The aim of this study was to identify the immediate effect of self-modelling with different focus of attention strategies (i.e., internal vs. external) on the teaching/learning of gymnastics motor-skills. Fifty-nine non-gymnast students participated in this study and were divided into three groups (i.e., an external focus group (EF), an internal focus group (IF), and a control group (CG)). Each participant’s performance of the back dismount in the parallel bars was assessed before the experiment (i.e., base-score), and each participant was asked to provide a self-evaluation of their performance and their efficiency percentage. Afterwards, participants received a specific learning session (i.e., self-modelling with external focus, self-modelling with internal focus, or traditional learning with verbal instruction) and performed the back dismount in the parallel bars again immediately after (i.e., final score). Four international judges evaluated performance of our participants. The results showed that the EF and IF outperformed the CG in the final score. Importantly, a significant difference between the base and the final score was observed in the EF and IF, but not in the CG. In addition, the EF showed the highest percentage of improvement (Δ-score) and self-estimation scores compared to the two other groups. In conclusion, this study supports the adoption of external focus of attention for teaching/learning gymnastics motor-skills.

The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of different teaching / learning strategies (i.e., verbal feedback, video feedback with modeling, and video feedback with simulation) on performing basic vaulting skills on the vault table. Three male groups of undergraduate students in physical education (i.e., 135 students, divided into 3 groups of 45 subjects) took part in this study. The groups (i.e., traditional, modeling and simulation groups) were divided on equal terms; students are not gymnasts, have the same level and taught by the same teacher. All participants were pretested to determine initial skill level (i.e., direct piked vault). This study covers 24 stoop direct vault sessions, 21 learning and three evaluations spread over 12 weeks (i.e., 2 sessions per week). A video motion analysis (i.e., using Kinovea software) was used to evaluate direct piked vault skills/performance. The results indicate a better improvement of performance in the modeling group compared to the simulation and traditional groups (vault score, 11.80±1.22 pts, 10.85±1.50 pts and 9.01±1.30 pts, respectively with p<0.01). In addition, the analysis of delta-percentage revealed a considerable enhancements of technical performance in the modeling group (46.93%) compared to simulation (27.62%) and traditional (21.64%) groups. In conclusion, video feedback with model’s superposition had led to better learning improvements in vault jump compared with simulation and verbal feedback methods. The video return with the overlay of the model enabled a lot of basic skills learning improvement at the vault table.