| Developing Concentration Skills |
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How many times have you heard someone say "I just wasn't concentrating"?
And how often was it just after a bad shot?
Everybody wants to make sure they are focussed when they are shooting.
This page gives a few hints on how you can improve your ability
to concentrate, and how you can put those skills into practice on
the line.
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Basic concentration skills |
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| Practicing
concentration skills |
| Some simple rules for practicing concentration
skills: |
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Start small |
Concentration is difficult. Start
small; for exercises, maybe five minutes will be hard to begin
with. |
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Practice often |
How hard can it be to find three
ten-minute slots a week? |
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Progress from easy to harder |
Start in relaxed, undisturbed
environments; as you get a little practice, try out your preferred
methods in more realistic settings, then with bigger distractions. |
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Concentration strategy |
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Decide WHEN you need to concentrate |
Nobody can concentrate all the
time; whatever you do, peak concentration is normally only possible
for relatively short times. But what you CAN do is choose when
those times are. For target archery, full concentration is only
critical for about 10 seconds at a time, during each shot. |
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Decide HOW you will focus attention |
You need a way of focussing for
those few seconds, every shot. You can use cue words or phrases,
cue actions, visual cues (like the focussing exercise above),
built into a performance routine. |
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Identify and prepare for distractions |
If you tried the simple concentration
game twice, you probably found it easier to block distractions
you had seen before. Have a look at the distractions
page for more info. |
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Practice concentration skills |
Keep up practice in basic
concentration skills to make sure you can switch on concentration
and ignore distractions when you need to. |
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