chipandcharge

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I just read about some research done by a Dr. Joan Vickers on the subject of "quiet eyes" for golfers and other athletes. I found it very interesting, particularly since I used a variation of her advice before I ever found her web page, and my ball striking improved tremendously. Here are two things that she found in her research. You can find her by searching for her name and for quiet eyes. She wrote a book on her research. First, low handicap golfers, whether putting or other clubs, look at the ball 33% longer than high handicap golfers, but this is only 1/2 second longer (2.0 seconds versus1.5 seconds). The second thing she found that they look with quiet eyes, meaning that where they look is much more localized than high handicap golfers, whose visual pattern spreads over a larger area. So, when high handicap golfers look at the cup before putting, their eyes roam over more area than for the low handicappers, which is why the terminology "quiet eyes" is used. Then, when the look at the ball before starting their backswing, they look at a very localized spot on the ball with quiet eyes. When they look at the ball, they may look at as small an area as a dimple. I read somewhere that the precise dimple is not as important as focusing your attention at a single dimple. I found this last part very interesting (looking at a localized spot on the ball, like a dimple) because it goes against the advice to use soft focus and not look at the ball too sharply. She also says that golf is a sport where the athlete benefits from good eye-hand coordination. I've seen people say that eye-hand coordination should be turned off because it interferes with good ball contact. Maybe this is like research on drinking coffee where the outcomes of the research say opposite things--ok, not ok, ok, not ok, etc.

Lihu, the article said that the thousands of rounds included golfers from scratch on up. I don't know how far up. The article did not give the standard deviation, so I don't know how wide the probability distribution was for this research. The figure 1.4 is a very good fit fit for my play. If it wasn't though, I would collect my own data over many rounds and come up with my own figure, and then use it to estimate how much my score would have been lower on any given day if I had cut my bad contacts in half, or down to my goal of four a round.

Patch, can't give a solid answer to your "how can I use it in my golf swing question because I don't now enough about golf, but I can make some comments relative to what I hear and read on the Internet. I've seen the terminology "soft focus" used many times, which refers to not letting the appearance of the golf ball in your real swing change your swing from your practice swing. Field dependent people would have more difficulty using soft focus. I'm sure they can implement it, but it doesn't come as naturally. Here's another concept from months ago on the Sand Trap. A Dr. Piparo, who is a sports psychologist and has written about golf, wrote that eye-hand coordination processes actually interfere with a golf swing and should be shut off, or maybe just toned down. I understand the concept of the possible interference of one cognitive process with another, but I I don't know how you shut of eye hand coordination. Perhaps this is what soft focus does. I would imagine that a person who is field independent might be one who is able to tone down eye-hand coordination processes, but this is just a conjecture. As for making use of field dependence and hitting the golf ball, I happen to be one of the types who does better when I try to swing down on the upper rear quadrant of the ball, a tip I saw months ago about curing fat and thin shots. I'm not comfortable with the process of swinging my idealized swing and just let the ball get in the way, even though I can shut my eyes and still make contact with the ball. I'm far more comfortable looking at the ball. I think that my ability to focus on the ball helps me use the "swing down on the upper rear quadrant of the ball: tip, even if several golfing friends strongly debate the value of this tip. I also think the field dependence helps me with another problem--my head head moves a little during the downswing. Physics tells us that if the head and eyes are moving and the ball is stationary, this is the same as if the eyes are stationary and the ball is moving. So, in essence, I'm swinging at an object that is moving slightly, but moving just the same. My theory is that field dependence helps me keep track of the location of the ball because I'm looking at the ball. My golfing friends tell me that is not able to change a swing if he/she detects a displacement of the distance between the eyes and the ball, so you have to take what you get, but this is not part of my mind set, having played a lot of racquet sports hitting moving objects. Maybe this is erroneous thought in golf, but I'm stuck with it at this time. I don't have any theories at this time on how field dependence/independence might affect using the concept of the aiming point. I imagine that some use the aiming point in the sense of a target to swing at, and some use the aiming point as a result of where your swing bottoms. In this case, both field dependence and field independent can make use of the aiming point concept. These are all conjectures, except for the physics principle of the relative movement between a moving head and a stationary golf ball and the concept of field dependence/independence. Perhaps the biggest use of the concept might be a match or mis-match between teacher and learner. My piano teacher continuously instructed me to learn to play without looking at the keys, but I was always more comfortable taking peeks at the keys for reassurance. I can play without looking at the keys if my hands don't move left or right, but as soon as I have to play notes by moving my hands, I have to look.

I can't describe it exactly. The best advice I can give is to go to golflagtiops.com and search the web page for tutorials on the hitting, swinging, and the four-barrel swing.

Ernest--I don't recall reading about your specific combination of hitter on the backswing and swinger on the downswing, but there are articles on swinger on the start of the downswing and then converting to hitter through impact. It goes by the name of the four-barrel swing. I don't know how polite it is to mention another website here, but I found it on the golflagtips.com website.

It may sound like something unreal, but I've read enough about it, conducted research on it, and made observations for years to be convinced that these differences do exist, to different degrees i different people, and to different degrees of being able to perform the task that uses a person's opposite field orientation. If you simply think of the times you've heard people say that someone couldn't see the forest for the trees, or someone understood the overview but not the details, and if the patterns repeated often, you probably were seeing this difference. It would not be uncommon for a field independent golfer to not see a specific danger up ahead, hit the ball into it, and say, "I didn't see that hazard." On the other hand, you also hear about people who are so "ball bound" that their swing changes between the practice swing and the actual swing. While there may be several causes for this, one might be that the ball diverted their attention away from the swing. As far as "energy field associated with the object," that may not be the actual phenomenon but simply a way to talk about why an object can grab your attention. I guess that it may be as difficult to accept, just like some people have difficulty accepting that the earth pushes back against you as you push against the earth. I had trouble accepting the latter in my physics classes and simply had to accept the conservation of momentum law or fail the course.

