Body Focus in Expert Action

Barbara Gail Montero, John Toner and Aidan Moran

Although adopting an explicit, conscious “body focus” may, at times, hinder performance and impede improvement, such a focus may often be advantageous to both practice and performance in highly skilled bodily activities. Empirical studies suggest that certain groups of experts frequently employ bodily foci and that a body focus can help fend off “choking under pressure.” Because experts push themselves to achieve their personal best and because bodies and environments are labile, a body focus may be needed to control action.

Achieving a desired goal that is just out of reach may sometimes require focusing on the means rather than the end. For example, if an aspiring thief wants to steal Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” from the Museum of Modern Art, the thief needs to find a disguise, gather tools, arrange for a getaway car, and so forth. But stealing second base in a baseball game, some claim, is not like this: A runner on first base who is focusing on the means of stealing second - specifically, the bodily means - will soon be out. Indeed, even prior to a nighttime heist, a prospective buyer might caution the thief against concentrating on finger movements while disabling the security system. Although focusing on the means may sometimes be needed to achieve an end, it is thought that focusing on the bodily means is unhelpful.

In sport, many studies suggest that focusing on the body leads to poorer performance relative to focusing on the consequences of bodily actions (see Wulf, 2013, for a review). Indeed, those studies led Wulf (2016) to conclude that “if movements are not planned in terms of the intended movement effect, but in terms of specific body movements, the outcome will always be less-than-optimal” (p. 338, cited in Montero et al., 2018). We do not doubt that there are times in an athlete’s, dancer’s, or other professional mover’s career when adopting an explicit, conscious “body focus” may hinder performance and impede improvement. And whether athletes are always marginally aware of their bodies (a topic beyond the scope of this essay) deserves attention. However, we shall present some reasons to think that in highly skilled bodily activities, it is often advantageous - both to practice and performance - to adopt an explicit bodily focus.

Let’s begin with an obvious example of where a bodily focus is necessary for achieving one’s goals: The small subset of skills whose success conditions are, at least in part, defined in terms of attaining a bodily-centered focus. The dance practice Gaga is illustrative (see Katan-Schmid, 2016, cited in Montero et al., 2018). As Gaga is concerned not with how you look but with how you feel, you are sometimes asked to focus on very specific parts of the body, such as the webbing between your fingers. Other activities that explicitly require a body focus are certain types of yoga and meditation where the point is to focus on one’s breathing. Because an explicit aim of these activities is to focus on the body, failing to do so, in these activities, means failing to perform optimally.

That such skills are aided by a bodily focus is uncontroversial. However, we argue that even beyond this small subset of skills, athletes and others whose skills are body based can sometimes benefit from focusing on the movements of their bodies.

One important reason why adopting a body focus can, at times, be beneficial to a wide range of skills is that focusing on one’s body can promote conscious control. The relevance of conscious control to improved skill might seem straightforward: Put simply, to fine tune your actions, you need to control them consciously. However, the empirical evidence does not invariably support this position. Wulf and Lewthwaite (2010, cited in Montero et al., 2018), for example, argue that in expert skill, a conscious mode of control may trigger self-evaluative and self-regulatory processing which may result in “choking” episodes (a sudden deterioration in skilled performance due to anxiety). Although we think that conscious control may sometimes impede certain skills, we are not convinced that it is always harmful. In fact, we believe that a body focus can sometimes be used to prevent choking. We believe that body focus may be helpful, in part, because even highly practiced skills might not be fully automated (Carr, 2015). Experts frequently try to push themselves to achieve their “personal best,” to shave off a couple seconds in a cross-country race or make the ending of a pirouettemore seamless. And, as noted by Ericsson and colleagues (1993, cited in Montero, 2018), going beyond what you have done involves leaving the comfort zone of automaticity.

Furthermore, environments are often labile and every day the body is slightly different, and slight differences may matter for the exacting and extremely important skills that an athlete or dancer may enact. As the tennis player Rafael Nadal put it in his 2011 book (with Carlin), Rafa, “every day you wake up feeling differently . . . [and] every shot is different”; thus, even after hitting millions of balls, “hitting a true, smooth clean shot every time ... [is not] a piece of cake” (p. 132). And if a challenge is present, we suggest, you need conscious attention. You might not need conscious attention to your bodily movements; however, as we shall go on to argue, in at least some cases of expert action, a body focus is beneficial.

There is evidence from empirical studies that certain groups of experts frequently employ bodily foci. When Guss-West and Wulf (2016) surveyed 53 international professional ballet dancers to identify what these performers focused on or imagined when preparing and executing a variety of actions, they found that 72% of responses related to body movements, and sometimes even quite specific, low-level bodily movements. For example, when describing the type of focus they adopted during a grand jete (a large leap), the dancers reported, among other things, focusing on the “gluteal engagement of the push off leg for thrust” and “releasing the air from my lungs to prevent the shoulders from going up; turning the head to the public,” while balancing in arabesque, where a dancer stands on pointe on one leg and extends the other leg high into the air behind her, the dancers’ reports included “feeling my center controlled over my supporting leg” and “the big toe of my arabesque floating away and up.” Conceivably, such a focus may have no effect on their movements. The widespread use of body focus among professional dancers, however, indicates that it may be beneficial. Using a similar approach, Stoate and Wulf (2011, cited in Montero et al., 2018) found that a number of expert swimmers reported focusing on their bodies - focusing, for example, on “high elbow,” “pull hands back,” “hip rotation” - when asked to adopt their “normal” focus of attention. Yet they also found that this body focus proved optimal for some swimmers but less than optimal for others.

