemed to loosen their grip.

What the researchers wanted to know

The researchers were interested in the role of the self behind these excuses. Claimed self-handicapping is when you announce an obstacle ahead of time — poor sleep, sore muscles, a headache — so that if things go badly, the excuse is already in place. It can feel harmless, even honest. But it can also quietly interfere with performance and hold an athlete back.

Their central question was whether an athlete's physical self-esteem — how confident someone feels about their own body and physical abilities — shapes how often they claim handicaps during training. And they asked something more hopeful too: if you could help an athlete feel more secure in their own worth, would the excuses start to fade?

How they studied it

Rather than a tightly controlled lab, the team ran two field studies with real athletes in real training settings. In the first, they compared athletes who scored low versus high on physical self-esteem and tracked how many handicaps each group claimed.

Then they introduced self-affirmation. This is a brief, well-studied exercise in which people reflect on the values and strengths that genuinely matter to them, which helps secure their sense of self-worth. The researchers wanted to see whether topping up that self-worth would change how much athletes reached for excuses. If self-handicapping is really about protecting a shaky self, then shoring up the self should reduce it.

What they found

The first pattern matched the researchers' hypothesis: athletes with low physical self-esteem claimed more handicaps than those with high physical self-esteem. The excuses clustered exactly where confidence was thinnest.

The second finding is the encouraging one. When athletes went through the self-affirmation exercise, their claimed self-handicapping went down. Athletes who had been affirmed reached for fewer pre-emptive excuses than they otherwise would have. Securing self-worth, in other words, seemed to reduce the need to line up reasons for a possible poor showing before it even happened.

What this means for you

You don't have to be an elite competitor to recognize this pattern. Excuses made before a challenge often quietly protect a fragile sense of ability — if you announce that you're tired or unwell first, a weak performance stings a little less. This research hints that the excuse frequently isn't really about the sore muscles; it's about how safe your self-worth feels walking in.

Taking a moment to remind yourself of what you value and what you're genuinely good at may make those pre-loaded excuses feel less necessary. That is the everyday version of self-affirmation. If you notice yourself narrating obstacles before a workout, a presentation, or an exam, it can be worth pausing to ask whether the real issue is the obstacle or the nerves underneath it. None of this is medical advice, and a genuine injury or illness deserves real rest — the point is simply to notice when the 'handicap' tends to show up mainly on the days your confidence is low. It's also worth separating the excuse from the exercise itself. In the study, the affirmed athletes didn't need to change their training — what changed was how secure they felt going into it, and the excuses followed. That order of events is the useful part: tend the foundation of self-worth, and the surface behavior can shift on its own. If a teammate, an employee, or a friend keeps narrating obstacles before they begin, this hints that piling on pressure or demanding they 'stop making excuses' may miss the point entirely. Helping them feel genuinely capable and valued may do far more than criticism ever could.

The honest caveats

A few limits are worth keeping in mind. These were field studies focused on claimed self-handicapping — the excuses athletes say out loud — rather than measured changes in behavior or final performance. The work centered specifically on physical self-esteem, so it doesn't tell us how other kinds of confidence behave. And while self-affirmation reduced the excuses, the study did not show that it improved athletic performance itself; fewer excuses is not the same as a better result. As always, one line of research is a signpost, not the last word, and how well it applies to any single person will vary.