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chipandcharge

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  1. Thank you for that feedback about time and practice. I can envision (I almost wrote "see") how that could take place. It's worse than having only one shoe on. Having a club foot and needing a shoe with a thicker sole might be a problem. However, if physics is correct, having unequal (but nearly equal) lengths of both legs/feet are automatically compensated for by gravity trying to make the spine line up vertically with the line from your position on the earth's surface to the center of the earth.
  2. If this happens to you on greens that look as flat as a ping pong table, the vision effect I wrote about might be of help. Working first on greens that look like a ping pong table but may or may not be tilted is a good first step. Here's what I do--I get down low and move back far enough that the cup looks like a cigar instead of an oval. Then I look at the long axis of this cigar and observe the direction of the tilt, and I estimate the amount of the tilt (small, medium, large). Then I go to the other side of the cup and do the same. If the tilts of the "cigar" are equal and opposite, I conclude that the green is horizontal at the cup. If the "cigars" tilt in the same direction both times, I know that the green tilts in that direction, to an amount between the tilts seen from both directions. If the cigar tilts one way from one side and a lesser amount in the other from the other side of the cup, I conclude that there is a mild tilt in the direction of the larger tilt. Sounds complicated at first, but this gives me a big confidence boost. This works best on short putts on flat but tilted greens and less so on long putts where the slopes change along the path. Good luck. I agree with your suggestion. I have been trying to find a local friend to go to a class but no luck so far. In the mean time, I bought a calibrated carpenter's level to take to putting greens to experiment with my vision and with my feel (as described in videos I have seen on Aimpoint). I have developed a procedure (I'm and engineer) where it appears that I am more visually sensitive to green tilts than I am kinesthetically sensitive with my feel. But I still intend to attend an Aimpoint class.
  3. I discovered something curious about my vision--when I stand naturally and look at a line that is perfectly horizontal, I see it as descending to the left around three degrees to the left. This means that if I look at a green that is perfectly flat and perfectly horizontal, I see a three degree slope to the left. For years, I couldn't understand why putts that looked straight in, broke to the right, and putts that looked like they would break to the left, went straight. When I got some advice to also look from behind the cup and saw the opposite break compared to looking from behind the ball, I attributed it to an optical illusion. Then one day, I discovered in my living room that horizontal lines such as the intersection between a wall and the ceiling and the top of a tv set looked like they were descending to the left. I used a carpenter's level to make sure that the lines were horizontal. I had my vision checked and was told that my dominant eye must have rotated in my eye socket and that it could be corrected by surgery on the muscles. I didn't want to do that, so using my engineering background, I came up with two methods of adjusting for this problem. The first is looking at the slope near the cup from behind the ball and behind the cup and estimating an average. For example, if the slopes are three degrees to the left from behind the ball and behind the cup, they cancel out, and the surface is horizontal. If the slopes point in the same direction from behind the ball and behind the cup, the "true" slope is the average of the two. There are other combinations. There is a problem that still remains--after estimating the actual slope, I have to putt an imaginary slope, or I have to develop a "cause and effect" relationship between the false slope and how the ball breaks for that false slope. I found a second correction last night that I will write about later.
  4. dennyjones--thank you for hanging in there with me and for encouraging words. I was getting discouraged, especially since my handicap went from 20 to 29 in a less than four months. I went out to play a round today, and the revised swing mechanics held up ok, but I got careless on the back nine and didn't match my front nine score. The back nine is said to be tougher, but I know my game slipped. Some day, I may have to write a post about how I discovered than my dominant eye somehow rotated in my eye socket a few degrees, making horizontal surfaces look like a sloped surface, meaning that putts that look straight in break, and putts that look like they should break go straight. I wonder if other golfers might not have a similar vision problem. Thanks again.
  5. If anyone has been reading my posts on trying to improve bad ball contact, which I attributed to eye damage that reduced my eye-hand coordination and depth perception to almost a bare minimum, I thought I would share recent improvements. I was given advice by and online pro that I should add more structure to my golf swing, but he didn't explain. I knew from reading up on blind golfers that they have to understand their position in 3D space, and they have to have a repeatable swing. I just didn't know what I needed to do to accomplish this since my mind is not very disciplined. But, here's what I stumbled on--I worked on matching up my left hand grip to my hip rotation and shift to the left so that at impact, the club face is square to the intended flight path of the ball. I did this by taking slow motion swings, stopping the club at the ball to see where the club face is facing, looking for a combination of left hand grip, hip rotation, and left ship that resulted in the club face being square to the target line and all feeling natural (from among many combinations that felt natural). The surprising thing is that I cut down on my number of fat and thin shots, I think due to getting regularity in my left shift. A nice fall-out of all this is that my confidence has gone up and I expect to make good contact. I'll report again after I see if this is long-lasting.
