Increases in jump-and-reach height through an external focus of attention: a commentary

Wulf et al.’s report of two experiments examining whether a participant’s focus of attention influences jump-and-reach height is the latest paper in a series proposing beneficial effects of instructing participants to adopt ‘an external focus of attention’ during motor learning and performance. Here, the novel contribution of the data involves a generalisation to the constraints of a maximum force production task (more on these task constraints later) and the authors propose that their findings have implications for understanding how practitioners can enhance physical training. On the face of it, these findings seem straightforward to interpret. However, in this commentary, I will discuss two problems with the experiments in this paper which actually generalise to the extant programme of work on focus of attention in motor learning and performance. These issues are theoretical and methodological in nature as explained below.