Date: March 21st 2011
Format: Stableford
Venue: [Home course]
Score: 36pts (joint 2nd)
Handicap mark: 3.9
Themes in reply: Excuses; playing defensively; swing thoughts; lessons.
Hi Colin,
Just a update on my round today.
Today’s competition was a Stableford – for each hole its 1 point for a bogey, 2 for a par and 3 for a birdie. Its a bit easier than Medal because if you take 10 shots on one hole you only lose 2 points.
This is the nett score on each hole so because my handicap is 4 on the 4 hardest holes my score is reduced by 1 shot. If you don’t understand I will explain it to you next time.
If you play to your handicap then you will get 36 points ( i.e 18 holes x 2 points)
I played pretty well and scored 36 Stableford points which made me joint 2nd in the competition. The winner had 37 and I should have beaten this really.
It was a lovely day with a slight southeasterly wind. The greens hadn’t been cut so they were a little on the slow side. We went up the practice ground first and hit a few shots and did a bit of chipping. Then onto the putting green for 10 minutes. I was striking the ball really well.
On the 1st hole at Porthcawl the wind was helping so I took a driver to clear the fairway bunkers. However, I hit it a bit right into the gorse and lost it. I didn’t visualise that!
I get a shot on the par 4 2nd so I had a 5 net 4 for 2 points. Then it got a lot better. I went birdie,par,birdie,birdie (with a shot giving me a nett eagle which is 4 points on one hole!) Then I parred form the 7th to the 13th including the 12th where I picked up another point because I had a shot there.
Therefore I had 29 points after 13 holes but then the wheels came off a bit.
I’m going through a poor litte phase on the 14th hole that short par 3. I hit a poor shot into the 2nd right hand bunker and had an impossible lie. I managed to get it out sidewards, chipped up but missed the put for a bogey. I parred the next with a shot but then really cocked up the 16th. I was by the side of the green for 2, hit a really poor chip and 3 putted from 10′ for no score. I don’t know why that happened. I finished off with pars on the last 2 holes.
What do I think? – Well, I recovered really well after losing a ball on the first and played the next 12 holes in 2 under par gross. After that I think I got a bit negative and tried to protect my score after that instead of going for the putts they were a bit of a lag.
However, most of the time I hit really good shots and again the ball seemed to be going further that normal. I hit 13 greens in regulation which is good.
We have a match tomorrow so I’ll let you know how that goes.
Thanks for you patience! With the hour going forward if we can’t get you down on a Sunday in perhaps we can do an evening because the sooner you see the course the better.
Regards,
John
Dear John,
Fantastic feedback.
First things first. Well played, especially after a short break. Your ability to recover from bad shots and holes is very impressive. Also, 12 holes on the trot in 2 under par is very good in terms of consistency – that’s about 50 shots without a bad one.
It is disappointing you didn’t win the Medal and the Stableford because you were very close, but to be thereabouts in both is highly pleasing and encouraging.
Now for the criticism.
1st – This is a much better description of a disaster than in your first e-mail. If you remember, I pointed out that in your first e-mail there were hints in your description of the disaster at the 14th of “blaming”.
“Blaming” is a hopeless habit for a sports person to get into because you need to take responsibility, work out what happened and take actions to try to limit the chances of it happening again. In this e-mail you simply say that you hit it a bit right after taking a driver off the tee to take advantage of the helpful wind direction and lost the ball in the gorse. You don’t even use the word “unlucky”. That’s much better, and I would say helped towards your swift recovery on the next hole.
However, I do have something to say about the drive. This next paragraph is all based on the fact that you hit the ball a bit right.
This is your first shot of the day even though you’ve had a few minutes on the practice ground. It sounds as if you are only taking the driver because the wind gives you a chance of clearing the main hazard, that normally you would be facing a more comfortable shot to start the day. Therefore, it is likely that as you face this first shot you are conscious that it needs to be a long one. This thought that it needs to be a good hit in order to clear the fairway bunkers will be very difficult to dislodge when it comes to the part of the routine that requires you to “feel what your visualised shot would feel like”, only because it is probably a little outside your comfort zone.
