Why we crack under pressure

High pressure: David Batty misses a penalty in Euro '96

The reasons why top sportsmen "choke" under pressure - and a possible solution - may have been discovered by psychologists.

The limited success of the England football team during penalty shoot-outs in crucial games suggests that, as a nation, we are not immune.

Every club golfer knows it is more likely he will miss an easy putt at the critical stage of a match - or if plenty of people are looking on.

However, a team of psychologists from Michigan State University say that they know why this is happening - people are concentrating too hard.

Tape recorded

It is not because the extra pressure is distracting our minds from the task in hand, they say.

Their experiments focused on student golfers who all received training to complete a putting task.

One group practiced under normal conditions, another group had to learn their putting while being distracted by listening to a tape recorder, and repeating a target word every time they heard it on the recording.

The final group had to train in front of a video camera - and were told that professional golfers would be watching their technique on the video.

High pressure exam

After plenty of practice, all three groups were tested - first in an undemanding "no-pressure" environment.

For the second test, they were told that, if they improved their performance, they would win monetary rewards for themselves - and one of the other students, thus ratcheting up the pressure.

They found all three groups did just as well on the low-pressure test, but when it came to the high-pressure test, two of the groups got substantially worse, and one got better.

It was the undisturbed practice group and the "distracted" group which got worse.

The "self-conscious" group who had trained while being taped improved.

Relax and succeed

Sian Beilock, one of the researchers, said: "This suggests that adapting to an environment where one is forced to attend to performance from the initial stages of learning may provide immunisation against the negative effects of performance pressure."

She added that the results suggested taking your mind off the task, particularly when trying to carry out well-learned ones - such as the putting - may help.

"Many of the notions described in theories of 'flow' or 'inner tennis' parallel our findings."