Golf_ The Mind Game - Marlin M. Mackenzie [40]
Regulating the amount of swing effort is the least understood mental task in golf. I’ve reviewed golf books and videotapes on the short game and haven’t found any useful instructions about how hard to hit the ball. Nor do the authors tell you how to establish the line of a putt or chip. They tell you to visualize the shots, how to hold the club, how to stand, and how to swing, but they don’t tell you how to visualize a shot or how to determine the necessary amount of effort to apply to your swing. This is what you’re about to learn.
It’s no wonder that we’ve known so little about how to regulate swing effort in golf. It’s an amazingly complex process because so many variables are involved. External variables include: distance between the ball and the pin, wind speed and direction, intervening hazards, the lie of the ball, the nature of the ground on which the golfer stands, and the contour and degree of firmness of the green.
Internal variables include: strength, ability to swing the club in particular ways, emotional state, sensitivity to muscular pressure and tension, visual acuity, and the way you mentally process and integrate all the relevant information. It’s absolutely impossible to do all this consciously, so let’s learn how to turn it over to your unconscious mind with its automatic neuromuscular connections.
The Fundamental Principle
The fundamental idea that determines swing effort is that vision is integrated with muscle action; the V’s and K’s go together. Obviously, hitting golf balls to targets must involve a combination of seeing and feeling. By looking at the target—the landing area, the contour of the green, a spot on a green, or the flagstick—the golfer ends up with a sense of which club to use, how far to open the face of a lofted club, and how hard to hit the ball. To learn how to combine visual and kinesthetic information requires knowing what to pay attention to so that the production of the right swing effort gets the ball to the target.
What Do Expert Golfers Pay Attention To?
How do “fine-touch” players know how much swing effort to use on approaches and chips? How do they read greens and know how hard to strike putts? Rather like tapping into a rich mine, I was able to dig this information out of the minds of a few golfers by using NLP strategy-elicitation procedures referred to in an earlier chapter.
When I asked a number of short-game wizards how they controlled their shots around and on the greens, they all said they knew from experience. Some said they imagined (saw) the trajectory, bounce, and roll of approach shots, and could see the speed of putts rolling on a path right into the hole; others said they felt the shots. Upon further questioning it became clear that they did a lot of other important things unconsciously, which they eventually verified after I rooted around in their brains.
The fundamental principle of combining visual and kinesthetic information was repeatedly verified. All the pros start with visual information to get the right swing feeling. Bill Adams, the pro at Ridgewood, first looks at the target to identify the slope and contour of the green and the distance to the pin. Then he sees in his mind’s eye the trajectory that he wants the ball to follow to the hole, based on his memory of the trajectories of past shots.
Then Bill reverses the process, moving in his mind from feeling to seeing. For instance, when chipping, after he feels the firmness of the green underfoot to get a sense of how fast the ball will roll, he swings his club to gain a sense of its heft. As he swings with different amounts of effort, pictures of a flight and roll of the ball are created on his mental screen. The images equate the amount of swing effort he feels in his arms and wrists. He compares these internal pictures to the desired trajectory, roll, and speed of the ball which he had previously established. When his internal picture appears to match the desired imagined shot, he tests