  6. Dennyjones--thank you for the comment and the encouragement I got from it. I college as a grad student, I played tennis against another grad student who lost an eye playing 8th grade football and was still able to play small college varsity tennis. Here's an interesting concept with no proof--a sports scientist watched me play my three favorite sports, golf, tennis and table tennis, and he said it looked like I had very good eye-hand coordination before my left eye went bad (good news), but the bad news was that I depended on it too much and didn't learn mechanics properly. He said that I need to improve my mechanics and fix my problem with my head doing things that it shouldn't. Ironic if true, that having very good eye-hand coordination can hurt you you lose it.
  7. I continued to struggle with my loss of depth perception (caused by double vision) from August 2015 until early March 2017. I went to several teaching pros, and none had any experience in teaching someone with my problem. I continued to watch online videos, trying to pick up something here and something there. Then the strangest thing happened in early March. Out of frustration, I decided to swing as fast as I could, not the usual 80-85% of max that I kept hearing about. My thinking was that if I was going to continue hitting fat and thin shots, I may as well get as much distance out of it as I could. All of a sudden, the fat and thin shots all but disappeared, from a high of 15 to 25 in a round of 18 down to around 4 to 6 a round. The best I can figure is that swing at maximum effort did two things. First, I think he made me shift my hips forward more aggressively, and second, it made me stay in my stance longer, and maybe even lower my center of gravity in an effort to put more effort into the swing. My enthusiasm for golf has returned after years of frustration.
  8. I have two vision problems that I discovered around Oct. 2013. I posted about it previously, but it might help others. One is almost total loss of depth perception from a damaged retina in my left eye, where I can't really tell how far I am from the ball at address other than it is on the ground. The other is that my good eye has rotated in its socket around three degrees, making it difficult for me to read side ways tilts in the green. I've been working for three years on overcoming these two problems, but I can't find a local pro who is willing or able to address these two problems, There may be other golfers who have one or both problems but don't realize it. I stumbled upon the existence of these problems quite accidentally. Until then, I thought my brain changed as I was fairly successful prior to 2011.
  9. What annoys me the most is playing with people who are always hunting for balls in the brush and are not ready to hit when it is their turn. One day, I was waiting for a playing companion to hit his ball. He had addressed his ball and then turned his head to the woods. I knew exactly what he was going through his mind. He wanted to go and search for golf balls, and he did.
  10. boogielicious--thank you for reading my post. It was so long,even after I edited. I have glasses with prisms, but they correct the double vision by only 80% or so for me. A problem with the prism gasses is that they shift objects in space, as I discovered about six months after getting them. If I look at a tennis ball on a table from a distance of six feet, the ball is located approximately four inches lower than it really is in space. If I were to try to hit it by throwing a gof ball at it and threw it perfectly, the golf ball would pass four inches below the actual ball. That's because my throwing arm would be outside the field of vision of the glasses. If I were to try to touch the ball with a six foot pole, I would touch it perfectly because the pole is in the same field of vision as the tennis ball. So, when I start swinging down, my hands and club are outside the field of vision of the glasses. I think that until my hands enter the field of vision of the glasses, I am swinging to the wrong location and must make a mid-swing correction. I also think that the pro's instruction to learn to swing like a sightless person still applies. Through trial and error, I need to learn to use body sensations (what some call "feel" to develop the right memory map that brings the club head to the ball, like a sightless pianist who is able to find the right keys. This is already too long; If I can figure out how to send a private message, I'll write more. P.S. I do indeed use a 3/4 swing. Thanks.
