Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [96]
Of course, even the “wrong” distractions are still beneficial if they get you out the door or keep you exercising longer. But it’s worth being aware of the effects. Try paying attention to how different songs make you feel and perform during different exercises, and you may learn how to give yourself a boost when you most need it.
Will I perform better under pressure if I focus harder?
When you’re lining up a crucial putt, the last thing you want to hear is an impatient jerk in the foursome behind you yelling “Hey buddy, could you hurry it up a bit?” But new research suggests that the jerk might be doing you a favor. Psychologists and neuroscientists are finding that, when you perform complex motor sequences that you’re very familiar with, concentrating too much on the details of the task makes your performance worse. Too much concentration is what causes choking on the putting green or at the free-throw line—and it’s why a bit of distraction can be a good thing.
Even skills as simple as tying your shoes begin as a sequence of separate actions that you consciously execute in a certain order, explains Clare MacMahon, a Canadian researcher now at Victoria University in Australia. As you master the skill, the steps become combined into a single action that is stored in your “procedural” memory, beyond conscious control. “If you then try to consciously monitor yourself—‘Make two bunny ears, one bunny goes around the tree’ and so on—you break the skill back down into its components,” MacMahon says, “and you end up looking like a novice again.”
MacMahon was a co-author of a 2002 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that compared novice and expert soccer players dribbling a ball while either focusing on their technique or being distracted by sounds. Novices performed better when they focused on technique, but experts—for whom technique had progressed to subconscious control—performed better when they were distracted. As an added twist, the researchers repeated the experiment with the subjects using their non-dominant foot. In this case, both novices and experts performed better while focusing on technique: even the best players weren’t truly expert with their non-dominant feet.
Sian Beilock, the University of Chicago researcher who was the lead author of the soccer study, published another study in 2009 in which novice and expert golfers were asked to putt either as quickly as possible while maintaining accuracy or taking as much time as they wanted. Again, novices and experts responded differently. The novices performed best when they took their time, while the experts performed best when they were told to hurry up. “It’s really clear that paying too much attention to your step-by-step actions can disrupt fluidness,” Beilock says. “And this is what happens under stress, what people call ‘choking.’”
Other researchers have extended these results to basketball, hockey, and even darts. More surprisingly, a 2009 study in the Journal of Sports Sciences found that focusing too intently was even disruptive in running, a task whose mechanics most people consider fairly straightforward. Researchers found that runners focusing on their form or their breathing consumed more oxygen and burned more energy than runners who simply watched their surroundings. If nothing else, this is a reminder that walking and running are complex tasks that your subconscious mind executes very efficiently. (“If you don’t believe walking is complex, why can’t we program a robot to walk normally?” Beilock points out.)
Of course, you still need your conscious mind to master skills in the first place. But once you’ve become proficient, it’s worth remembering that, when the pressure is on, scrunching up your forehead and focusing on your mechanics is