The Process Athletes Must Follow to Improve Focus and Concentration
For the last two days I have been explaining the conundrum of how athletes lose focus and concentration during a two-hour practice. On the one hand, coaches must be mindful of this and end practice when athletes are no longer focusing and concentrating. On the other hand, athletes must learn how to improve their mental skills to focus and concentrate longer.
For athletes, the question is how? To answer this question you must take a page out of the same process one follows to master training pain. Training pain is a type of pain that is not injury related. It’s the muscles and lung pain that athletes often describe as fatigue.
In order to improve your ability to handle training pain, you must follow a process to gradually push yourself further and further beyond the stage of fatigue. This requires a progression to increase one’s pain tolerance over time. So, this ultimately means the only way to increase your pain tolerance is to gradually experience more pain.
Gradually Improving Focus and Concertation
Correspondingly, improving focus and concentration requires this same process. This means more boredom and distraction is the secret for overcoming boredom and distraction. But not just boredom and distraction for the sake of it. Indeed, it must have a purpose and a progression. Ideally, this would flow from doing the repetitive drills that lead to real improvements in whatever skill you are building.
For example, if now you can only do these drills for 15 minutes without getting bored or distracted, then the next step is to work towards 16 minutes. From there the progression may just be to add 1 minute each time you do the drills. The key is to continually increase your tolerance without decreasing the quality of each repetition. If the quality decreases, then decrease the time and don’t increase the time unless the quality remains high.
Over time, if you stick with the progression, your ability to focus and concentrate through boring and repetitive activities will increase to expert levels. Then you will be a master of mental monotony for that particular activity. While it’s possible that your mastery could transfer to other related activities, it’s more likely that each additional activity will require a new progression for mastery.