Where to put your attention: internal and external focus in archery.

Part of the complete guide: How to improve your archery score

Of all the things an archer can work on, attention is the one we talk about most and train the least. We keep telling ourselves to concentrate, but we almost never ask what, exactly, we should be concentrating on. And yet research on motor learning has a fairly clear answer, and it is an answer that overturns the instinct of most people when they start out.

The underlying distinction is between two opposite ways of directing the mind during the movement, and understanding the difference is the first step to stop sabotaging yourself without knowing it.

Two ways of directing your attention

The first way is the internal focus: the attention goes to your own body and to the movement you are making. The fingers holding the string, the elbow rotating, the shoulder blade drawing in, the bow hand pushing. It is the way that feels most natural, especially when you want to be in control: I look inward, I check the parts, I put them right one by one.

The second is the external focus: the attention goes to the effect of the movement, or to an object outside you. The arrow leaving, the centre of the target, the pin of the sight floating in the gold, the string moving away from the face. You do not think about how you move the body, you think about what you want to happen out there. Most beginners, and most archers gripped by performance anxiety, choose the internal focus without realising it. They have the sensation of controlling more. The trouble is that, most of the time, they control worse.

Why an external focus tends to win

On this point the literature is among the most solid in all of motor science. For decades, dozens of studies across different tasks, different levels and different ages, summarised by several systematic reviews, have reached the same conclusion: an external focus improves both immediate performance and learning compared with an internal focus. It is neither a small nor an uncertain effect, and it is one of the few training principles that research genuinely agrees on.

There is also a curious and useful detail: within certain limits, the further the point of attention is from you, the better. Concentrating on the effect of the shot out there, on the target, tends to work better than concentrating on the bow in your hand, and concentrating on the bow still works better than concentrating on your own arm. It is as if moving the attention away from the body freed the movement instead of caging it.

Why it works: the movement that frees up

The most widely accepted explanation for this phenomenon has a slightly technical name, the constrained-action hypothesis, but a simple idea behind it. When you bring the attention onto your body and try to consciously control the movement, you impose conscious control on a movement that should run on its own. And in doing so you interfere with exactly those fast, automatic processes a good shot demands. It is like starting to think about how you move your legs while going down the stairs: as long as you do not think about it you go smoothly, but the moment you do, you stumble.

The external focus does the opposite. By pointing the attention at the effect, you let the motor system organise itself, bringing into play the automatic programmes that training has built over months and years of repetition. Conscious control freezes, the external focus frees. And this is why the archer who stops commanding their fingers and starts thinking about the arrow in the gold, often, suddenly shoots better.

What it means, concretely, in archery

Putting this principle into practice means changing the words with which you think about the shot, and above all the ones with which you teach it to yourself. Almost any internal instruction can be reframed in external terms, and usually the external version works better.

It is not word play: it is a different way of occupying the mind in the decisive instant. A good coach, after all, almost always speaks in images and external effects precisely for this reason, even when they do not know the theory underneath. They have seen that it works.

The elite archer's attention: networks and interoception

If we look at what sets apart the attention of high-level archers, research adds two pieces that complete the picture. The first is that elite shooting athletes show more efficient attentional networks: they are better at keeping themselves ready, at orienting their attention onto the right thing at the right moment and at filtering out distractions. It is not just where they put their attention, but how well their attentional machinery works as a whole.

The second piece is more surprising and concerns attention turned inward, to the inside of the body, interoception: the ability to perceive internal signals, muscular tension, the breath, the heart rate, the moment when you are truly ready. Elite archers have a marked one, and this seems to contradict everything said so far. In reality it does not contradict it at all, because they are two different jobs. During the execution of the movement an external focus is the right choice, one that does not set about commanding the muscles. But internal sensitivity is needed before and around the shot: to work out when you are ready to go and when, instead, it is better to let down and start again. One guides the execution, the other the decision of whether and when to execute.

The link with the quiet eye

Anyone who has read the article on the quiet eye will meet an old friend here. That long final fixation of the gaze on the target, before the release, which marks out the best shooters is, in a sense, the external focus made concrete: the eye that anchors outside, on the point that matters, and stays there. It is no accident that the two things often go together. A well-directed external attention and a steady gaze on the target are two faces of the same way of being in the shot, and they train well together.

If you want to go deeper into that side, you will find everything in the dedicated article: Quiet Eye and Visual Training. Here it is enough to say that giving the gaze a clear external target is one of the most direct and concrete ways to build an external focus.

How to train your focus

Like everything else, focus can be trained too, and in fairly simple ways. The first is to learn to talk to yourself in external terms. Choose a few key words that describe effects and not muscles, and use those as reminders during the shot. The fewer the better: a single external image to return to is worth more than a list of internal checks.

The second is to resist the temptation to monitor yourself too much. In moments of difficulty the instinct is to look inward and start correcting part by part, which is exactly the thing that makes the movement worse. Training trust in your own automatism, and keeping the mind outside, is a skill in itself, and it pays off above all under pressure, when the tendency to stiffen up is strongest.

The third is to use blank-bale shooting, at a close butt, to feel the movement free without the weight of the score. It is the same tool that serves for the release and for rhythm, and not by chance: they are all faces of a single goal, letting a trained movement happen, instead of forcing it to.