Mind Games
The next time your game confuses you, take it back to basics
Why your game needs a dose of the bleedin’ obvious.
There is an age-old tale about a weekend golfer approaching his club professional. “I’d like to hit the ball further,” he said. “Hit it effing harder then,” the pro replied.
Whether that conversation ever actually happened is anybody’s guess. But given today’s picture of the elite golfer spending as much time in the gym as the range – and the modern mania for speed training – that surly old pro seems rather pretty prescient.
In one sense, all he was doing was stating the obvious… an obvious that is becoming increasingly elusive in a media and technology age seemingly hell-bent on complicating the game for us. Just type ‘longer drives’ into Youtube and see how the dizzying, conflicting mass of videos compares to the pro’s advice. As American coach Chuck Hogan put it, the modern golfer spends his life “drowning in information, thirsting for knowledge”.
We can relate this state of affairs to the Pareto Principle. Pareto was a 19th-century economist who worked out that 80% of Europe’s wealth was owned by 20% of its population. His research has since been extended into a well-researched and supported hypothesis, asserting that in all spheres of life, 80% of your results come from 20% of your activity. In a wide range of industries, it has proved uncannily accurate: businesses routinely report 80% of profits come from 20% of products; in the music industry, 80% of record sales come from 20% of the artists.
If we relate the principle to golf, we can perhaps begin to see how, rather than a scattergun, try-anything-and-everything approach, we might do better to target a few key elements. What could you really drill down into that would make a significant impact on your game?
Individuals might well come up with different answers to this, but I will suggest four areas which, though obvious, can get buried under the daily data dump.
1. Ballstriking Whether through highly sophisticated launch monitors or raw instinct, we know the value of a centred strike. Hit the ball in the middle of the club and other things fall into place. Yet how many of us have ever dedicated a range session or made a pre-round commitment simply to hit the ball better? Join The Dots is a simple exercise in which you draw a large circular dot on the ball, and another one on the clubface. Your only task is to join those dots. Once that becomes your goal, your body organises around that intention… and so many other elements fall into place.
2. Tension We know tight muscles are poison to fluent, co-ordinated and powerful movement. Yet so many golfers play tight as they try to force the latest unfamiliar swing thought or move into grooved, grudging swings. Become aware of your tension levels, your hand and arm pressure, and commit to playing looser. Again, a simple softening of the muscles can lead to a vast range of technical improvements, especially in areas like sequencing and timing.
3. Balance Again, we know balance is key to efficient and accurate motion. That is obvious. But it doesn’t stop golfers sacrificing it in search of three extra yards. As with tension, monitor it… and commit to swinging within it.
4. Hit more greens You don’t need me to tell you that your scores will drop if you are putting rather than chipping. There is even an algorithm, created by American analyst Dr Lucius Riccio, that proves it. But it doesn’t stop us picking clubs and strategies to send our ball into elusive and dangerous corners of the putting surface. Chart your GIR stats. Then spend a month hitting only for the centre of the green, before charting them again. See how your stats rise… and your scores fall.
If you were to place the easy-come, easy-go tips to one side for a few weeks and work on just these four elements, I would expect you to find yourself playing a game that feels both easier and simpler to rectify. Stripping your game back to the obvious things really can work… and for my last piece of evidence I present a story told to me during a recent Mind Factor podcast with respected holistic coach Adam Young. “A guy came to me with a shank,” he recalls. “We tried everything to fix it. Nothing worked, and he was at his wits’ end. So in the end, just to send him away with something to consider, I suggested he focused on hitting the ball out of the toe. He flushed it. Then he flushed it again. During the week he rang up to tell me he was playing the best golf of his life.”
It was an object lesson in how the best solution to a problem is very often the most obvious one… and how, if we are not careful, we can so easily overlook it.