Effects of varying attentional focus on health-related physical fitness performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Assessing health-related physical fitness is important for determining health status. However, verbal instructions provided during an assessment generally do not specify direction of attentional focus. This investigation examined the effect of attentional focus on performance outcomes during appraisals of health-related physical fitness. Eight females (25.0 ± 4.0 years) and 8 males (26.3 ± 3.9 years) completed 7 physical fitness tests of the Canadian Physical Activity, Fitness and Lifestyle Approach (modified Canadian Aerobic Fitness Test, grip strength, push-ups, sit and reach, partial curl-ups, vertical jump, and back extension) on 3 different days, each separated by 1 week. On day 1, no attentional focus was specified. On days 2 and 3, participants were asked to adopt an external focus (instructions focused attention away from the body) or an internal focus (instructions focused attention on the body's movement) in randomized order. Irrespective of sex, adopting an external focus resulted in significantly better performance on all tests when compared with no focus or internal-focus conditions. An internal focus also resulted in performance decrements for grip strength, push-ups, and vertical jump vs. no focus. These results demonstrate that instructing individuals to adopt an external focus provides a performance advantage on appraisals of aerobic and musculoskeletal fitness, whereas an internal focus may hinder performance. In some participants, these scores may convert to a rating of health status that is 1 health benefit zone higher or lower, respectively. This highlights further the importance of formulating verbal instructions that incorporate attentional focus for optimal performance on appraisals of physical fitness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".