The Feel of Good Movement

Beyond the external/internal dichotomy

I've written and podcasted before about the research showing that, when it comes to performing or learning a movement skill, attention on the task or the environment (external attention) seems generally superior to attention on the body (internal attention.)

But there are some caveats:

• although external attention has a general advantage, internal attention may have some unique benefits in some contexts;

• elite athletes and coaches frequently use internal attention, and we should presume they know what they are doing;

• internal focus that is “holistic” may avoid the drawbacks of internal focus that is more localized and specific;

• the distinction between internal and external focus is often simplistic and fails to respect the complexity and dynamism of attention.

A recent paper provides a good summary of these points:

Attentional focus is not as simple as adopting one focus strategy for all individuals within all contexts.

Following are some quotes from this paper and others with further detail.

What athletes actually do

Random controlled trials are an excellent source of evidence, but we should also be interested in real world practice. Numerous studies have asked elite movers and coaches what kinds of attentional focus they actually use to learn and execute their skills, and these make clear they frequently use internal focus. For example:

in a survey of 58 professional dancers Guss-West and Wulf (2016) found that 36.1% of focused on internal cues, 27.7% on external cues, and 36.1% of the used a mix of internal and external focus cues while performing. Similarly, a majority (69%) of athletes on the US track and field team reported focusing on internal cues when competing.

Fairbrother (2016). Tiger Woods has frequently stated that has always used the feel in his hands as a way to control his swing. That’s internal attention.

Several studies have found that internal focus is more likely to be used during a practice session, with external focus being more common in competition. For example, in golfers:

During training, the skilled golfers were more likely to focus on the movement and resulting kinesthetic sensations. During competition, the golfers were more likely to attend to movement outcomes, psychological states (e.g., focus or confidence), and visual information (e.g., hand placement or the target).

Fairbrother (2016). Here’s a post where I discuss attention in golf in further detail.

Internal focus for correcting bad habits

Why would internal focus be more likely to be used in practice than competition? Perhaps because internal focus is useful for the correction of bad habits that have become automatic. Gabriel Wulf explained the superiority of external cues in reference to the fact that they invoke the automaticity and naturalness which characterizes expert performance, while internal attention creates the self-conscious control strategies associated with novice performance and choking. This is called the “constrained action hypothesis.”

Automaticity seems like a good thing, but what if want to change your movement habit? Now external focus isn't a very good tool, and you might need internal focus to inhibit the habitual way of moving and look for alternatives:

Oudejans, Koedijker, and Beek (2007) argued that an internal focus of attention may “be indispensable when an athlete seeks to replace a suboptimal technique by a more optimal one in order to reach a higher level of performance.” …

According to Shusterman (2008) “we cannot simply trust our habits to correct themselves through unconscious trial and error … to remain focused on the effects of our actions will “simply reinforce these bad habits”

… it seems reasonable to speculate that the inefficient or affected habit must be brought under the control of consciousness so that the coach can help the athlete regain the ‘old’ desirable technique or refine and acquire a new optimal movement pattern.

Toner 2016. The need for some degree of self-consciousness and internal attention is consistent with the idea of “deliberate practice” proposed by Anders Ericsson:

Similarly, Ericsson's deliberate practice framework proposes that expert performers seek to counteract automaticity, and thereby avoid ‘arrested development’, by remaining within the ‘cognitive’ and ‘associative’ stages [of motor learning.]

More generally, Rossano (2003) has argued that “expertise requires deliberate practice. Deliberate practice requires consciousness.”

Toner 2016. The big takeaway for me: if you want to your movement to be automatic and conserve limited attentional resources for other purposes, as you would likely want in competition, use an external focus. But if you want to inhibit habitual movement patterns and explore new ones, an internal focus may be useful.

Holistic focus and the feel of good movement

Several papers discuss the potential benefits of a “holistic” internal focus, which attends to the complex feelings associated with good movement, such as being rhythmic, smooth, balanced, or explosive. This is very different from attending to local and specific sensations, such as the contraction of the glutes, or movement in the hip joint. This “micro” focus can disrupt natural movement patterns, but holistic focus tends to promote them:

In the performance of a standing long jump, a holistic focus of attention (i.e., focusing on feeling explosive) and an external focus of attention (focusing on jumping toward a cone) have been found to present a similar benefit over an internal focus (focusing on rapidly extending the legs). This type of cue is also consistent with some athlete self-reported cues in the previous paragraph (e.g., “conveying a jazzy feel” and “being fluid and smooth”) meaning it may be a useful option.

This definitely matches my personal experience, which is that focusing on holistic feelings, like smoothness, balance, ease, or lightness is a very helpful guide to finding good movement techniques.

I first noticed this in my 20s while learning to play pool. For at least six months I found the game frustrating, and noticed that my stroke felt effortful, awkward and tense. When I finally started to get better, I noticed that success was associated with feelings of smoothness, ease, and elegance. In short, I noticed that good movements feel good. This connection became clearer after I started practicing Feldenkrais lessons, where students are encouraged to pay detailed attention to the sense of effort involved in simple movements like rolling over and reaching.

Once I started to tune in to the feel of efficient movement, I learned to perceive it with more clarity, and was more aware of when it was or was not present. This was a helpful guide to improving my movement in everyday life and in sports like golf, squash and skiing. Of course it remains true that good performance in all these areas requires external attention to the environment, because that's where a lot of the important information is. But a lot of information about how to move remains in the body, and I think we can see it more clearly with a soft focus, that tunes into the overall feel of movement, avoiding the microscopic reductionist focus that may cause paralysis by analysis.

The complexity and dynamism of attention

In any event, considering the relative benefits of internal versus external, we must also remember that in some sense, the division is kind of artificial because the nature of attention is so dynamic and ever changing and complex.

If you have meditated, you will know that the mind moves constantly and quickly, even when you are sitting still doing nothing. So it shouldn’t be surprising that during sports, the target of attention shifts by the millisecond. Some targets are external, some internal, and some are not easily defined or located. Here’s a quote from a study called “Both a holistic and external focus of attention enhance the learning of a badminton short serve”:

Attention throughout a sport performance is dynamic, with athletes self-reporting shifting their attention through a wide variety of focus points (Bernier, Trottier, Thienot, & Fournier, 2016; Fairbrother et al., 2016. Importantly, many of the focus cues reported by athletes do not fit within the dichotomous internal/external paradigm employed in research. For instance, golfers have reported focusing on the rhythm of their swing and “the sensation of release in my hands” (Bernier, Codron, Thienot, & Fournier, 2011, p. 333).

Another quote from the Fairbrother study:

Attentional demands fluctuate during skill execution [and] experienced performers have the opportunity to adopt complex patterns of attentional focus … skilled horseshoe players had significantly faster secondary probe reaction times at the end-point of their backswing compared to at the beginning … Similar fluctuations in attention have also been found during skilled performer’s execution of volleyball sets .. These results indicate that at certain points during the execution of a motor skill, experts will have some portion of their attentional capacity free to focus on more than one source of information. In horseshoes for example, attentional resources during the backswing might be directed toward a combination of foci related to the feel of the swing, the stake, and general performance self-talk (e.g., “get a ringer”).

Conclusion

Solving movement problems is always about acquiring information. Some of this information is inside the body, and some of it is outside. Attention is simply a tool that helps you collect the right information at the right time and make sense of it.

Sometimes your attention needs to be external, other times internal. Sometimes it needs to be very sharp to pick up specific details, and other times softer to discern big picture patterns.

Skillful use of attention is probably a big part of what makes a skillful mover. It’s more art than science, and therefore we should hesitate to make prescriptions based on simple dichotomies.