Focus on the rate of your breathing and try to keep it at a slow and steadied pace. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, feeling the air filling emptying from your lungs each time. Try to concentrate on this movement to centre and relax yourself.

Sometimes it can be useful to have a key word which you repeat over to yourself which can help you to refocus. This supplements the concentration on the breathing and helps to fully focus you on what you want to do. This way you will be able to recall the method automatically when you need to use it most.

Sometimes the stress of training or competition can get in the way of you centring yourself, and regular practice of your technique is the best way to combat this. By following a consistent routine, athletes can prime their minds and bodies for optimal performance. Setting clear and specific goals helps athletes maintain task-focused concentration.

Breaking down goals into smaller, achievable targets keeps athletes focused on the immediate task at hand. This prevents the mind from wandering and enhances concentration by providing a clear direction and purpose. Physical conditioning plays a significant role in mental focus and concentration.

Regular exercise, adequate rest, and a healthy lifestyle contribute to optimal brain function, improving concentration abilities. Taking care of the body t hrough proper nutrition and sleep positively impacts mental clarity and focus.

In the digital age, attention training apps and tools can be valuable resources for enhancing concentration.

These apps offer various exercises and techniques designed to improve focus and attention control. Athletes can incorporate these tools into their training routine to enhance concentration skills.

Breath control exercises, such as diaphragmatic breathing or box breathing, can help athletes regulate their breathing patterns and enhance concentration. By focusing on their breath, athletes can calm their minds, reduce stress, and improve their ability to stay focused during training and competitions.

Proper breathing techniques are essential for enhancing concentration in sports. One effective technique is diaphragmatic breathing, also known as belly breathing.

To practice this technique, athletes should inhale deeply through the nose, allowing the breath to expand the belly instead of the chest. They should then exhale slowly through the mouth, releasing any tension or stress. Another technique is box breathing, which involves inhaling for a count of four, holding the breath for a count of four, exhaling for a count of four, and holding the breath again for a count of four.

These techniques help regulate breathing, calm the mind, and improve focus and concentration. Distraction management techniques involve identifying and minimizing external and internal distractions that can hinder concentration. This can include creating a quiet and clutter-free training environment, using noise-canceling headphones, or practicing techniques to redirect intrusive thoughts.

Mental rehearsal and simulation involve mentally rehearsing specific scenarios or performances in detail. Athletes can visualize themselves going through the motions, making the right decisions, and maintaining focus. This helps build familiarity and confidence, enhancing concentration during actual competitions.

Emphasizing the process rather than solely focusing on the outcome can enhance concentration. By directing attention to the immediate actions and steps required to achieve a goal, athletes can avoid getting overwhelmed or distracted by external pressures.

This mindset promotes a laser-like focus on the task at hand. Enhancing concentration is a crucial aspect of sports performance, and sports psychology provides a wealth of exercises and techniques to help athletes improve their focus.

By incorporating mindfulness, visualization, attention control training, cue utilization, routines and rituals, goal setting, physical conditioning, and attention training tools, athletes can develop strong concentration skills.

These exercises not only enhance performance on the field but also translate to improved focus and concentration in other areas of life. By consistently practicing these sports psychology exercises, athletes can unlock their full potential and achieve success in their chosen sports. Sports psychology exercises to improve your concentration and focus.

Dr John Crimmins Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist. The Power of Mindfulness.

After gaining proficiency in your ability to concentrate, you can progressively add distractions. Allow 5 minutes for each exercise unless otherwise indicated. Place a medal, trophy, ball or any other object from your sport directly in front of you, pick a specific spot on the object and then in a relaxed manner, focus your attention on that spot.

Study it carefully. As you keep your eyes on that spot, slowly repeat to yourself a word or phrase. Next, close your eyes and try to get a visual image of the object and your spot. Continue to repeat your concentration cue to yourself as you do this. Finally, pick the medal or object up and study it with your hands.

