I absolutely love it when I run into a mental skills tool that I was not previously aware of! That’s part of the joy of reading as much as I do.
In his book ‘Ninety Percent Mental”, former MLB all star pitcher turned mental skills trainer Bob Tewksbury shares how he developed tools to help him be successful as a pitcher at the highest level of baseball, and later helped others to implement those same tools after he retired from his career as a pitcher, got his degree, and started practicing as a mental skills trainer.
If you like baseball, you will love this book! It is full of anecdotes that will really give you an inside view of what it took during Bob’s career to make it to the big show and to stay there (with a few detours up and down the various levels). Personally, I am not that big of a baseball fan, but always enjoy hearing how mental skills are used in different sports. While the mental skills concepts are basically the same, there are often nuances, that when understood, can lead to new ideas about how to implement a particular skill in a different sport. I enjoyed reading how Bob had implemented the traditional mental skills such as goal setting, imagery, breathing, and positive self-talk on his own, and later with other players.
But, I was a little puzzled when he started talking about using concentration grids. If you are not familiar with this term (as I was not), a concentration grid is a 10×10 matrix in which the numbers 00 to 99 are randomly filled in. here is a sample that I found on the internet:
To use the grid, you start a timer and begin crossing the numbers off in order starting with 00 until you have crossed them all off. Then record your ending time to get your score. I was intrigued! I printed off several pages of grids (the site I went to allowed you to input the number of grids you wanted and it would randomly generate them for you and download them to your computer. For security reasons, I did not include the link to the website I used as I don’t have any way to verify the security of the site (I can only say that I used it and, so far, have not experienced any issues…)).
I tried it ten times over a 12-day period (no more than once / day). Here is a chart showing my times for each trial in seconds.
As you can see, I made some progress as my times trended downwards!
Bob Tewksbury explained that the purpose was to focus on one number at a time, just as a pitcher focuses on one pitch at a time (or a clay target shooter focuses on one target at a time). Sounds good right?
But, I was still puzzled as to why I had not heard of this before in either my formal education or my subsequent reading. So… I did what I often times do! I let google be my friend. I was able to locate one study entitled “Examining the efficacy of the concentration grid exercise as a concentration enhancement exercise” which appeared in the Psychology of Sport and Exercise journal in 2006. I was able to learn from that study that concentration grids had been around since 1984. The study was unable to find any support that use of the grids had shown any improvement in 3 dimensions of concentration tasks after a 9 week training program provided to a group of collegiate soccer players. The authors had concluded that their failure to show any statistical significance lended credibility to sport psychologists at that time that had cautioned about using concentration grids in applied sport psychology. Perhaps that was the reason why I had not heard of them.
So, does that mean they are bad and not effective? Maybe, maybe not! Often times, the placebo affect can be pretty strong! If an individual incorporates a tool like this into their pregame preparation, and believes it works, it very well might for that individual. I wanted to try to test the effect on myself. One way I had at my disposal to measure focus was with the EEG headband and my muse meditation system. So, after my trials with the concentration grids, I completed a meditation and checked my focus readings from the muse system. I did not notice any significant difference from my reading done without having done the matrix beforehand – but then again, I only did 10 trials with the grids myself. Hardly enough to draw any conclusions.
For myself, I found the grids fun to do. I printed out a bunch of the sheets and may try them on occasion for fun. While I don’t plan to make them part of my pre-match routine, I see no harm in using them. I would encourage readers to try them out themselves and make their own judgement. Based on the number of sources that came up when I googled “concentration grid”, there are many people who must be using them! Give it a try! You might enjoy it!
If you are interested in Bob Tewksbury’s book, here is the amazon link.
Greenlees, I., Thelwell, R., & Holder, T. (2006). Examining the efficacy of the concentration grid exercise as a concentration enhancement exercise. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 7(1), 29–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2005.02.001