Practical and methodological considerations

This penultimate chapter considers how athletes might develop the ability to exert attentional control. It outlines some approaches that might help athletes to switch their focus or re-distribute patterns of attention when they realize they have adopted task-irrelevant thoughts. It evaluates the use of mindfulness, quiet-eye training, pressurized training, among other approaches, as means of training attentional control. The chapter concludes by outlining a series of methodological approaches that might be employed by researchers wishing to test some of the predictions put forth by our model of skilled action and our proposal that skilled maintenance is underpinned by the flexible deployment of attentional resources.