As a result, your conscious mind decides to “make sure” that it is long enough. This will almost inevitably take the form of a “pull” or tug towards the ball at the top of the backswing. We know that waiting for gravity to do its bit at the top of the backswing when nothing much is happening is so, so difficult; the temptation to start the downswing before gravity is ready is very difficult to resist, especially when you are under pressure.
“Pulling” at the top of the backswing rotates your arms around your spine, but because at this point in the swing you cannot rotate your hands and club around your wrist (and even if you could, imagine trying to get the same amount of rotation into both pendulums!) your pendulums become slightly mis-aligned. At the point of impact this mis-alignment will always have the effect of the club face striking the ball slightly open, and so the ball goes right. This is the precise reason why beginners are invariably slicers – they always pull at the top of the backswing.
The lesson from this (and lets not forget that in this instance the very first shot of the day cost you the tournament!) is to catch yourself when you make a decision that is outside your comfort zone. Recognise it for what it is, and make sure that you convince your subconscious that the shot you are attempting feels incredibly easy; in fact, it really is hard to imagine anything easier! Your conscious thoughts are immensely powerful and will interfere with your swing unless your guard is up at all times.
[Having now spoken to you on the phone, I think the point to be made here is that every shot should be a challenge of control. So, even if the tee shot off the first at Porthcawl is a lay up in front of the bunkers it still should be vividly visualized so that the subconscious is switched on and the round begins as it means to go on ie as a pursuit of perfection. The decision to lay up or not should be based on the conditions of the day with the attendant risks factored in, just like all the other shots. In some ways, the first shot of the day being a challenging decision is a good thing because it has the capacity to awaken your subconscious to the challenges ahead; or, in more modern parlance, it puts you in the zone.]
My next point is the one I lost last night (I’m still fuming). It is about the fact that you think you started to play carefully. This is a classic instance of allowing your conscious mind to take over.
Being defensive (or careful) is a conscious thought process, and is fine, but has no place in a sporting contest. Sport is a trivial activity and because it is trivial it means that its participants have the freedom to play “full-on”. The only point of wasting your life hitting a little white ball with a lump of finely honed steel is to bring something out of yourself and, very importantly, your opponent(s).
To play carefully is to deny the reason for playing sport in the first place. Also, it allows your conscious mind to interfere and therein lies disaster. The really clever bit about my method is that it distracts the conscious mind by giving it the task of following the routine. Following the routine is exactly what the subconscious wants and so by doing this we have engineered a situation where the conscious is helping the subconscious rather than interfering with it; and that’s why my method works so quickly and so powerfully.
In our telephone conversation, two things you mentioned rang alarm bells, they were: 1. The phrase “… swing thoughts”. 2. Previous lessons about posture etc.
Swing thoughts – the reason this rang alarm bells is because it is a phrase that belongs to conventional teachers and theorists who bandy the phrase around with gay abandon and little intellectual accuracy: very much like the much abused “visualization”. My “swing thoughts” have come about because of this thought process:
- Humans are able to hit and throw with consistent accuracy because they have access to double-pendulumic power via their jointed limbs: if we didn’t have joints we couldn’t hit 200-yd 3-irons STRAIGHT!!
- The application of accurate force (eating, hair-combing etc) is handled in the brain by the subconscious.
- The problem for games players is that the nature of the activity means that they are always at risk of allowing the conscious to take over, especially if they believe that they are able to consciously apply an accurate force. (In fact, the very act of being “taught” gives the conscious all the permission it needs to assume control over the application of force.)
- The answer is to distract the conscious mind by giving it the task of providing the subconscious with the conditions it needs to enable it to have the best chance of executing the desired instruction. (And it is worth remembering just what an extraordinary feat of co-ordination of muscles every accurate application of force represents.)
- The conditions the subconscious requires is what the routine is (“visualisation”, for example, is a conscious thought process that the subconscious then uses once the conscious has forgotten it, which is why it is so important to perform the routine in the correct order), and it is the perfect distraction for the conscious.
- The routine itself is a result of a little knowledge about how the subconscious works and a huge amount of my own experimentation.