Feel the texture of the surfaces, the corners and points, the temperature of it, the feel of raised writing if any, etc. Repeat this sequence looking, imaging and feeling for 5 minutes.

Sit up close to your TV screen with the set on and no volume. Hold your thumb out against the screen and focus only on the center of your thumbnail for about 10 seconds.

When you can do this without being distracted by the pictures, increase your time up to 20 seconds. When you can go a whole minute, turn the volume up and try to focus only on your thumb for 10 seconds without being distracted by the sound or pictures.

Continue to increase your time until you can go minutes without losing your focus. This is the heart of concentration! Focus your attention on your breathing as you inhale. Inhale, focus on your breathing; exhale, focus on number 1. When you first find your mind distracted or wandering, gently return to your focus in the following way: Concentrate on the feeling of the inhale.

With each distraction, recognize that you are drifting, bring yourself back and increase the number you focus on by one. If you treat your concentration like a muscle and WORK to develop it, you will discover great results.

Remember to always focus on yourself. Alan Goldberg is an internationally-known expert in peak sports performance. Nor do you have to have a room full of trophies, win a state championship, or make the front page of the sports section.

They set high, realistic goals for themselves and train and play hard. They are successful because they are pursuing their goals and enjoying their sport. Their sport participation enriches their lives and they believe that what they get back is worth what they put into their sport.

There are nine, specific mental skills that contribute to success in sports. They are all learned and can be improved with instruction and practice.

At the Ohio Center for Sport Psychology we work with serious athletes of all ages and ability levels to help them learn and sharpen these important skills. We believe that our work is worthwhile because the same mental skills that athletes use in achieving success in sports can be used to achieve success in other areas of their lives.

These nine mental skills are necessary for performing well in sport as well as in non-sport performance situations.

At the Ohio Center for Sport Psychology:. Although each of the nine skills is important, its primary importance will occur during one of three phases: long-term development, immediate preparation for performance, and during performance itself.

Level I - These mental skills constitute a broad base for attaining long-term goals, learning, and sustaining daily practice.

They are needed on a day-by-day basis for long periods of time, often months and years. Level II - These skills are used immediately before performance to prepare for performance. They maybe used just before competition begins, or immediately before a specific performance action, such as a golf shot or a free throw in basketball.

The pyramid below represents the relationship of the nine skills to one another. Each of the higher levels incorporates and is based upon the skills of the preceding levels. The nine mental skills associated with athletic success are the same mental skills associated with performance in a wide variety of non-sport, performance situations.

At the Ohio Center for Sport Psychology we help people develop the important skills necessary for high-level performance in sport and non-sport performance situations. Copyright © Ohio Center for Sport Psychology.

Our survival is ultimately aided by our ability to attend to stimuli and extract information from our surroundings. The ability to focus is a mental process that is present from birth. It plays a vital role in virtually every life domain. There are actually several different types of focus.

But the two most relevant in the work we do are Focused Attention and Sustained Attention. During focused attention, we attend to a target stimulus for a given period of time. Good examples from major sports would be:. Sustained attention, or what is commonly known as concentration , is where we focus on a task for an extended period.

Complete attention is given to the task until it is over. Any irrelevant sensory information is filtered out. Think long-distance and enduro-sports, musical and theatrical performances, and even surgery.

Basically, anything that requires an individual to concentrate for a prolonged period of time. A swimmer requires focused attention whilst on the blocks followed by s ustained attention during the race.

Because focus plays such a large role in high performance across the sporting and non-sporting performance domains, it can be valuable to learn about the different ways we can enhance and improve our focus.

In the performance domain, meditation is commonly used to bring our attention to the present moment. Basically, this practice helps us get better at focusing our minds on the task at hand. Meditation is not about positive thinking nor about changing thoughts.

At the end of the day, thoughts are something we have only some influence over. The purpose of meditation is actually to heighten our awareness of the present moment. This includes any external experiences sensory stimulus and internal experiences such as thoughts observing them without judgment.

