The Muscle Memory Myth of Golf Swing Training
Or; why your golf swing feel doesn't always repeat...
PGA Tour professionals hit hundreds of golf balls every day in an effort to groove their golf swing so it repeats without having to apply conscious thought. Doing so allows them to concentrate on strategy and make minor shot adjustments.
The idea behind hitting so many balls during a practice session is to passively remember golf swing and store it into "Muscle Memory."
Yet every now and then, they hit a shot that doesn't turn out as planned, and with all the practice, the only thought in their mind must be, "What happened?"... Followed by, "God, I hope it doesn't happen again!"
Don't throw your golf swing under the bus... You've hit the shot thousands of times before, so you know you can hit it and you probably had the right idea for the shot... So what really happened?. Golf psychologists will tell you to quit beating yourself up, as that presents a distraction which causes even more trouble, but SOMETHING caused the bad shots...
If the swing isn't at fault and your mind is OK, how did it happen? It's a thought that is hard to shake, and may cause more distraction to your game. Let's face it; telling yourself not to think about a thought only shines a spotlight on that thought, just as "not the lake" brings up a picture of a lake in your mind. If you don't find a way to deal with the thought, it will haunt you in spite of your best efforts to ignore it.
You've probably come to expect a few bad shots per round, but what if you could eliminate them altogether?
There is one area nobody has looked into that causes those few costly strokes...
And it can be fixed.
For the answer to why you still hit a few bad shots after all of that practice, we must look at the process the brain uses to log all of the information gained from each practice session and how that affects a golfer's future performance.
Since the goal is to place movement into memory, we first have to examine how memory is stored in the brain...
If you are walking around in a completely dark room with objects that you are familiar with and run into one of those objects, how do you identify it? You touch it and identify by feel what the object is; right?
So what happens in the mind while you are feeling the object? The mind is scanning memory to find all of the objects that could feel like the one you are feeling and tries to zoom in for positive identification. In the process, a picture of that room is brought up and possible objects that don't fit are thrown out. Once the mind settles on the most likely object,
it puts a picture of the object up in your mind so you can compare details and finalize the identification. This all happens in a split second.
Your subconscious mind is scanning pictures based on how your conscious mind is interpreting the feel feedback from your hands. When the conscious mind and the subconscious agree, you hopefully have made a positive identification... As long as a picture of the object is somewhere in the memory archives.
If you notice during the "moving in the dark" exercise, the memory was interpreting your feel and looking for pictures. The two components needed to remember movement are bio-feedback (feel) and visualization (pictures).
What is visualization without feel? It's just a picture. Unless the brain has some kind of associated bio-feedback image to make the body recreate the picture, visualization is just dreaming. Likewise if you feel something in your body but you can't lock it into a clear picture, the brain won't keep it in memory for later.
I'd like you to take minute and try to describe how the perfect contact with the ball feels. It usually starts with, "It feels like..." and then you try to describe a picture that can be seen. "Click", "Chunk", and "Thud" are all sounds that can happen at impact... What's the difference? I'll bet you're seeing in your mind the circumstances which would create each sound, aren't you?
Memory is stored in pictures. Feel has to be interpreted into a picture in order to be stored into memory. This is why it is difficult to remember a complicated movement such as a golf swing. There are too many places to feel to picture all of the movements. It's also why so many pros never try to get through a round with more than one or two "swing thoughts." That's all the conscious mind can process at one time.
If you've ever heard the saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words", it is demonstrating that a picture can hold a thousand times the information that any conscious thought can hold. It's why your subconscious relies on pictures to run the body. Combine pictures with consistent feel feedback, and you have control.
So is the practice of hitting a thousand balls a waste? No, because the muscles are still getting trained, and yes, if you're not actively stimulating the memory to capture your movement. To improve consistency you need to understand how the mind controls the body and use the proper process to place your swing into memory.
Bio-Visual Focus is designed to plant your swing firmly into memory faster than any other method being trained to golfers today.
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