EP2. How To Change Your Golf Swing

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Mind Caddie podcast, the show that helps you improve your golf by improving the way you think. All of the ideas you hear in this podcast have been used by major champions and golfers at all levels and brought to you by the coach who taught them, Karl Morris. We bring you some of the most popular lessons found in the Mind Caddie app, as well as discussions with professional and amateur golfers about how they use their mental game to shoot better scores, so you can learn from others and apply to your own game. I'm Ben, the co founder of Mind Caddie, along with Karl Morris, who has spent the past 30 years working with golfers on their mental games. If you want to learn more, you can download the Mind Caddie app from the app store and access over a hundred audio lessons, as well as scorecards and guided programs. Search Mind Caddie on the app store today. I'm sure so many of you listening to this program and following the Mind Caddie approach to better golf have been over the years immensely frustrated if you're trying to change your golf swing. And nothing seems to happen, old patterns seem to stubbornly stay in place, you go back to what you've always done before. And it's important to understand that if you are aiming to change the movements that you make in your golf swing, it really needs to be done with the brain in mind because it is the brain that conducts the golf swing. The message from brain to body is the key element to all of this. And understand that your golf swing is stored in your brain and to play a golf shot. It's about retrieving that learning that is stored in your brain. Now, one of the things to understand. Is that to try and replace an existing motion with a new motion just by hitting shots tends not to be the most effective way, as you've probably found out. There's a couple of kind of counterintuitive ways. That you can go about learning new moves in your golf swing, enhancing skills from a brain perspective that will speed up that process of creating changes. One of the things to do to understand is the concept of what I call trapping the feeling. The idea being that in pretty much everything that we've ever learned in life, we don't learn by getting something right. We learn by understanding and feeling either side of right. The best way and best analogy for that would be when you see a baby learn to walk, a baby learns to walk, not by getting it right, a baby learns to walk by falling to the left, falling to the right, falling forwards, falling backwards, but eventually the brain organizes around it. The organizers are on a balance point and the baby learns to crawl, then walk, then run and skip and jump and all of the other skills that we develop as we, as we go through life. There's a great crossover with golf for that. So for instance, let's say you're one of the skills that you want to build. In your golf swing or in your game is more centered strikes, which would be a very, very good goal to have at any time, almost at any level of the game. Well, rather than just trying to hit the ball out of the middle of the club, a really good practice session for me would involve where you start off with the golf ball in the middle of the club and hit a shot, hit five shots where you swing it back and deliberately try and catch the ball out of the toe. Start in the middle, hit it out of the toe. The next five balls, start in the middle, deliberately hit it out of the heel. Now, if your system can sense toe strikes and heel strikes, the next five balls, then it becomes interesting to see the adjustment that you tend to make. The brain organises around that middle ground and you can start to feel the middle of the club. But you can use that principle of trapping the feeling with almost anything that you're trying to do in your golf swing. If it's a takeaway issue, Take it too much on the outside, take it too much on the inside, feel the middle ground. If it's a swing playing issue, swing it too flat, swing it too upright. Feel the correct position for you, you're only limited by your imagination on this. The other thing, again, that's slightly counterintuitive, to help the retrieval process from the brain, and change existing patterns, is when you're working on a particular move, on the range, to actually hit, Three or four shots with the new motion in mind, but then hit a couple of shots with the fault Again counterintuitive, but you actually hit a couple of shots feel the old move And again, it's that contrast that the brain loves if you can feel the old move clearly and then feel the new move The learning tends to speed up the retention and the retrieval is enhanced with that. So it's not just a case of just trying to get it right all the time. As so many of us have done over the years, it's been the standard way that golf has been taught without an understanding of how the brain retrieves patterns and alters patterns. So those two concepts, trap the feeling, but also to hit shots where you hit the, you go with the correct move, the move that you're trying to aim for. But deliberately it's a couple of shots with the old fault, if you like it built in there, and you'll find that the process is speeded up much more rapidly. Always a good thing to check on video to see the progress. But those, those two elements, those two approaches are very brain compatible and will speed up the process of creating change in the golf swing and enhancing your golfing skills.