Why the Athlete’s Brain Starts Looking for the Next Error After Just One Mistake

Every coach has seen one mistake unexpectedly turn into a series. An athlete fires a wide shot, concedes an easy touch, disrupts the release, sends the ball in the wrong direction, or misses a stroke they would normally execute without difficulty. The next attempt looks worse, another error follows, and from the outside it seems as though the technique is falling apart during the competition. But the first error and the ones that follow may have different causes. The first may result from a small technical disruption, a brief lapse in attention, a poor decision, external conditions, or a random deviation. After that error, however, the brain begins solving a different problem. Before the mistake, the task was to perform a familiar action. Afterwards, the task becomes understanding what happened and preventing it from happening again. To achieve this, the brain increases control, attention becomes more sensitive to any sign of a possible problem, and neutral sensations begin to feel like warnings. The shooter notices every movement of the sights and every sign of tension in the trigger finger. The archer starts monitoring the release and shoulder position in advance. The fencer expects the opponent to repeat the attack that has just succeeded. The golfer builds the next swing around the fear of sending the ball right again. The darts player moves attention away from the target and towards the fingers and the moment of release. The athlete has not made the next mistake yet, but has already started searching for its signs.

At the level of motor control, this has a clear explanation. A well-developed skill is not performed through constant conscious instructions to every muscle and every component of the movement. After thousands of repetitions, the movement becomes an integrated motor programme that requires less working-memory involvement. This allows the athlete to see the target, assess the situation, maintain rhythm, and make decisions at the same time. After an unexpected error, trust in that programme decreases. The athlete tries to gain more control and begins holding for longer, searching for a steadier sight picture, checking the finger, shoulder, release, head position, distance, or trajectory. It may seem that the athlete has become more attentive, but attention is no longer supporting the action. It is checking the action for possible errors. As a result, the movement breaks into separate parts, rhythm changes, muscles engage too early, decisions are delayed, and working memory becomes overloaded with details.

This is why the second mistake may look like the first even though it is produced by a different mechanism. The first shot went wide because of a brief technical deviation. The second went wide because of excessive holding and conscious control of the trigger finger. The first touch was conceded because of an error in distance. The second was conceded because the athlete started anticipating the repeated attack too early. The first golf shot went right. The second changed because the athlete tried to consciously rebuild the swing while performing it. The coach sees a technical change and naturally wants to correct it. But unless the original cause is separated from the athlete’s subsequent reaction, the coach may start correcting the consequences of excessive control.

This is easiest to miss in an elite athlete. The higher the athlete’s level, the more precise their internal representation of the movement and the faster they detect even a small difference. Experience helps identify errors more quickly, but under pressure, the same experience can turn into constant comparison between the current attempt and an ideal model. The athlete starts monitoring too much information at once. In shooting, they no longer simply see the sights but evaluate every movement as a possible flyer. In archery, they no longer simply execute the release but check whether the wrist, elbow, and shoulder are working correctly. In fencing, they stop reading the opponent’s current actions and start searching for evidence that the previous attack will be repeated. In golf, they no longer perform one complete swing but try to execute several technical tasks at the same time. From the outside, this may look like a loss of concentration. In reality, the athlete is concentrating too intensely and on the wrong information.

After the first error, the coach therefore needs to look not only at the result and the visible form of the movement, but also at how the action is now being organised. Is the athlete taking longer to prepare? Have more checks appeared? Are they waiting for the perfect moment? Has their usual rhythm changed? Have they become cautious in a situation where they previously acted freely? Have they stopped trusting their first decision? These signs show that the error has already changed the athlete’s attention and that the next attempt is being performed from a different state.

This does not mean that every series of errors should be explained psychologically or that technique should be ignored. Sometimes the cause is technical, physical, or tactical and requires correction. But the coach needs to recognise that after the first error, another factor is almost always added to the system: the brain’s attempt to prevent the error from happening again. If this is overlooked, the athlete receives new technical information while already overloaded by their own conscious control, and the number of elements they are monitoring increases further. The coach corrects the finger, shoulder, rhythm, distance, or swing while the athlete is simultaneously trying to follow the instruction, avoid the previous mistake, and confirm that the technique still works.

This is what I work on individually with coaches and coach-athlete pairs. We examine how the athlete responds to the first error, what they start searching for, what they begin controlling, how the movement changes, and at what point a technical correction helps or adds another layer of control. A series does not begin when the athlete repeats the mistake. It begins when the first mistake causes the athlete to stop solving the original task.