Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

soccer, swimming). Request their permission to tape your interview with them on either
an audio-cassette recorder or a mini-disc recorder. Then, ask them the following
questions:

1 What does the term “concentration” mean to you?
2 On a scale of 0 (meaning “not at all important”) to 5 (meaning “extremely important”),
how important do you think that the skill of concentration is for successful
performance in your sport?
3 What sort of distractions tend to upset your concentration before a game/match?
Describe the situation and the distraction which results from it
4 What distractions bother you during the event itself? Describe the situation and the
distraction which results from it
5 Please give me a specific example of how a distraction changed your focus and/or
affected your performance. Tell me what the distraction was, how it occurred and how
you reacted to it
6 What techniques do you use, if any, to cope with distractions?

Analysis
Compare and contrast the athletes’ answers to your questions, The word “focus” will
probably feature in responses to Q 1. Try to establish exactly what athletes mean by this
word. You should also find that athletes regard concentration as being very important for
successful performance in their sport (Q 2). After you have compiled a list of distractions
(Qs 3 and 4), you will probably find that they fall into two main categories: external and
internal. Is there any connection between the type of sport which the athletes perform and
the distractions that they reported?

Having explored what concentration is, how to measure it and why we often lose it, we
should now examine the various strategies recommended by sport psychologists for
improving focusing skills.

Concentration training exercises and techniques

Applied sport psychology is replete with strategies which claim to improve concentration
skills in athletes (see Greenlees and Moran, 2003, for a recent review). In general, the
purpose of these strategies is to help an athlete to achieve a focused state of mind in
which there is no difference between what s/he is thinking about and what s/he is doing
(see Figure 4.2). If this happens, the athlete’s mind is “cleared of irrelevant thoughts, the
body is cleared of irrelevant tensions, and the focus is centred only on what is important
at that moment for executing the skill to perfection” (Orlick, 1990, p. 18). But what
concentration strategies do sport psychologists recommend to athletes and what do we
know about their efficacy?
In general, two types of psychological activities have been alleged to enhance focusing
skills in sport performers: concentration training exercises and concentration techniques
(Moran, 1996; Moran, 2003b). The difference between these activities is that whereas the

Sport and exercise psychology: A critical introduction 112