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Test your focus in various scenarios to enhance performance in sports. Learn about attentional control principles and distraction management techniques for optimal concentration. Prepare with pre-competition plans to achieve peak performance.
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Focus Test - Activity • Here, you will take a test to determine how good you are at focusing. • You will do it four times, in four different scenarios. • Each trial takes two minutes. • After each trial, continue to the next using the menu across the top of the page. • Then read the instructions for the next trial and do it. • Make sure that your speakers are turned on, (except for trial 3), and that you are in a quiet environment.
Performance Planning Focus • Attentional field is everything inside of you, such as thoughts, emotions, and physical responses, and everything outside of you, including sights and sounds, on which you could focus. • Focus is the ability to attend to internal and external cues in your attentional field. Sport Science Distraction (Part 1)Distraction (Part 2)
Prime Focus • Involves focusing only on performance-relevant cues in your attentional field. • In other words, only focusing on cues that help you to perform your best. • Depending on the sport, performance-relevant cues can include technique, tactics, your opponent, the score, time remaining, and many other cues. • Gives you the ability to adjust your focus internally and externally as needed during the course of a competition.
Prime Focus Example • For example, a football quarterback first focuses internally to select the best play based on the current game situation. • As the huddle breaks and he moves over center, he widens his focus externally to survey the defensive alignment. • When the ball is hiked and he drops back to pass, the quarterback focuses on the routes of his receivers until he finds one who is open, at which time he narrows his focus onto that receiver and throws him the football.
Poor focus • Involves focusing on performance-irrelevant cues in your attentional field. • That is, focusing on cues that will hurt your performance. • There are two types of harmful cues • Interfering cues are those that will directly hurt your performance such as negative thoughts, anxiety, and concern over who your next opponent will be if you win. • Irrelevant cues are those that simply distract you from an effective focus including what you'll have for dinner tonight or the project that you must finish by tomorrow.
Concentration - exists along 2 dimensions: • Width - At any given moment, your attention is either: • Broad (focused on multiple things simultaneously), or • Narrow (focused on one thing) • Direction – Your focus is either: • External (focused outside your head) • Internal (focused inside your head)
Impact of Pressure & Activation Level • When energy activationincreases: • Attention involuntarily narrows and becomes more internally focused • Alteration in perception – time seems to speed up so you start to rush • Muscles begin to tighten – impacts quality of actions
How to improve attentional control • Set goals – can help keep motivation and energy activation high as you work towards reaching your goal • Pre performance routines – doing the same thing before every game, especially things like “concentration grid” activities • Focus on controllables vs. uncontrollables – make 2 lists before a game of all possible controllable (such as a response to a mistake or a bad play) and uncontrollable things (the crowd’s response to your mistake)
How to improve attentional control • Simulation Training – place the athlete in “real life” scenarios in practice in order to simulate possible distractions and additional areas of focus that could occur • Distraction Training – identify distractors and deliberate attempts to shift one’s attention away from the areas of required focus in order to practice shifting back to relevant cues during performance. • Concentration Cues – develop a list of positive, focused cues (ex: self talk, visual reminders) to quickly shift one’s attention to appropriate points throughout a performance.
Performance Planning Distraction Control Plan
Performance Planning Readiness & Pre-Competition Plans • Obtaining the optimal level of focus and activation needed for optimal performance • A holistic plan that helps you to get into your ideal performance state (IPS) • Key Factors: • How do you want to feel? • What level of activation is optimal for task • Where do you want your focus to be
Performance Planning Pre-Competition Plan • Create a plan for what you need to do to get to state of readiness
