Does Train & Trust Really Work?

On the good days, it’s easy to trust your golf swing. But what happens on the third day of a tournament where you have a shot at the lead and your swing isn’t working? Kind of tough to trust it them isn’t it?

The fact is that from day to day, your golf swing will always be a little different. If you want to win, but your shots aren’t getting it, what is your backup plan? Is “trust your swing” a good plan when the swing doesn’t give you a reason to trust it?

Is grinding it out your only alternative? The idea is to hit safe shots and get it around the course while somehow NOT losing many strokes to the leader. How does it feel to play so you don’t lose too many strokes? What if yesterday’s round was 5 or 6 under par?

The next question: Why such a difference from day to day? Why didn’t the “training” portion of the formula work?

If you think in terms of how many balls you hit in practice, you could be a victim of “quantity over quality.” Accepting the theory that the more balls you hit, the better your golf swing will be, is the very reason for your inconsistency from day to day. It’s not how many, but how, and more importantly, how you were logging your practice session into memory that will consistently create more quality shots when you are playing on the golf course.

The reason “Muscle Memory” theory doesn’t work is that it’s much like haphazardly laying your keys down somewhere as you go through the house when you get home. An hour later you don’t remember where your keys were… Because you didn’t properly log the information into memory. (See Active vs Passive Memory)

When using Muscle Memory training, golfers somehow think that the muscles are logging the information about their swing into memory… But the muscles can’t do that! They don’t have brains OR memory! If you want to keep the correct movement of your golf swing in memory, YOU have to actively put it into memory, but that opens a whole new an of beans…

So How can a golfer enter is swing into active memory? First you need to understand a little more about the difference between active and passive memory…