Working in Movement

What do you think about when you perform some physical skill, whether it's simply walking or a highly complex sports skill like swinging a racquet, bat or golf club? Do you focus on the internal sense of what your body is doing or on the effects of your efforts on something external to yourself like the golf club? Academic researchers have been looking into this issue. In Focus inward or outward I looked at a UNLV study of people experiencing Parkinson's disease symptoms who were tested for stability as they focuses internally or externally. The study suggested an external focus provided more stability. Enhancing Skill Acquisition in Golf refers to a study of people attempting to accurately throw a ball with their non-dominant hand. It found that people provided video feedback (clearly an external focus) performed much better than those who weren't. And the well-known Inner Game work of Timothy Gallwey championed this sort of external focus years ago.

These types of studies and approaches suggest that attending to external cues is more productive than focusing inwardly on the movements themselves. More traditional sports instruction comes down more towards the initernal. But is focus of attention the most critical element of performing some movement-related action? What other variables might be as important or even more? How about the ability of the body and sensory motor system to respond to the demands of the skill performance?

How do you learn that? What do you pay attention to? In a goal-oriented skill, striving to reach the goal dominates the performance, whether you focus internally or externally. But what goal do you pay attention to to learn about the general movement ability of your own self? And wouldn't striving for a goal invoke learned habits and reflexes that might preclude learning new movement patterns, patterns that just might be useful in, say, hitting the ball further?

The simple answer is to separate the goal from the activity. But how? Feldenkrais (and some others) realized this paradox, and designed a useful system of movement activities to facilitate learning without invoking the effort of reaching a goal. There's a sample lesson to give you the flavor of this type of learning.

Once learning about your movement capacity (often much different than you would have suspected), once the previous limiting patterns are exposed, applying yourself to learning and developing a new skill can take place quite differently. And it doesn't much matter whether your focus is internal or external.