Approaches to Manage Performance Breakdowns Due to Reinvestment in Sports Tasks: A Systematic Review

Reinvestment, defined as consciously monitoring and controlling movements and/or decision processes, can lead to performance breakdowns in sports. Different types of interventions aimed at helping athletes to maintain or improve performance have been developed. The present work systematically evaluated the research on interventions used to alleviate reinvestment-related performance breakdowns in sport-specific tasks. Seventeen randomized and nonrandomized interventions with a total of 996 participants were included. Six studies implemented interventions during motor learning, two studies targeted the potential reinvestment trigger, and nine studies manipulated the attentional focus during performance. Interventions were deemed successful if any of the following outcomes were achieved: Performance was maintained or increased solely in high reinvesters, reinvestment did not/no longer predicted performance deterioration or correlated less negatively/did not correlate with performance during or after the intervention, in contrast to the comparative intervention or control group, or to performance prior to the intervention. While 13 interventions successfully stabilized or improved performance, only four interventions manipulating the attentional focus (i.e., dual-task focus, internal focus, or verbalization of performance) showed positive reinvestment-specific effects. However, results are preliminary, as the reviewed evidence on attentional focus manipulation is contradicting. Methodological shortcomings limit evidence, as most studies did not consider prerequisites for the reinvestment occurrence, such as performance pressure as a situational trigger, at least partial automatization of the skill, and a certain level of task complexity. Future research needs to design studies that maximize the likelihood of reinvestment occurrence and develop measures of state reinvestment enabling manipulation checks.