Think it over

The other day, a particularly annoying and uninformed man told me that ‘golf is really, really easy … the ball is sitting there in front of you and you’ve got all the time in the world to hit it’.

I asked him how many times he had played golf. He hadn’t. Enough said. The fact that the ball sits there in front of you and you have all the time in the world to hit it is precisely why golf is really, really difficult!

When the ball comes towards you in tennis, you move your body, draw the racquet back and react to the situation. It is instinctive.

Now I am not for a moment claiming that tennis is easy. All I am saying is that you simply do not have time to think about your backswing, your balance or your tempo, you just hit it.

In golf, the ball just stares at you with a glare that can make grown men afraid to take the club away.

If you don’t have a clear idea of what you are going to do (and there are hundreds of different thoughts flying through your head) the anxiety that builds when you are standing over the ball can cause disastrous results.

Let’s discuss ways of organising your thoughts and identify how much thinking is too much thinking.

Firstly, let’s assume that the following information applies to practice on the driving range. If you are having lessons and trying to improve your technique, it is likely that your coach will be asking you to work on a number of things.

The driving range is the place where you can do your technical thinking and hard graft. The golf course is where you play golf. Try not to get the two mixed up.

It is important that we now differentiate between the two types of thoughts that occur prior to executing a golf shot; static thoughts and dynamic thoughts.

Static thoughts refer to what you think about in your set up. This is when you go through a check list ensuring that your grip, posture and alignment are all correct.

Once you have completed that check list, forget about them as they are already done.

Dynamic thoughts are things such as ‘control your backswing’, ‘strike down on the ball’ and ‘keep your body turning through impact’.

These thoughts are the ones that can cause problems if they get out of control.

Regardless of what you are working on, do your best to ensure that you only ever have a maximum of two dynamic thoughts in your mind. For example ‘No hands in the take-away and finish with your belt buckle facing that target’. 

If you have any more than two swing thoughts in your mind at one time, you run the risk of paralysis by analysis, where you freeze and struggle to take the club back.

In practice, it is important that you don’t react to every shot you hit. Just because you might hit a couple of bad shots in a row, doesn’t mean that what you are working on is incorrect.

Trust your coach, persevere with what you are working on and carry out the repetitions.  Also, remember that when you are making changes it is vital that you invest more energy in the successful repetition of the new swing movements (process) as opposed to becoming obsessed with the outcome.

If you focus your attention on repeating the process consistently (i.e. consistent static thoughts and dynamic thoughts), the outcome will start to take care of itself.