Nearly April already! It feels like the start of the year has flown by. I am not sure about you, but I feel like I always benefit from resetting my focus every couple of months. Time goes by and we are busy – without taking stock, reflecting and re-focusing, a year can go by quite quickly. When I was going through that little exercise earlier, I was thinking that the topic of focus would be great for the blog series. So I did a little reading to update myself on new knowledge about focus and movement, and here we go. Happy reading.
When thinking about directing your attention, there is usually a distinction made between attention directed inward (also called internal focus) or on oneself and attention directed outward (also called external focus) or anything outside of our body. When thinking in the context of movement, for example, an internal focus might mean that you focus on your feet, arms and hands – on how your limbs move and where they are in space and in relation to one another. An external focus during movement usually means your focus is more on the intended effect of your movement. For example, you might focus on the surfboard, the golf club, the soccer goal or the dart board. An intriguing finding that has been shown for many types of movements including surfing, golfing, soccer and darts is that an external focus improves movement.
This works in two ways. Firstly, an external focus means, of course, greater attention on the task goal – the soccer goal or the dart board. It is easy to understand why greater attention on the goal might increase our chance of success.
Second, reduced attention on oneself (internal focus) contributes to improvements in movement. This sounds a little strange at first, perhaps. For example, at first thought, one might think that paying less attention to where our feet are on the surfboard, how much weight is on one foot compared to the other or how the ankles are moving means less chance of riding the wave, right?! The theory here though is that the legs, feet and arms are better coordinated with each other and by the brain when there is less conscious focus on them. In other words, once the ‘smarter’ parts of the brain analyse movement, things fall to pieces. We are slower and make more mistakes.
This has been found for balance tasks, accuracy in motor performance and excitingly also improvement of biomechanics to decrease excessive forces on parts of our joints. For example, in protecting the ligaments in your knee (ever heard of cruciate ligaments when watching rugby or following other types of high profile sports?), directing attention externally can help.
So how do we put this into some real world action? To put simply, try not to overthink it! You might be able to benefit from the amazing power of your body and brain organising movement all on its own by focusing on something related to your movement but outside of your body. This might be particularly helpful when:
- you learn a new movement, for example, when taking up a new sport (Stand Up Paddleboarding anybody?),
- you want to avoid injury while training in your chosen sport ahead of a tournament or race, or
- you are interested in improving movement to become better in your chosen sport
- or simply when wanting to improve your balance by practicing standing on one leg.
If you are keen to learn more about how your focus, or where and how you pay attention, impacts on your movement over the next couple of months, keep an eye on this spot, follow me or subscribe to the blogpost. To work with me one-on-one to apply some of these principles to your own life and movement, message me for a free call. I look forward to hearing from you.
References (for the extra keen)
Benjaminse et al. (2014)
Park et al. (2015)
Ghorbani et al. 2019
Wulf (2012)