David in FL--I went to goflagtips.com to find exact quotes and found this--"Drive it strongly down and out. Destroy the ground!" I'm sure that the "destroy" part is meant figuratively to express the hitting action.

I thought I would post some information on "position" and "check points" as they are affected by differences in cognitive styles of different individuals. This might some learners understand why the relate better to one style of coaching than another, and it might help instructors understand why they can reach some people faster than others. This will be long and wordy, but I don't want to leave holes in the description. There is a psychological scale, where at one end, a person sees movements in terms of check points or positions along the movement. You can think of this as "connecting the dots," like the drawings that kids used to do in grade 1. At the other end of the scale are those who see movements in their broadest sense, seeing more of the artistry and flair in the movements and not specific check points. The first mentioned person, when learning a new dance, would like to be taught the elements of the hand and feet positions rather than just go out on the floor an imitate the other dancers. The second mentioned person would just go out and imitate the others, and maybe even invent totally different movements, just moving to the music. Then there are people whose cognitive styles populate the full range of the scale between the two extremes. As a volleyball coach who was rather successful, II once almost ruined a volleyball holistic hitter by trying to coach his as a technique hitter like I had successfully coached other hitters. I would say that the majority of hitters are technique hitters. Then I learned of his natural abilities to learn motions holistically and only got confused by having to concentrate on positions. On the other hand, I know of a dad whose daughter was taking softball position lessons. He asked the coach for the various positions so that he could coach his daughter between lessons and was told, "We don't coach that way. Pitching is a holistic motion." Bottom line--the person who learns by connecting the dots musts be able to transition to holistic movements, and the person who learns holistically must eventually get the right dots. The way golf seems to be taught to adults in any class I took is by first getting some dots. The expression used by people who study things like this is "transcent." Those who prefer the dots must transcend to holistic motions, and those who prefer to learn holistic motions must transcend and master the details. On the other hand, kids seem to observe a swing and just copy it if they aren't taught the fundamental positions early on.

I apologize if I'm repeating something already posted. I just discovered this thread and have not had time to read through its entirety. For me, the most important aspect of golf for the past three years has been ball contact. Prior to 2011, I hit very few fat or thin shots in a full round. Then within a few months in 2011, when I lost most of my depth perception, my scores went up six strokes a round. I read an article in Golf Digest that was based on statistical analysis of thousands of rounds, where they found that each bad contact added 1.4 strokes to a round. This statistic fits my golf performance very closely. If I make four bad contacts in a full round on a course with 123 slope when playing at or near my best, I shoot 84-86. On the other had, at or near my worst, I make 14 bad contacts, and I I shoot 98-100. The ten additional bad contacts would statistically add 14 strokes, which is very close. So, my goal is to get back to where I was prior to 2007 in terms of reducing bad contacts. The difficulty is that I can't simply go back to the swing I used back then because my vision was better at that time, ignoring that I aged from 69 to 72 in the mean time.

When I was doing research in cognitive psychology, one of our projects studied the difference between people who tested out as being Field Independent (FI) orField Dependent (FD). After a lot of studying the various theories of striking the golf ball, I'm beginning to believe that this difference influences one of the aspects of striking the ball that interests me. Field independent people are said to be LESS attracted to the visual energy created by an object, such as a golf ball, or larger objects such as a pot hole in the road, the individual trees in a forest, or even the side walk in a park. Field dependent people are said to be MORE drawn to the energy field related to an object., such as being drawn to a pot hole in the street when you are driving in the lane that contains it, or walking on a sidewalk in a park without thinking about it. Field independent people are said to look at the forest or the big picture, while field dependent people are said to look more at the trees. People who can find Waldo in the Where's Waldo pictures are said to be more likely to be field independent because they are not distracted by the energy in all of the interfering lines in the picture. So, now to the golf ball. I see tips on using soft focus, to swing as if the ball isn't there, and to just let the ball get in the way of the club. I can't seem to do this comfortably. I can do it for a swing or two, and I can even hit on the driving range with my eyes closed, but it is psychologically uncomfortable. On the other hand, I am quite comfortable with the tip to swing down on the upper rear quadrant of the ball to stop from hitting thin or fat. I'm also comfortable with the tip about hitting an imaginary small ball inside the golf ball. Even the interpretation of "hitting the ball" seems to be different for FI and FD people. FI people see to say, "you don't hit the ball, you swing through it." FD people say, "That's what I mean." I'm comfortable with what's called "the hitter's swing," where the objective is to "pound the ball into the ground," but I'm not comfortable with the "swinger's swing," where the objective is to focus on a wider, graceful arc, and just let the ball get in the way of the club. I've played sports that require eye-hand coordination (E-H C) for years at high levels, and my E-H C is good but not exceptional. I'm good at racquet sports, but lousy at fielding a long fly in baseball. I've tried using swing tips that relate to field independence theories but can't get the hang of them. I have more success with tips related to field dependent theories, but most other people try to get me to stop. My #1 focus is on good ball contact because my scores go up and down depending on how many fat or thin shots I hit. So, until I find out who a field dependent person can learn field independent processes, I guess I'm stuck with focusing on the ball. Changing from FD to FI is almost like changing from being right handed to left handed or left handed to right handed.