Effects Of Attentional Focus On Golf-putting Learning And Performance For Novice

In golf, the one who gets the lowest strokes is the winner. Shooting 250meters by using the driver is one stroke and making the putt which is 3 centimeters away from the hole is also one stroke. Putting score almost takes up half of the standard score in one round, the performance of putting has a big difference on the final score, golf putting is the most basic and important skill, for beginner, learning and mastering the putting skill are also very important, it’s good for improving the training quality and putting performance by giving the beginner the most effective introduction of motor-skill learning method. However, evidence is accumulating to support the premise that presenting a performer with a large explicit knowledge base through learning is, paradoxically, not the most productive method of acquiring a motor skill, One theoretical approach has been to consider the focus of attention of the learner, and golf putting is one of the sports skills which have been researched.This research conducted a two-weeks of golf training and test. By giving novice different introductions of internal and external attentional focus, studied the effects of internal and external attentional focus on the performance of learning phase, under pressure situation and retention phase of golf putting.Participants are 54 undergraduates from one sport university. The number of participants of external attentional focus is 28, consisting of 26 girls and 2 boys, the range of age is from 18 to 20 years old; The number of participants of internal attentional focus is 26, consisting of 23 girls and 3 boys, the range of age is from 18 to 20 years old. All participants have no golf experience before, voluntarily participated in the study after giving their informed consent. This study contain three experiments, experiment 1 researched the effects of internal and external attentional focus on the learning of golf putting, experiment 2 researched the effects of internal and external attentional focus on the performance under pressure situation, experiment 3 researched the effects of internal and external attentional focus on the skill retention of golf putting. The conclusions are as follows:In the skill learning phase, the performance of external attentional focus group is significantly better than the internal attentional focus group.Under the pressure situation, compared with the external attentional focus group, the performance of internal attentional focus group get significantly improved.In the retention test after one week, the performance of external attentional focus group get improved while the internal attentional focus group get decreased.