Researchers have often examined the difference between “external focus” and “internal focus” in the learning of new motor activities. An external focus is one in which your attention is directed to the effect you are having on or in relation to the external world; an internal focus is one in which your attention is directed to how your own body feels or is coordinated. If you are shooting a free throw in basketball and concentrate on how your wrist feels as you release the ball, your focus is internal. If you focus instead on the rim or the backboard or the basketball, your focus is external.
The leading proponent of the superiority of external focus in learning motor skills is a psychologist named Gabriele Wulf. She came to the idea in the late 1990s, not by theoretical cogitation but out of her own experience learning how to windsurf. As she describes in her review of fifteen years of research on motor learning and attentional focus, she was struck by how changing her focus while attempting a windsurfing maneuver produced a marked difference in her performance: “While practicing a power jibe, I found that directing attention to the position of my feet, the pressure they were exerting on the board to change its direction, or the location of my hands on the boom, resulted in many failed attempts and frequent falls into the water over several hours of practice. With the spontaneous decision to simply focus on the tilt of the board while turning came instantaneous success.” (...)
I emailed Dr. Wulf after I’d begun my quest to learn how to surf. She wrote back quickly and decisively: “I have no doubt that a focus on the surfboard would be more effective than any focus on body movements.” Buoyed by her confident declaration, and feeling that I now had the authority of scientific kinesiology at my disposal, I returned to the water. But either my focus remained insufficiently external, or I was focusing on the wrong part of the surfboard; my frustration was relieved only by the pleasure I took in observing the pelicans dive-bombing for fish in long, elegant arcs, or the stately procession of dorsal fins as dolphins swam parallel to the shore, just beyond the break. I was accumulating “time in the water,” which might eventually translate into the physical reality of surfing waves. (...)
After I had reached the point of being able to stand up in the whitewater and it came time to go out beyond the break, where real surfing actually took place, a profound frustration set in, which I suspect is common to many beginning surfers. One of two failures usually took place: either I could not generate sufficient speed to catch the wave, and pounded at the water helplessly as wave after wave passed me by; or (to compensate for the first failure), I slid up on the board to generate more speed and shift my weight forward, and thus found myself constantly “pearling,” or digging the nose of the board into the water, which led to a head-over-heels wipeout that was often frightening. Caught between these two extremes, which seemed to represent hydrological physics conspiring against my success, I nearly cracked and gave up. There were middle-aged men with potbellies who took off effortlessly and gave me slightly pitying looks as I flailed about, fit but helpless in a foreign world.
One day in late summer I remember as particularly awful. I’d gone to a spot slightly farther north that had been recommended as friendlier to beginning surfers, and the conditions looked favorable. Two hours in the water produced not a single ride, and my shoulders ached from the buildup of lactic acid. I came out of the water convinced that this had now become an impossible task, that I was too old or had some East Coast, neurotic gene that prevented me from catching waves. I had reached what the philosopher William James, in an essay on the sources of human energy and second winds, called the “fatigue-obstacle.”
The leading proponent of the superiority of external focus in learning motor skills is a psychologist named Gabriele Wulf. She came to the idea in the late 1990s, not by theoretical cogitation but out of her own experience learning how to windsurf. As she describes in her review of fifteen years of research on motor learning and attentional focus, she was struck by how changing her focus while attempting a windsurfing maneuver produced a marked difference in her performance: “While practicing a power jibe, I found that directing attention to the position of my feet, the pressure they were exerting on the board to change its direction, or the location of my hands on the boom, resulted in many failed attempts and frequent falls into the water over several hours of practice. With the spontaneous decision to simply focus on the tilt of the board while turning came instantaneous success.” (...)I emailed Dr. Wulf after I’d begun my quest to learn how to surf. She wrote back quickly and decisively: “I have no doubt that a focus on the surfboard would be more effective than any focus on body movements.” Buoyed by her confident declaration, and feeling that I now had the authority of scientific kinesiology at my disposal, I returned to the water. But either my focus remained insufficiently external, or I was focusing on the wrong part of the surfboard; my frustration was relieved only by the pleasure I took in observing the pelicans dive-bombing for fish in long, elegant arcs, or the stately procession of dorsal fins as dolphins swam parallel to the shore, just beyond the break. I was accumulating “time in the water,” which might eventually translate into the physical reality of surfing waves. (...)
After I had reached the point of being able to stand up in the whitewater and it came time to go out beyond the break, where real surfing actually took place, a profound frustration set in, which I suspect is common to many beginning surfers. One of two failures usually took place: either I could not generate sufficient speed to catch the wave, and pounded at the water helplessly as wave after wave passed me by; or (to compensate for the first failure), I slid up on the board to generate more speed and shift my weight forward, and thus found myself constantly “pearling,” or digging the nose of the board into the water, which led to a head-over-heels wipeout that was often frightening. Caught between these two extremes, which seemed to represent hydrological physics conspiring against my success, I nearly cracked and gave up. There were middle-aged men with potbellies who took off effortlessly and gave me slightly pitying looks as I flailed about, fit but helpless in a foreign world.
One day in late summer I remember as particularly awful. I’d gone to a spot slightly farther north that had been recommended as friendlier to beginning surfers, and the conditions looked favorable. Two hours in the water produced not a single ride, and my shoulders ached from the buildup of lactic acid. I came out of the water convinced that this had now become an impossible task, that I was too old or had some East Coast, neurotic gene that prevented me from catching waves. I had reached what the philosopher William James, in an essay on the sources of human energy and second winds, called the “fatigue-obstacle.”
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