chipandcharge

I guess people choke for different reasons, as I would expect. I usually don't experience jitters in competition, but I was setting for a volleyball club, playing Purdue in the semifinals of the class A USVBA midwest section. At 13-13, playing to 15 in the second set, the enormity of the situation must have gotten to me. I was able to run one of the options but chose the wrong option, and we got blocked. In another situation, it was 5-5 in the third of three sets in the Danville, IL, men's 35 and over singles tournament, and I got the jitters so bad that I could hardly hold the tennis racquet. I lost the set. My execution became sub-standard. I haven't experienced this in golf yet, but I imagine that it might happen on a crucial swing or putt. I remember advice that said to stay in the moment and not consider what might happen, good or bad.

I understand about the continental grip and using the knuckles. I can hit tennis balls either right handed or left handed, and on both sides, I feel smoother on the backhand side. I've been told that this is because a pulling motion is smoother than a pushing motion. The analogy with front wheel drive and rear wheel drive was used in that presentation.

I switched to left hand low because my right hand was too active. I played a lot of tennis and had a very wristy forehand, and that sometimes carried over into putting. I went to a putting clinic where we were asked to putt one handed, with the right hand and with the left hand. It showed me that I had a tendency to flick my right wrist during the putt but my left hand putting was very smooth. So, I switched to left hand low and have not looked back.

Thank you for bringing be back to my reality, or focus as you wrote. Until I read the post about jumping and got intrigued by the subject, I was actually fully involved in the process of learning how to swing the golf club with impaired vision, where I lost some ability to determine distances in 3D space. The ball isn't where my eyes tell me it is. I have been advised by several local teaching pros to try to learn golf like a blind person. Quite a task. Some good is coming out of it, though. I'm learning this that I paid little attention to in the past.

I guess the only way to find out if I have the degree of coordination required to accomplish this jumping successfully is try it. It will be an interesting experiment.

Am I interpreting "jumping" correctly in my interpretation that it is a coordinated movement where the club head is moving on one arc, the left shoulder is moving upward and to the left on another arc, and the hands are moving on a third arc, all coordinated so that the club face is positioned properly to contact the ball square? It seems that the three arcs can be treated as independent variables even though the hands are connected to the shoulders and the club head is connected to the hands. I'm fairly sure that we aren't supposed to be thinking about all things as we swing, especially if my thoughts are wrong, but it seems to indicate the level of difficulty of this "jumping."

It seems that it might be worthwhile to attend and Aimpoint clinic and try to have a personal conversation with the staff to see how their methods work out for someone with my particular vision problem. I find that I can sense the direction of the slope of the green with my feet, but I can't determine the amount of the slope, which makes it difficult to determine how much it will break. Thanks for the suggestions.

I went to a specialist and found out why images seen by my dominant eye are tilted down to the left. Due to weakening of the eye muscles, my right eye has rotated slightly. This is why a perfectly horizontal green looks like it is tilted down to the left. Just the other day, I found out another vision problem that this rotation of the dominant eye causes. When I line up a putt from behind the ball and pick a spot around 12" ahead of the ball and then take my stance with my eye line parallel to the putting line, the line looks like it is going left of the target. That's because I'm looking downward, and any line that is parallel to my eye line will be seen to be shifted counterclockwise. Previously, I was susceptible to re-assessing my line and moving it to the right.

Colin007, is there an easy way to translate how much slope your feet tell you into estimating how much the ball will break? I have been trying to find the apex, but I don't know if I can do that from the information I get from my feet.

Robere, I understand the "me against the course" concept, but for me, I have come to the conclusion that playing in a foursome is not the same as playing by myself on the basis of how much time it takes when you hit once out of every four shots, in general. I base this on the concept of the impact that rehearsal has on human performance. When playing alone, each swing becomes rehearsal for the next swing, but with four people hitting, the passage of time reduces the rehearsal benefit of the previous swing. It's only a theory, based on general research on human performance with and without rehearsal. The example often given in the research is the basketball player who first makes the motion of shooting a free throw before the actual free throw.

Thank you for replying and for the suggestion. I have been using my feet to sense the tilting of the green, but it never occurred to me to develop the finer sense of differentiating between different levels of slopes. You made me realize that the ability of the feet to feel different slopes is an alternative to using the eyes to do the same. I hope I have talented feet.