By focusing on their bodies, athletes and others might focus directly, via proprioception, on a muscle or joint to fine-tune control or to monitor an injury (Montero, 2018). But, arguably, experts may also find it useful to focus on the body indirectly via imagery. Bernier et al. (2016, cited in Toner et al., forthcoming) found that skaters used visual and kinaesthetic images before, and indeed during, some of their jumps. One skater reported, “During the approach to the jump, actually, I’m doing the jump in my head: I have the same sensations in my body, and I feel like I’m doing it in my upper body and hips;” another revealed that: “Here, when I place my foot to take off, I have an image in my head that my neck is really straight... My coach, when I was young, he told me to picture a hair standing straight up, perpendicular to the top of my head. So here, I’m visualizing this image” (p. 261). In these examples, it seems that bodily foci, mediated through mental imagery, assist performance perhaps by focusing the mind and heightening control.

Apart from the ability to facilitate conscious control over one’s movements, adopting a body focus has been seen as beneficial in alleviating anxiety, which is a crucial trigger of choking episodes (Hill & Hemmings, 2015). One way that anxiety distracts one from one’s optimal focus is by turning one’s mind to disturbing thoughts about such things as what others will think, or the possibility of failure or, indeed, how much the mind is racing and not focusing on what is important (Wine, 1971, cited in Montero et al., 2018). And although the best way to cope with anxiety is very much an open question, some athletes manage it by focusing on the details of their bodily movements. For example, in Hill et al.’s (2010, cited in Hill & Hemmings, 2015) study on choking under pressure, some golfers claimed that focusing more on their skills helped prevent a more severe performance breakdown.

Although some of the warnings against body focus apply not just to performance but to practice as well (Wulf, 2016), there seem to be strong reasons to think that both body focus and a disruption of automaticity can be useful in practice. According to Anders Ericsson’s theory of deliberate practice (Ericsson et al., 1993), automaticity leads to stagnation: Performing automatically may help maintain a level of performance but will not allow improvement. Thus, if adopting a body focus can lead to consciously controlling a movement, such foci in practice can leave to door open to continued improvement. And when an athlete or dancer has been applying a body focus during practice, a bodily focus would be natural and thus one would not expect it to hinder performance. As Maurer and Munzert (2013) found in their study of skilled basketball players’ focus during free throw performance, irrespective of focus direction (internal or external), “frequently used familiar focus strategies become integrated into the proceduralized skill components and are no longer disruptive to skill execution” (p. 737, cited in Montero et al., 2018). Furthermore, a body focus can also be pleasurable, and thus would encourage prolonged practice.

Finally, although numerous studies appear to support the view that focusing on the body leads to suboptimal results, the longterm effect of focusing on one’s body is untested empirically. And this is significant because, as Peh et al. (2011, cited in Montero et al., 2018) suggest, it could be that the most effective training schedule can disrupt performance in the short-run while it improves it over a longer period of time. It is also quite difficult to design experiments that adequately investigate how adopting a body focus affects skill even in the short run. This is so because it is challenging to design experiments to test body and external foci that are balanced both in terms of how natural or familiar an expert finds them and in terms of their relevancy to the task. We hope that future research into body focus will be able to address these shortcomings.

In Memoriam

We (B. G. M. and J. T.) note with sorrow the passing of our colleague, Aidan Moran, who died shortly after this essay was completed. We are richer for having known and worked with him, and the scholarly community is richer for his contributions.

For Sources and Further Reading

Carr, T. H. (2015). Strengths and weaknesses of reflection as a guide to action: Pressure assails performance in multiple ways. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 14, 227-252.

Guss-West, C., & Wulf, G. (2016). Attentional focus in classical ballet: A survey of professional dancers. Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, 20(), 23-29.

Hill, D. M., & Hemmings, B. (2015). A phenomenological exploration of coping responses associated with choking in sport. Qualitative Research in Sport. Exercise and Health, 7(4), 521-538.

Montero, B. G. (2018). Thought in action: Expertise and the conscious mind.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Montero, B. G., Toner, J„ & Moran. A. (2018). Questioning the breadth of the external focus effect. In M. L. Cappuccio (Ed.), Handbook of embodied cognition and sport psychology (pp. 199-221). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Toner, J., Montero, B. G., & Moran, A. (forthcoming). Continuous improvement in elite performance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Wulf, G. (2013). Attentional focus and motor learning: A review of 15 years. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 6(1), 77-104.