Implicit or Explicit Body Awareness: which is more Efficient for Professional Athletes? Application of Embodied Cognition in Sport Science

 Investigating factors that affect the performance of professional athletes has always been one of the important fields of sports science.

One of the important questions in this regard is whether athletes are better to be self-aware while performing physical movements or, conversely, this self-awareness as an interfering factor will lead to a decline in their performance.

In the present study, an attempt has been made to examine this issue with an interdisciplinary view based on the physical cognition approach, especially with the application of two models of Dreyfuss (2007) and the meshed architecture (Christensen, Sutton and McIlewin 2016; Gllagher, 2020).

According to the first model, self-awareness will interfere with the performance of skillful movements, and in the opposite model, the performance of movements requires awareness of self, body and position.

Both approaches seem to rightly point to different aspects of awareness in performing movements; although awareness of the current situation is essential for performing movements, overt body awareness interferes with learning and performing movements and can have adverse psychological consequences for athletes in the long run.