Or as little judgment as possible! Aside from the benefits of meditation on our cognition and focus, sleep also plays an important role in these mental processes. We know that sleep deprivation can severely impact our decision-making, alertness, memory, learning, and reaction time.

One of the biggest causes of sleep disruption today is screen time, particularly its proximity to bedtime. Electronic device usage prior to sleep can have a significant impact on sleep quality.

Research has shown that individuals who use their mobile phones right before sleeping experience a decline in both focused and sustained attention. To enhance your sleep quality and reduce the impact of screen time usage on your focus the following day, it is ideal for athletes and performers not to be on their phones right before bed.

One way of giving yourself the greatest chance for a good performance is by switching off any electronic devices as early as possible before sleeping. The word Flow is also thrown around in the sporting world when we talk about focus. What we know about flow is that in this state physical performance is heightened.

This is because the individual is completely present, attending solely to the task and filtering out any irrelevant information. Based on Flow Theory, individuals who struggle to get focused or stay focused are probably experiencing one of two things. To create an environment where flow can occur, skill level and task difficulty need to be roughly equal.

Matching skill level and task difficulty can be particularly tricky in a team or group setting where you have individuals of varying skill levels and experience. For example, if a boxer is asked to spar against a less experienced opponent, setting higher point thresholds or introducing artificial rules to make the round more physically and mentally demanding might aid them in entering a state of flow.

For a swimmer hitting well below the times they need to be hitting during an endurance set, introducing a more difficult breathing pattern or a higher dolphin kick benchmark off each wall might introduce some additional physical and psychological constraints to a relatively easy set.

Narrowing our focus to a small selection of focus areas when we train and even compete is an attentional style that promotes concentration and helps us filter out all the irrelevant information around us.

Clarifying these focus goals ahead of the session, week or month also allows them to take ownership. Focus goals allow athletes to recognise their progress more clearly and take accountability for their efforts during training and on game day.

Start a training diary if you don't already have one and use it to record these concentration highs and lows. There is no need to complicate this process - if you feel your concentration was the cause of poor performance, make a note of it.

Use your notes to identify key moments where your focus tends to wane, consider what the cause could be and set goals to prevent it from happening. Your goal could be as simple as practicing a specific motion over and over until it becomes second nature, allowing you to better focus on your environment, or it might be to do more of the actions where your focus trends to stay true and developing plans to perform without relying on the actions you know you struggle to stay focused on.

Routines channel your focus and get you ready to perform, helping to make potential complex actions become second nature. Creating set routines makes it almost impossible for distractions to creep in as your brain enters a familiar sort of auto-pilot.

For example, you could listen to the same songs every time you warm-up, eat a specific breakfast in the morning, or leave enough time for a breathwork practice before you get started. Whatever it is you're trying to achieve, visualise yourself smashing it. Concentration is connected to emotional arousal.

When emotional arousal is high — excitement and anxiety are the two prime suspects here — concentration tends to dip. Anxiety at the start of a competition, for example, often leads to intense performance at the start, but possibly going out too hard or too fast.

Breathwork and meditation are both effective techniques for lowering emotional arousal. If, however, you need to increase your emotional arousal — pump yourself up, basically — motivational self-talk works wonders.

It might sound silly, but start chanting a mantra out loud or in your head to gee yourself up. The more you commit and the more often you do it, the more effective it will be, reminding you of past successes. The sweat, lactic build-up and heavy breathing of high-intensity exercise can make it hard to stay focused.

The mind-body connection is so strong because your brain is hard-wired to prevent you exercising yourself to death. That's okay. Focus and concentration are trainable. To make progress, start by identifying goals and evaluating how you can achieve them.

Use mental visualisation, self-talk and cue words, while understanding physiological states can impact your performance. Andy Lane is a Professor of Sport Psychology and Director of Research Excellence at the University of Wolverhampton.

A Fellow of the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences BASES , Andy is Health Professional Council registered and a British Psychological Society Chartered Psychologist.

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