The A - Z of Sports Vision - Paralysis by Analysis

Take something you do every day without thinking about it – brushing your teeth, for instance, Next time you brush your teeth try and think about the precise movements that you are making with your hand. If you manage to keep this up for a while, you’ll find that brushing your teeth is no longer the simple process that it was on the previous occasion. If you start thinking about the mechanics of a routine process that we normally do sub-consciously, the result is that our performance deteriorates: “paralysis by analysis”. This is particularly common in sport: when something goes wrong, it’s very tempting to start analysing the mechanics of what happened, with the result that a blip becomes a catastrophe. Jackson & Beilock (2008) asked skilled soccer players to dribble the ball through a series of pylons while paying attention to the side of their foot that most recently contacted the ball. Their performance was worse in terms of being slower and having more errors compared with when they were given no instructions. Similar results have been found in baseball where skilled university-level players were asked to perform a hitting task. They heard a randomly presented noise and were told to indicate whether their bat was moving up or down at the instant they heard the noise. Biomechanical swing analysis revealed that the resultant deterioration in performance was at least in part due to a disruption in the sequencing and timing of the components of their swing. The more complex the skill, the greater is likely to be the loss of performance when the player concentrates on the step-by-step components of that skill (Masters et al 1993). It’s also more likely to occur in a high pressure situation, such as hitting a golf putt to win a golf championship (Masters et al, 1993). And it’s golf, and in particular Tiger Woods, that has given us an example of how paralysis by analysis can be overcome. Tiger’s father Earl taught him to putt when he was just a toddler. He told him to rotate his head and really look at the hole, then come back to the ball. He repeated this two or three times until he built up a picture in his head. All he had to do now was to “putt to the picture”. In other words you want to tell your subconscious brain, in as much detail as possible, exactly what you want it to do. But don’t tell it how to do it. David Donner