Don't overthink it! Why concentrating on their arms won't help your child to hit the ball

You can see the concentration etched onto their face as the ball zooms through the air towards them. They have it all planned out, bat ready in hand. But what might actually help your child to hit the ball is not thinking about their arms at all.  

Have you heard about constrained action hypothesis? If not, it means that when people are performing a physical activity and their main focus is on their movements, it might reduce their success. 

The constrained action hypothesis suggests two ways of placing attention on movements during sports.^[1] 

The first type of attention is called ‘internal focus’. 

This means that when your child focuses their attention on how their arm should swing the bat, their attention is linked to the movement of their limb. 

The second type of attention is called ‘external focus’. 

During the same bat and ball game, if your child focuses on the where they want to hit the ball to, their attention is focused on an external goal. 

When your child’s attention is focused on external aspects of the activity, this can allow the motor system to organise itself.  

So, when they play sports like bat and ball and concentrate on where they anticipate the ball will go, your child’s brain will process information from their senses and adjust their movements accordingly, without conscious thought.  

The same hypothesis can be applied to different sports, like high jumping,^[2] and also to learning how to play instruments.^[3] 

When learning to hit a ball with a bat, the constrained action hypothesis suggests that your child might be more successful if they think about the path the ball will take, rather than the movement of their arm. 

References: 

[1] Werner, I., Federolf, P. (2023) Focus of Attention in Coach Instructions for Technique Training in Sports: A Scrutinized Review of Review Studies. J Funct Morphol Kinesiol. 2023 Jan 8;8(1):7. doi: 10.3390/jfmk8010007. PMID: 36648899; PMCID: PMC9844492. 

[2] Vidal, A., Wu, W., Nakajima, M., Becke,r J. (2018) Investigating the Constrained Action Hypothesis: A Movement Coordination and Coordination Variability Approach. J Mot Behav. 2018 Sep-Oct;50(5):528-537. doi: 10.1080/00222895.2017.1371111. Epub 2017 Sep 19. PMID: 28925816. 

[3] Allingham, E., & Wöllner, C. (2022) Effects of Attentional Focus on Motor Performance and Physiology in a Slow-Motion Violin Bow-Control Task: Evidence for the Constrained Action Hypothesis in Bowed String Technique. Journal of Research in Music Education, 70(2), 168–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/00224294211034735.