Where is your focus?

An article by Anna Schrefl

Here I am, still enjoying the late sunny days in Vienna. This summer was intense but also relaxing and inspiring. My Pilates studio in Vienna got a ten-day-long renovation and refresher treatment and I feel the urge to bring a bit of fresh air into my teaching as well.

Back to regular hours and very motivated, I ask myself what special things I could give to my clients. Often I start a new week, month or season with a bunch of new exercises, a new training gadget or a deeper focus on alignment. Sometimes I love to fetch some “old” exercises out of the memory box, concentrate on different aspects (such as flexibility, strength or coordination), or get inspired by my fantastic colleagues at the studio. But this time I am not changing the exercise programme. I am simply shifting focus – mine and my clients’.

Internal versus external focus

We constantly receive information from both the outside and the inside of our body through our somato-sensory system. We can also voluntarily shift our focus to what is going on in our body or in the environment around us.

• When we consciously perceive our body in space and motion, feeling how our shoulders are placed, how our core muscles are getting engaged and how the lengthening of our psoas muscle affects our pelvis, we use our internal focus.

• When we feel a ball moving underneath our feet while trying to keep it stable in a shoulder bridge exercise, when we try to keep tension in an elastic band or when we reach with our hands towards the ceiling, we use our external focus.

In fitness (as in physical rehabilitation and physiotherapy), we find a lot of instruction based on internal focus such as “squeeze your butt”, “pull the navel in” or “lower your shoulders”. In many sports, we find a lot of external focus of attention such as the resistance of weights, a certain distance to be jumped, or hitting a ball over a net.

Learning a specific task can be internally or externally focused – but did you really pay attention to how your legs bent and stretched when you were learning to ride a bicycle? Once we have automated a skill, we give more and more attention to the external focus. I find, in general, that external focus is more effect- and goal-oriented while internal focus is more concerned with the movement itself.

Depending on our teaching style or Pilates-technique, we might find ourselves more on the internal or external side and yes, each of us is using both. Why then make a big fuss about it?  By playing more consciously with the guidance toward an internal or external focus, adapting to the different needs of our clients, we can enhance alignment, well-being and training effects.

How can we teach exercises most effectively?

In sport and movement science, the focus of attention and its effect on performance and learning processes have become a huge thing. More and more research has been done on that topic to find the optimal way to teach skills and enhance performance.  Research across many disciplines (golf, tennis, weight lifting, swimming, dance and gymnastics) shows a very clear result: external focus is more effective than internal for movement efficiency and learning processes, especially when the skill is difficult or complex. For example, small changes in wording such as “focus on the marker” instead of “focus on your foot” had a significant impact on the quality of the athletic performance when using a skiing simulator.  Bringing the focus beyond the body seems to enhance accuracy as well as movement efficiency.

That leads me to the question whether we are wrong when we want our clients to pay attention to their shoulder placement, the external rotation of their femur, or the engagement of their pelvic floor. Most of us will answer: “No! We see the development of movement quality in our clients every day in our studios.”  So how does our experience as movement instructors relate to the latest scientific findings?

We have to distinguish between different tasks in our Pilates classes. Very often, clients come to us with lots of tension in their bodies. An internal focus helps them to get in contact with their bodies, to release unnecessary tension, to start breathing naturally again and, by doing so, to balance the nervous system.  In my experience, this becomes more and more important for a lot of people before starting a training programme. Another aspect is bad alignment. Here again, it helps to zoom into the body to become aware of unnecessary tension and to trigger new muscle engagement and new movement patterns.

“I don´t think we´re ready to abandon internally focused feedback” said Greg Myer, director of The Human Performance Laboratory.  He added that internal focus and breaking down complex movement tasks help to identify the specific cause of a problem. That is exactly what we are doing in our Pilates classes.

Nevertheless, there is also growing consensus that transitioning to an external focus of attention as fast as possible improves the learning process. So it might be worthwhile to examine our teaching approach and see whether we get stuck with too many internally focused instructions from time to time.

Regarding alignment, there are always external foci to which we can draw our attention: our relation to the floor, the rhythm and flow of our movement (and the effect of it), the air around us, the space we create or shift with our arms and legs. In Pilates, we also have access to lots of props as a way to sharpen external focus.

Images, as we know, can be very beneficial as well; they direct attention away from specific muscles toward the intended effect of the action. But we have to be creative in finding good images and cues that can help all our clients. Not everybody will understand what to do with “open your chest like a flower” for example.

Reorganizing our teaching of a movement pattern from an internal focus to an external focus (by shifting the attention to the outside and toward the desired effect or goal) can help us to not overcorrect our clients. Perhaps sometimes we just need to get out of our heads and let our clients move. J

 

Anna Schrefl

Anna Schrefl studied contemporary dance at the Amsterdam School of Arts and the Modern Dance Academy in Rotterdam. In 2001 she finalized her Pilates training in New York with Romana Kryzanowska. She completed her Pilates Teacher Trainer training under Ton Voogt and Michael Fritzke and established the “Pilates System Europe – Certification Program” in 2006 under the supervision of Ton and Michael. Anna teaches special seminars for Pilates trainers around Europe and also works as a freelance choreographer. Since 2013, she is a certified advanced specialist in Spiraldynamik® and is currently becoming a lecturer of the Spiraldynamik® methodology. Since 2015, she has taken part in the Master of Dance Science Programme of the University of Bern. Anna is the director of Pilates System Europe® in Vienna.