Has anyone heard of this vision problem? If I'm looking at a horizontal line, like the top of my TV set or the top of a bookcase, my dominant eye sees it as sloping down to the left approximately at a three degree slope. When I look at a green that has no side to side slope, I see it sloping down to the left. If the green slopes down left to right by less than three degrees, I see it sloping down right to left. I can't be lazy and read the green from just behind the ball. I also have to look at the green from behind the cup and compare the side to side slope with what I saw from behind the ball. If it slopes left to right from behind the ball by around three degrees and right to left from being the cup by around three degrees, I conclude that there is no slope. If I conclude that there is a side to side slope, I then have to select my arc on an imaginary slope that isn't what my eyes see. So, I'm guessing more than reading. Makes putting complicated. I don't know if there is a treatment that can fix this problem.

I play by myself quite often, nine if I walk and 18 if I ride. I do this because I play on a rather spur of the moment schedule. However, I have begun to notice that I played better when I played alone, and it took me awhile before I figured it out. I thought at first that it was because I wasn't distracted by the conversations. Later, I realized that I played better alone because I swung more frequently, and I could "remember" my swing better from one to the next. When playing in a group of four, the time delay between swings caused each next swing to be as if I had little or no warm up. At least, that's my current thinking about why I play better when I play alone.

I can give this eyes closed practice a try, which would be what looks like a small extension of trying to emulate the cognitive processes of a sightless golfer. I say "what looks like a small extension" because in trying to understand the cognitive processes of a sightless golfer, I had my cognitive processes analyzed (tested) by a cognitive psychologist, and they turn out to be almost exactly the opposite of those that would be theoretically used by a sightless golfer. Fortunately, I have been assured that a person is able to learn to use his/her opposed cognitive processes--it's just that it won't come naturally. Sounds a little far fetched, but the models are a close match to how I learned other sports, depending more on the eyes than visual imagery.

I may be asking a question that has an obvious answer, but how important is having depth perception, and correct depth perception, at that, to the golf swing? For three years, I have been fighting a problem related to retina damage in my left eye. On the opthalmologis's' depth perception test, I score zero out of nine (can't see even the first one). Furthermore, if I were to try to simply tap the ball with the butt end of the club, I would miss it completely, on the short side of the ball. If I finally tap it after several tries, I can then tap it again through some kind of spatial memory, but if I make a 360 degree spin and try again, I miss it again. I'm currently changing my learning process to mimic as best I can what I think a sightless golfer would use, which mean that I have to cut down on the dynamic elements of the swing and focus more on making good contact. Thank you for reading.

Kyle--thank you for what you wrote. It triggered a thought in my mind as I read it. I know enough from competing in tennis and volleyball tournaments to focus on the point at hand and not possible match outcomes, or one shot at a time. I think I'm letting other thoughts creep into my mind. The thought that came to my mind is that maybe I'm like the proverbial "front runner," the horse that runs freely at the start of the race when he gets out in front, but begins to tense up toward the end when the horses begin to bunch up, and he can't run freely. Something to think about.

I had a round today that is example of a problem that I have and I'm looking for suggestions. The problem: good front nine (43) and bad back nine (50). This happens quite often. The opposite hardly happens (bad front nine; good front nine). My current hypothesis is that I either get over-confident and lose focus on the back nine, or I get tired and lose focus. My main source of increased scores on the back nine is making bad contact with the ball. When I competed in tennis tournaments, I was always able to regain focus. I can't seem to do it in golf. Any suggestions, other than to get in better shape to eliminate tiredness as a cause?

I'm working on making my actual swing at the ball be as close to my practice swing as possible so that I benefit more from the practice swing that I currently do. Like many, by swing changes when the ball is there. I have difficulty with the "ignore the ball" advice. I didn't know why, but I think I do now. I read about the works of Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung, who said that people differ in how my their minds are energized by objects around them--when some see something to hit, the mind goes into the "hit" mode. If true, this may explain why I can take a smooth, graceful swing when there is no ball, and change my swing when I'm swinging at the ball. So, it seems that I have two choices--keep trying to make my actual swing at the ball emulate my practice swing, or take a practice swing that looks like my actual swing at the ball. I tried the former for months/years. Now I'm working on the latter--taking a practice swing at a broken tee that is more like the swing I'm going tto swing. I now have a better understanding of the difference between the hitter's swing (where the ball is an object to be hit) and the swinger's swing (where the ball is merely in the way of the club head).

