Using Attention to Lower Perceived Exertion

When endurance training gets tough, it’s easy to turn your focus inward. You start noticing your breathing, muscle burn, heart rate, and discomfort. While this seems logical, research in sports psychology reveals that where you direct your attention during intense efforts can change how hard the effort feels, even if your output stays the same.

Focusing on external cues rather than internal sensations has been associated with lowered ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) and can help you perform more efficiently during high-intensity endurance work. Let me walk you through how this works and how you can apply it to your training.

Internal vs. External Focus: What’s the Difference?

Attentional focus falls into two main categories:

• Internal focus: Concentrating on your breathing, muscle tension, fatigue, pain, or heart rate.

• External focus: Paying attention to the terrain, rhythm, power targets, visual landmarks, competitors, or movement outcomes.

  
  

Research across motor learning and endurance performance shows that an external focus can reduce conscious control and self-monitoring. This allows your movement and pacing to stay more automatic. As intensity rises, this shift becomes even more valuable.

Studies demonstrate that athletes using an external focus report lower perceived effort and, in some cases, are able to sustain hard efforts more effectively, including improved movement efficiency under fatigue.

Especially in controlled environments, including self-paced climbs, a change in focus can make the work feel subjectively more manageable.

drsconditioning athlete, Bernhard Zisser, pacing a climb during the Ötztaler Radmarathon

Why External Cues Work During Hard Efforts

As your effort approaches threshold or goes beyond, your body’s sensory feedback becomes louder. Breathlessness, muscle burn, and rising heart rate dominate your attention. When you fixate on these sensations, your perceived effort often rises faster and may decouple from physiological fatigue levels, leading to skewed estimates about your predicted time to exhaustion.

External focus helps by:

• Potentially reducing the attentional emphasis placed on discomfort-related sensations

• Limiting emotional interpretations of fatigue (e.g., thinking "this feels bad, so I must slow down")

• Encouraging smoother, more economical movement patterns

  
  

Examples of external focus in practice:

• Running toward the next visual marker instead of monitoring your breathing

• Focusing on pedal tension over a climb instead of foregrounding muscle discomfort

• Matching cadence to the rhythm of the terrain rather than internal sensations

  
  

Of course, these strategies don’t erase physiological strain. Instead, they prevent it from becoming your central reference point.

Controlled environments, such as ramp tests are great settings to experiment with cueing strategies

What Research Tells Us About Endurance Performance

Endurance-specific research highlights that attentional focus becomes more important as effort increases. External focus is especially effective during:

• Intervals

• Threshold efforts

• Long climbs or sustained race-pace work

  
  

Meanwhile, excessive internal focus has, in certain contexts, been associated with higher perceived effort and earlier disengagement during hard tasks.

That said, internal cues are not inherently bad. The key is timing.

Mixed Cue Strategies for Long Events

In long-duration efforts, especially ultra-endurance events, you can’t rely on just one attentional strategy. Observational and qualitative research suggests that successful performers often shift between external and internal cues depending on task demands.

Common patterns among experienced endurance athletes include:

• Using external focus during hard segments like climbs, surges, or technical sections

• Switching to internal monitoring during steady sections for hydration, fuelling, and breathing control

  
  

This mixed approach allows you to:

• Control RPE during demanding efforts

• Avoid ignoring critical physiological signals

• Sustain performance without mental overload

  
  

Endurance events and ultra racing aren't about blocking internal sensations entirely. It’s about preventing discomfort from dominating your decision-making.

How to Apply This in Training

Attentional focus can be trained intentionally, much like pacing or nutrition strategies.

Here are practical guidelines:

1. Use external cues during intervals, threshold work, and late-session fatigue.

2. Reserve internal cues for recovery periods and system checks.

3. Keep cues simple and specific—focus on one clear cue per effort.

4. Practice switching cues under fatigue, not just when you’re fresh.

   
   

After your sessions, reflect on:

• When did your RPE spike?

• Which cue helped stabilise the effort?

• When did internal awareness become useful again?

  
  

Over time, this builds a reliable attentional toolkit you can deploy automatically in competition.

Remember, train the body to produce power. Train attention to make that power usable when it matters most.

Making Attentional Focus Work for You

Understanding and applying attentional focus strategies can transform your training. By shifting your focus outward during hard efforts, you can lower perceived exertion and potentially even sustain a higher output for longer. This approach is one of the many athlete-centred strategies at drsconditioning, which helps multi-sport athletes in Vienna redefine their limits through expert guidance and structured training.

Start experimenting with external focus cues in your next session. Notice how your effort feels and how your performance responds. With consistent practice, you’ll develop the mental tools to push harder and smarter when it counts most.

Essential Reading

• Wulf, G. (2013). Attentional focus and motor learning: A review of 15 years.

  Establishes why an external focus improves efficiency and lowers perceived effort across physical tasks.

• Brick, N., MacIntyre, T., & Campbell, M. (2016). Attentional focus in endurance activity: New paradigms and future directions.

  Outlinines how endurance athletes shift attention as intensity and fatigue increase.

• Marcora, S. (2008). Do we really need a central governor to explain brain regulation of exercise performance?

  Introduces the psychobiological model of fatigue linking perception of exertion and motivational intensity—not physiology alone—to physical task disengagement.