I was the perfect laboratory animal for this work because I knew that before discovering the pendulum dilemma at the heart of every attempt to apply accurate force, I was a useless hacker who had spent 10 long years trying to get better. There were very few theories or ideas I hadn’t given time to.
Once I had the answer of “timing” then I could easily test things like “visualisation” to see what role they played and where and when they ought to be utilised. It was this sifting process that enables me to say with such certainty that there is only one “fundamental” in golf technique: you need to stand athletically still. I have proved to myself that all other accepted “fundamentals” such as grip and stance alignment are not truly fundamental they are simply helpful.
It is worth considering the distinction between fundamental and helpful for a moment because it reinforces the important idea that there is a hierarchy in the things that matter in a golf swing. At the top is the pendulumic rhythm – without that there is no chance of “timing”. Below that there is the stillness of the stance and the routine. Below that is the grip, alignment, fitness etc. And below that are the peripheral things like equipment.
Understanding this hierarchy prevents you from believing that simply by purchasing a new sooper-dooper loft wedge you are going to chip better; that the magic is in the club, somehow. The wedge in itself could make a small, subtle difference to an already fully functioning chipper, and for this reason may be worth purchasing. But it will never make a good chipper a great one; only the rigorous application of vivid imagery can do that!
Apart from the pendulumic dilemma, none of what I say is particularly original. But, I think that the way I have put it together from my unique position of being a hacker who discovered “timing” is original; and it works!
My view is that other theorists notice a phenomenon like visualisation but then lack a cogent framework to put it into and so end up saying that it is simply a good thing to do. This is fundamentally wrong because if you do visualisation at the wrong place in the routine it will actively cock-up the subconscious rather than enhance it.
A parallel in tennis is the oft-quoted instruction to “watch the ball”. This is fine if you watch it just as it is about to reach you, but disastrous if you watch it as it leaves your opponents racket. Why? Well, simply because in tennis the overriding requirement of the player is to get to the ball, and to do that you simply need the ball in your peripheral field of vision. If you consciously “watch” the ball you are fractionally delaying the start of your movement into the balls’ path.
Previous lessons about posture. . . If you’ve got this far then you might be able to guess why I had alarm bells when you mentioned this. Firstly, I want to stress that in no way do I wish to denigrate the input of the teacher who taught you about posture. It is just that I see a lot of risk in the teaching technique of breaking the physical aspects of the swing into bits and then concentrating on one bit.
Of course, it is highly tempting to believe that we can see good golf swings, describe them visually and get someone to put the instructions into practice. All of us can sense the difference between a good swing and a poor one, but you only have to watch a tournament on the telly to see that visually there are thousands of ways to successfully skin the particular cat of a successful golf swing.
Because there are so many visually different successful golf swings, the teachers have resorted to breaking the swing down into component parts and then trying to sell the idea that all of these visually different successful swings at least have these component parts in common; that they are fundamental. However, even a cursory glance at the top players proves that even the “fundamental” bits are visually different.
My main objection, though, is that this type of instruction turns the golf swing into a conscious activity and therein lies the danger; and it is a grave danger. I don’t doubt for a minute that you gained something from your lessons but you have to be very careful how you handle the advice so that it doesn’t get in the way of your subconscious processes.
The next time we have a chance to hit a few balls, I will be asking you to try something out for me. It may or may not add something to the quality of your striking (it certainly does for me but you may be doing it already). This exercise will also have the effect of showing you how easy it is to “play” with your swing once you understand its true fundamentals because you will be confident that you will always be able to return to your “natural” swing at any moment.
This method of learning allows for you to notice some tiny detail of the “feel” of a particularly good shot and then test it out on the range without any fear that it might spoil your swing in any way. You will come to rely on the visual evidence of others less and less. Also, it is a fact of Darwinian biology that the more golf shots you hit with your subconscious fully switched on, the more evidence your subconscious gathers in order that it might complete the next similar task in a more energy efficient manner. (Your subconscious is genetically driven to find the most energy efficient way of achieving any task that requires physical effort simply because the organism that is John always thinks that it has just eaten its last meal!) So, as long as you keep swinging pendulumically, and you do it often enough, you are genetically pre-determined to get better. Amazing, isn’t it!
Regards,
Colin