  11. Prior to 2011, I had very good depth perception and eye-hand coordination. I had a history of doing quite well in racquet sports. I started playing golf in 2007, and my index was progressing downward at a reasonable rate. Then I developed double vision due to scar tissue developing behind the retina in my left eye. In 2011, my index went up six points in less than a month. My number of bad contacts in a round of 18 went from 2 to 3 to 15 to 20. One day while waiting on the tee box for my turn to hit, I tried to nudge the ball on the grass with the handle of the club, and I missed it by one inch. On an optometrist's test with the concentric cylinders that protrude from the paper, I scored zero out of max, whereas I used to almost max out the test. I received some advice from a teaching pro that I should try to learn to play golf like a blind person so that I wouldn't have to depend on depth perception. It was a very difficult process that took three years to see some signs that I might be able to make it work. After trying instruction after instruction on how to improve contact, I finally tried one that worked, but it was counter to my natural inclinations. I had to convert to a swing where the right arm is almost totally de-energized to prevent it from moving the club in an unwanted direction, whereas in prior years, I was very right-arm dominant from playing racquet sports for so many years (from 1950 through 2007). This was the most recent part of my recovery process. Before that, I had to put in a lot of work on developing a reliable set up that was highly repeatable, and I had to work hard on "keeping my head in the box." My theory is that I got away with a bit of sloppiness due to very good eye-had coordination, which I lost. So far, my index has dropped three points, but if I don't warm up on the driving range before playing, it takes me several holes before I swing the swing that I want, mainly because it is very different from the swing I used to use prior to 2011. I have learned a lot about the golf swing in this recovery process, things that I should have been working on but didn't.
  12. Yes, how to characterize a bad contact will surely vary from person to person, but for me, the 1.4 additional strokes fit my golf scores quite accurately. If it did not, I would have calculated my own figure so that I could look at the number of bad contacts I counted and hypothesized how much lower my score would have been if I could have cut my bad contacts in half, which was one recommendation on how to make use of this figure of merit. Bottom line--a person can remove the general nature of the 1.4 strokes per bad contact by using personal scores and what he/she considers a bad contact and then calculating his own figure to help estimate potential improvements from improving contact
  13. This kind of yips described by the above post and an earlier one on focal dystonia has been reported on in a book that discusses fMRI research written by Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee, "The Body Has a Mind of Its Own." They write about a particular form of yips that are experienced by experts, such as golfers, violinists, and pianists, where patterns have to be repeated with repeated precision. They write that an expert develops what they call "memory maps" that direct the firing of the muscles in a particular order. An expert has a collection of very similar memory maps that all essentially accomplish the motion to within an acceptable variation. The problem occurs when a person's brain simultaneously activates a collection of similar memory maps, and the person doesn't know which one to use to trigger the swing or stroke. It is an equivalent of a stutterer who hears his/her voice echoing on the first syllable and doesn't know when to say the next syllable or word. I know golfers whose yips look like the putter is trying to move in jerky fits and starts, which would be an example of the brain unloading multiple memory maps what confuse the person. The researchers write that people overcome the yips by changing how they putt, developing a new memory map. They say, however, that as soon as he/she becomes highly skilled with his/her new putting style through the development of many similar memory maps, then he/she has the possibility that the old problem of the mind releasing a whole set of memory maps might re-appear. This doesn't explain any yips that might be caused by lack of confidence, fright, or other psychological problems. Unless Tiger describes what's going on in his mind, we can't say which of the several psychological causes might be responsible.
  14. Thanks for the confirmation from soccer. In one of her articles, Dr. Vickers wrote that her quiet eyes intervention worked for free throw shooting on the University of Calgary's women's basketball team. The article said that the basketball players were instructed to focus on a spot of the rim before making the free throw shot. The particular spot could differ from individual to individual. It didn't have to be an aiming spot. It just needed to keep the eyes from roaming over too big an area. At least, that's my interpretation. I imagine the theory applies to a marksman. I always heard about quiet fingers, but it seems that quiet eyes would also be essential.
  15. Since I brought up the research of Dr Vickers, I suppose it is my responsibility to look for actual data. I believe she published her research in reviewed professional journals, so she would have to have solid data. As for whole ball versus dimple, either could work if it quieted the eyes, which her research found was one of the two factors mentioned. I can see why focusing on a single dimple works for me since I have double vision and actually see two golf balls. I'm guessing now that my eyes must be jumping back and forth between the two balls, where the second ball is displaced about 1/2 inch from the actual ball. It seems that simply the process of focusing or staring at one dimple helps me quiet down my eyes since I have to put much more attention to focusing on one dimple out of the many dimples on the ball. By the way, focusing on a dimple works well with my intention to swing down on the upper rear quadrant of the ball.
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