Great post, Brakkus. Gives older learners some clues on how to improve adult learning. I took some tennis lessons from the then current coach of the Austrian Davis Cup tennis team, and he was able to get me to do things I prejudged as difficult for me to do. One difficult thing, though, is that some are more able to "let go," and others are not, based on their personal history of what happened when they did "let go." My history is not positive. My positive history comes from the times when I was highly under control, which makes it difficult to "let go." Still, I agree strongly with your advice.

Joekelly--neuroscientists have explanations for much of what you wrote. When you look at gifted athletes and gifted musicians, fMRI research sows that they have superior abilities to develop what they call "memory maps," which the brain uses to direct the muscles to execute movements. The more gifted the person, the more highly refined are the memory maps. Furthermore, the more gifted, the more these memory maps are condensed and move from the frontal lobes to the rear lobes, which is what allows them to execute movements so well. Another interesting outcome of the research is that the gifted ones say that they feel as though their hands are reaching through the implement, such as the hand feeling through the club face, which may explain things such as eye-hand coordination in striking sports. On your other point about 2 year olds, who learn sports, music, language, computers, and other tings that older people have difficulty with--neuroscients say that their brains are uncluttered and can thus form highly efficient neuro paths to process information quickly. Adults have cluttered minds and have to use existing linkages, which may be optimized for one kind of behavior but not for another. However, even old dogs can learn new tricks, but you have to find your way to do it. There's more, but better left for another time, about what Jungian psychologists refer to as "transcendence," where a person who learns in details must transcend the gap to putting them together holistically, or where a person who learns holistically must transcend the gap and learn the details. Sounds like mumbo-jumbo, but I made my living studying this kind of stuff.

On how long it takes for muscle memory to kick in, from what I know from research in how people learn to execute a biomechanical motion with repeated accuracy, it depends on your ability to repeat a procedure. This depends on how your mind is organized. People are distributed along a scale of being able to repeat a procedure (like divers, gymnasts, and ballet dancers on one end of the scale, and people who don't like to do the same thing twice on the other. If you observe people in their careers and in their hobbies, you will see these differences. If you are on the former side of the scale, muscle memory may come quickly simply through repeated actions. If you are on the latter side of the scale, you may have to learn the habaits of those on the former side of the scale. I speak from around 25 years of doing research in this are in skill learning.

Some time ago, I posted a note saying that I am working on making good contact as my major point of focus.. I read an article in Golf Digest that said that based on statistics over many rounds, each bad contact contributes to 1.4 extra strokes. Looking at my scores (21 index), my scores range from 89 when I make zero contact errors to 102 when I make eight contact errors. This range seems to fit the statistical model. I've tried focusinguon other parts of the game (drives, fairway woods, approach shots, pitching and chipping, and putting), but it seems that reducing contact errors seems to have the biggest pay-off for me. By the way, I read another article in a golf publication that said that getting 20 more yards on drives saved one stroke in 18 holes, and hitting the fairway on all holes saved two. It seems that reducing contact errors has the biggest pay-off of the three areas of improvement.

You misunderstood when you supposed that the players in the cart are in a hurry. They aren't.

You misunderstand, greatly. The guys in the cart are not in a hurry; just interested in playing at a reasonable pace. With the crowded conditions on the course, the group finishes its round at the pace of the cart riders and not the walkers. The groups behind, I would imagine, also appreciate the efforts of the walkers to keep up with the cart riders. It works for all involved--the walkers, the cart riders, and the groups that follow. It eliminates the worst case scenario, where a foursome with two in a cart and two walkers play at the rate of two separate twosomes.

I play alone quite a bit because I like to play at times (mid afternoon) that most people avoid. I usually play better when I play alone, and for some time, I attributed it to less pressure and less distractions. After reading some research papers on the brain-muscles relationship in sports and music, I have added another possible reason why I play better alone--the time duration between swings. My latest theory, based on research, is that I can execute the same swings more effectively if I swing more frequently because the swing is in short term memory. This is like reciting a name or phone number frequently and putting it into short term memory. Based on research in long term memory, I now realize that I need to find a way to put the swing into long term memory so that I can recall it when playing in a group of four, with longer durations between swings. Anyway, that's my theory.