How To Avoid Paralysis By Analysis As A Golfer

There's a huge mistake that many club level golf players make when they are starting to learn to play golf or when they try to improve their golf technique.

Here's what happens: you take a few golf lessons (or read an instructional article online or watch a DVD) and you learn some new facts about golf technique.

When you learn new ideas about technique, you must, of course, consciously move your body at first.

The learning process goes through 4 stages and once you learn something new, you go through stages 2 and 3.

You need to repeat the movement many times before it becomes automatic and subconscious. However, this process happens with only a few players.

Most club players - especially those who don't play much but who take many golf lessons and mostly look to improve their technique - get stuck at stage 3 of the learning process.

(Stage 3 of the learning process is when you have to remind yourself consciously of the movement that you need to make and when you do, the movement is generally correct.)

The reason why club players get stuck at stage 3 is because they keep thinking about technique! They cannot stop thinking about it.

These people can be very controlling types of persons and cannot let go of controlling their strokes. They want to be in control all the time and simply letting go and just playing golf is too scary for them.

Other players, in contrast, simply programme their minds by thinking about the technique every time they make the shot and that becomes a part of their stroke.

The mental command to move the arm or leg or hip in a certain way ALWAYS gets triggered when they are about to make the shot.

Even if they attempt to stop thinking about it, they cannot do it. It's the curse of the mind. If I tell you not to think about a white elephant, what are you thinking about right now? ;)

Probably about the white elephant. The same thing happens with some club players. They simply cannot stop thinking about their technique. 

Why Thinking About Technique Hurts Your Game

The reason why thinking about technique hurts your game is because you split your focus into 2 parts: one part of your brain has to calculate the target and focus on the target.

The other part of the brain is now occupied by your conscious thinking about technique, which means that you've just taken lots of processing power of your brain away from the part that calculates feel and timing.

This will almost always result in poorer timing, poorer coordination and poorer shots. You now play worse.

We coaches know exactly how this process works. That's why, when we work on technique with a player, we often do it without a ball and infront of a mirror.

We know that when we ask the player to focus on technique, they will inevitably hit the ball more poorly than before.

We also remind them of this fact and prepare them to expect more missed shots in this period of learning, when we are simply trying to make a new movement automatic.

Learning of the new movement might take a few hundred repetitions or even a few weeks or even few months before it becomes automatic.

We test our players by having them practice various drills after the technique training, which takes their mind off the technique and forces them to focus on targets.

While the player is occupied by playing, we carefully observe how the technique has changed from the many repetitions we did with the player.

We need to see how the player hits the ball when they are not thinking about technique.

This is what most club players fail to do. They are stuck in the pattern of thinking about technique and they never ALLOW it to become subconscious. Therefore, it never does.

If you keep focusing on something over and over again, you don't allow it to sink into your subconscious.

Your subconscious MUST TAKE OVER at some point and the sooner it does, the better it is for you - since you'll be able to play golf freely again, without splitting your focus into two parts.

How To Learn Technique In The Most Efficient Way

When you're learning a new technique, you obviously need to consciously think about it for a while.

Nevertheless, your goal must be to allow your subconscious to take over as soon as possible. Therefore you need to focus on technique consciously for a while and then STOP.

Start playing golf by focusing on the target - While you're doing this, you need to get feedback from a coach on how that new technique looks and whether it's there already or whether you'll need to think about it again later.

If there's no coach, you need to be able to observe yourself - but only here and there - and see and feel whether that new movement is already there or not.

If you observe yourself ALL THE TIME, you'll again be too conscious and you won't allow the subconscious to take over.

The periods of observing and correcting need to become shorter and shorter and you need to focus more and more just on playing.

This way, you'll allow a smooth and quick transition of that new technique (new movement) into your subconscious.

You must have the end goal clearly in mind - and that is to have no more thinking about technique!

You're trying to get from a place of thinking about technique to a place where you're not thinking about technique and you're simply playing golf.

How are you going to stop thinking about technique if you keep focusing on it???

You need to let go and think less and less! Let your body and subconscious take over as soon as possible.

When you watch a professional golf player (or even a very good club player) play golf, they are NOT thinking about technique at any point during the round.

They are simply thinking WHERE AND HOW they want to play the shot. (And by "thinking" I mean actually visualizing the ball flight.)
            
Once you learn how to switch off thoughts on technique and focus simply on playing, you'll experience a much higher level of play and at the same time allow your technique to become automatic.

And that's the only way you'll enter the "zone" and eventually experience what it means to play golf at your peak performance.