Internal and External Focus in the 60-Meter Sprint Among Children

Background: External attentional focus has an advantage over internal attentional focus in improving closed motor skills and in tasks involving the use of physical fitness components (Wulf, 2013). This superiority was also found in a short run ((Porter et al., 2015).

Aim: The purpose of this study was to examine whether the external attention advantage was maintained among young learners during a 60-meter sprint.

Method: One-hundred and thirty-four fourth grade students were divided into three research groups: an external focus group (25 boys, 26 girls), an internal focus group (28 boys, 24 girls) and a control group (14 boys, 17 girls). Participants performed a first measurement of a 60-meter sprint and then received an intervention according to their research group. After the intervention, another measurement was performed to examine the effect of the intervention on performance.

Results: Among the girls, no difference was found in the running times before and after the intervention and no interaction was found between the results and the study groups. Among the boys, no significant difference was found between run times before and after the intervention, but an interaction was found between the results and the study groups (F = 7.022, p = 0.002). Post-hoc tests show that the external focus group ran slower in the second run (12.67 sec) (p 0.05), compared to the internal focus group (11.99 sec) and the control group (11.89 sec).

Discussion and Conclusions: The internal focus improved the boys’ performance. That is, young learners produce an advantage in internal focus similar to inexperienced golfers (Perkins-Ceccato et al., 2003). In addition, the attentional system in children is still in the developmental process and therefore the effect of external focus does not work in the same way as in adults.