Summary and go further – concentration
British Olympic and world heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis-Hill. Image credit: Adam Kerfoot-Roberts.
This topic has hopefully given you a better understanding of what good concentration means in elite sport and how it can be achieved:
- Concentration is the fixing of attention on a specific object or action to the exclusion of everything else.
- Concentration is a difficult skill as demonstrated by the concentration grid excercise.
- Wasting attentional focus on matters not directly related to the immediate task can lead to poor performance.
- Errors in concentration can be considered not only as problems of attention selection, but also as choosing the wrong type of attention focus.
- Strategies to improve concentration include simulation training, pre-event routines, centering, and triggers.
- How athletes respond to errors is a good predictor of subsequent performance.
Go further
Raceplans
In sports such as rowing, flatwater kayaking and swimming, in which athletes compete in lanes, it is common for athletes to to develop race plans to optimise tactics and aid concentration. You can read about race plans in the Rowing in Australia chapter of Secrets of Asian Sports Psychology
Below, you can watch a video about research into the attentional processes of rowers during races. Notice the use of cue words to assist concentration.
Michael Lloyd on attentional processes
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