practice session

Pre-Round Preparation – Be ready To Play

December 5, 2010 by admin

By Dr. Ron Cruickshank, Golf Mind Coach & GGA Director, Canada

Technique: Get Your Attitude Right Before You Get To the Course

Several years ago I was driving south on Hwy 220 on my way to the Greater Greensboro Open (GGO) at Forest Oaks C.C. It was a new highway then, four-lane with a 65 mph speed limit. I came up quickly behind what I recognized as one of the PGA Tour Courtesy Cars and I slowed down to see the driver.

As I casually passed the car I recognized Mark Calcavecchia at the wheel. He was doing about 55 MPH and leaned way back in the seat, looking like he was half asleep. As I passed I looked to the right and briefly caught his eye. He gave me a friendly nod with wide-open forthcoming eyes and then he sank even lower in his seat. Wow, did he look relaxed.

As I reflected on this I remember thinking he was going to arrive at the course in a great state of mind. He was ambling to the course, not rushing. There is a lesson there for all of us: pay attention to our pre-round preparation and arrive at the course in an optimized mental-physical-emotional state. Don’t defeat yourself before you take the first swing.

Attitude Generalization

An attitude is one’s feeling or emotion toward a fact or state. If we have several negatives experiences on top of another (rushing late from the office, the traffic is slow, we catch a few red lights, a driver pulls out in front of us) we can begin to ‘stack’ these and they become generalized as a state of anxiety, stress, pressure or anger. You find yourself in a bad mood suddenly and don’t know why. A friend asks you how you “are” and you respond ‘I’m having a bad day’. It is often because you’ve stacked up a series of little things and generalized them into a negative emotional state.

In my experience, I’ve found rushing and the lack of a pre-round preparation routine can set the conditions in support of having a bad day on the golf course.

For most of us, golf is not our profession. It is our passionate hobby and we look forward to getting out on the golf course or to the practice tee as often as possible. Yet still, we have to fit the game into our busy work schedules and lives. This reality often leaves us rushing to the course after a meeting or when our weekend list of chores is completed. We drive to the course at the last minute, often speeding and worried about making our tee time, fretting because we already know we won’t have time to hit any balls and get warmed up. In other words, we are in a stressed condition before we even start playing.

How would you feel if your doctor arrived in this condition prior to operating on you or a loved one? Or your lawyer rushes in at the last minute all flustered before sitting down to a sensitive negotiation? In both cases you would tell them to take a few deep breaths and calm down. Well, while a game of golf doesn’t have the potential import of these situations, why not give ourselves the best opportunity to play the best we are capable of. It starts with intention and consciousness.

Pre-Round Preparation Techniques: Arrive Optimized

On your calendar, mark your start time well in advance of before it actually isand then treats that as real. Rushing always produces stress, limit the stress.
Startyour preparation on your drive to the course. Listen to some soothing music. Imagine yourself hitting the ball solidly all day with nice See your putts going in. Breathe and appreciate the day. When you pull into the parking lot, remember this is about having fun playing a game you love. Ahhhhhhhh!.
If you know the course, play it in your mind, see yourself doing well on each hole.
If you don’t know the course, imagine hitting it solidly off the first tee and making every putt you look at. Imagine success.
When you arrive at the course have a pattern of preparationthat works for you. Do the same thing each time. Know how long it takes. It could look like: check your equipment, stretch, hit some putts and see how fast the greens are, hit a few balls and get in a nice tempo, back to the practice green and hit a few putts to store the feeling of the greens speed just before you tee off. Move at your normal pace.
Get to the 1^sttee with a couple of minutes to spare.

Having a good pre-round preparation routine will not give you a great swing. What it will do is ensure you don’t defeat yourself before you start. Remember, improving your mental game means to optimize your mental/emotional and physical condition in support of playing the best golf you are capable of. Give yourself a chance.

Why Have a Purpose When You Practice?

November 24, 2010 by admin

Technique: Be ‘On Purpose’ To Improve Intelligently

At the gym the other day I found myself at a locker next to a middle-aged guy in the dressing room. He was droning to his friends about how he came to the gym regularly but never saw good results: he chalked it up to advertising hype, age, genetics, diet and a busy schedule. Full of excuses, he trooped off to the gym with his buddies.

55 minutes later, as I finished my workout, I took the time to observe him. You see, I love going to the gym, but I am constantly amazed when I see people wandering around aimlessly like sheep looking for fresh grass. He was picking up a dumbbell here and pumping out a few reps and then wandering over and chatting with a friend, then pumping a few reps out on the bench press. No routine, no systemized sets or reps, no apparent purpose or outcome to his workout.

Sound familiar? How many times have we found ourselves at the driving range or on the putting green aimlessly hitting shots with no sense of purpose, defined here as the lack of any plan or specific objective when engaged in an activity? Yet still we feel dissatisfied because we aren’t getting better? This is self-defeating and needs to stop now!

Would you be offended if a friend told you that you ran your life without purpose, that by definition you were “purposeless”? Most likely you would be, because you reject the idea that you are just wandering around. However, the reality is that this concept reflects how most people go about playing the game. Remember that old adage: If you don’t change, you will keep getting the same results. Damn, there’s a concept!

Begin to do something different now. To start, get specific with the outcome. As opposed to going on to the putting green and just randomly hitting a bunch of balls in the direction of the hole, think about what you want to accomplish. For example, today, I want to work on left to right putts from the 20 foot range and make sure I am swinging the putter on the right path to the point of break.

Secondly, use your training aids to ensure you are practicing the right technique and getting the right feedback. It takes a bit more effort, but the energy output pays you back with solid data about your performance. It only takes a minute to set up the putting strings or pull the Eye-Line device out of the trunk and take it to the green.

Third. Keep a journal about your progress and track your progress and results from each training session. The act of writing about your results in your journal forces you to become analytical and translate your feelings into left-brain terms that will help you recall them as needed. The technical term to describe this process of translating feeling to thought and vice versa is called modality synaesthesia.

In golf, as with most sports, we generally think of taking a concept and translating it to feel. However, what should you do once you acquire the feeling and you want to be able to reproduce that feeling with consistency? Our experience is that you want to store that feeling in as many ways as possible. Take pictures, write it down, and put it in your own words. The importance is that you have a process for being able to recall and repeat the movement on demand.

Remember, improvement and growth in your game come incrementally based on high-level distinctions you make. Most of these improvement distinctions will come as a result of practice. So be ‘on purpose’ with every practice session and improve with intelligence.

Practicing Distinctions

October 14, 2010 by admin

Several years ago I ran across a fascinating video that taught me a lot about the techniques magicians use to complete their illusions. On the video was a circle of 8 people in front of an elevator dressed in black and white. They had two basketballs and the instructions given were to count the number of passes and bounces as the 8 people walked in a circle. Pretty simple task huh?

What ensued was nothing short of a reality check. In the course of the 30 seconds the group passed and bounced the basketballs, a person in a full gorilla suit walks into the middle of the circle, beats his chest and then exits the other side.

The magic; not one individual in the 200-person group I was in saw the gorilla. How was that possible? The answer is called intentional misdirection. We were told to count the passes and bounces and in the process of focusing our attention on what was asked we missed the gorilla. Several people actually missed the gorilla the second time during a replay because they were still watching the balls. A few hard cores refused to believe it was the same video.

The point here is that the brain is wired to generalize, delete and distort massive amounts of information all the time. It is set of functions allowing us to operate in the world and they are very useful. The downside is that we miss things right in front of us (like the gorilla) because we are pre-disposed to see what we are looking for or what we’re expecting to see or what we are told to look for.

Is it any surprise that when four people witness a traffic accident they all give different reports of what happened? Not at all, because during the stress of the event they were highly focused on a narrow portion of the event.

The implications are important to intelligent practice. Recently, during my own deep practice session I watched a video replay of my own swing about 10 times looking at plane angles and trying to figure out a glitch. My attention was totally on my lower body movement (knees, hips) and on my arms as they moved in and up. After 10 viewings I still hadn’t seen the problem.

Finally the bolt of lightning hit and I noticed head movement (meaning spine) from a DTL perspective that was quite obvious and clearly put me in the wrong position. My immediate reaction was “how did I miss that the first 10 times?”

The answer was misdirection. I had programmed myself to look at something specific and that was all I was seeing …..over and over.

Remember:

Take a broad view when analyzing swing issues, particularly on film
Look at your whole swing first and then narrow in on specifics for review
Develop a checklist based on the Single Plane Solution graphics from DTL and Front View
When studying the SPS DVD, be sure and take the time to make distinctions beyond what you are instructed to see. You will be amazed at what you can notice.

More Moe,

Dr. Ron

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