The Arm Swing Illusion / Jim Waldron's Swing Philosophy

[Kiwi2]

Thanks for the kind words guys.

They are appreciated.

The kudos should go to Jim, though. He has put a huge effort into this thread.

[mikah]

well played ...Aithos

[Jim Waldron]

Thanks everyone for all of the support and kindness - it is truly appreciated!

I look forward to continuing the conversation in the coming weeks and months....

Cheers,

Jim

[MrJones]

[quote name='Aithos' timestamp='1430320408' post='11465541']
While your intent is a little different this is exactly the sort of attitude and post that I'm talking about. How dare I come in an express an opinion you don't agree with.

Stay classy MrJones.
[/quote]

It wasn't your opinion I had a problem with. It was your presentation. You'll notice I highlighted certain features of your post, none of which were you expressing your opinion as much as you were talking about yourself and your internet experiences.

You never even really discussed your opinion as much as you discussed "[b]threads like this[/b]".

Jim and many others have presented a ton of FREE information on the golf swing here. He's put a lot of time and effort into posting information and answering people's questions. I very much appreciate it and unlike you I've actually read the entire thread. I took more offense to the fact you hadn't even read through the thread than I did to anything other statement you made. Before you decide to come in and warn people about a "magic bullet", how about having enough respect to read through what's actually been said rather than judging it based on threads you've seen before.

PM sent.

[Half Flush]

[quote name='Aithos' timestamp='1429909020' post='11435329']
[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1429224284' post='11376453']
No one here is getting "carried away". Perhaps you did not read the entire thread? If you had, you would know that I said several times that the ASI is not in any way a "magic move" or any such similar golf instruction marketing nonsense. Just one very important fundamental concept in a long list of many such fundamentals and swing concepts that I teach.

As for my students who have posted here on how much the ASI concept was a breakthrough revelation, and for the non-students as well who achieved a similar breakthrough, I assure you - this was in no way an exaggeration to them. When someone tells you ASI or any other swing concept was a "mind-blowing" experience for them, I think you should respect that.

It sounds like for you the notion of thinking about the golf swing in 3D terms comes rather easily, so naturally, you assume that by comparison to the average golfer, who lacks such understanding and is certainly thinking mostly in 2D, that when they talk about their "light bulbs", that they are exaggerating. Not true - for them it is very real.

Of course it is also very possibly the case that you don't actually understand the ASI concept to the extent that you think you do. I could be wrong about this, certainly. But I can tell you this - I have had well over 30 forum members come to see me for golf schools, everyone told me at the start of the school that they "totally got" the ASI concept, and every single one of them told me at the end of the school, that their prior understanding was "way off". And that the implications of the ASI were far more important than they had previously believed.

Several thousand golf school graduates and scores of teaching pros have told me that the ASI and related concepts are indeed "groundbreaking". I agree with them. That does not mean that there are not MANY other very important swing concepts that one needs to know about and master to reach your potential.

In golf, as in Life, most things are nuanced. One of my favorite authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald, famously said when discussing this (and I am going purely on memory here) "the sign of an intelligent man is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in mind simultaneously and yet still retain the ability to function."
[/quote]

Jim,

I appreciate your response and that you took the time to read what I had to say and were respectful in the manner you replied. That's a rare thing in Internet communities, especially from teachers and people in positions of respect when discussing their ideas, so I want you to know that I respect that and it says a lot about your character. I greatly enjoy discussing things with people who know how to conduct themselves as gentleman and don't take offense to people who may have a different perspective. So thank you for that.

I wasn't trying to downplay the personal revelation aspect at all, personal revelations can be powerful things and everyone is different. What might be simple to me might be mind-blowing to someone else and vice versa, I'm not disputing or doubting that at all. That wasn't the purpose of my post, nor was it to discredit or make light of the importance of your concept or teaching style.

In fact, it is my opinion (and I feel very strongly) that in order to be a good teacher you MUST be able to explain things different ways for exactly that reason: because we all see and approach the world in different ways. It is not uncommon for me to be thinking of things from a different perspective and it can often lead to situations where I don't do a very good job of getting my point across. I really do understand needing to have things presented in a manner you understand, I've had that experience throughout my education and I know how important it is.

The reason I posted is because I've seen threads like this before in other communities where the topic became something over the course of time that it wasn't intended to be. The good idea that was a very good approach (among many) became regarded as THE approach and the people who had personal "AHA!" moments started belittling or dismissing anyone who either didn't share the same perspective or attempted to suggest another approach.

I saw some posts in here as I was skimming that reminded me of those other topics and so I just wanted to come in and caution people to keep things in perspective and remember the important thing: learning something from someone knowledgeable and improving your golf game by gaining another perspective. I realize that your intent and the intent of the posters isn't negative and I never meant to imply anything of the sort.

However, there will be people who come in here and take away impressions you or the other posters didn't mean to imply - just like you (and others) read something in my post that wasn't intended. I just wanted to remind everyone that golf is a very personal game and to not get caught up in finding a "magical bullet" because as you say: there isn't one. There is a lot of good info in here and I would hate to see your approach become a monster unto itself where people are intimidated or discouraged by it.

I've been involved in online communities of one fashion or another since the early days of the Internet and maybe it's caused me to become a bit cynical. I've just seen so many cases where people miss out on really good information for silly reasons, or will deny a different perspective because of arrogance or a fear of appearing less than perfect. It is really sad that so many people would rather live in ignorance than acknowledge that someone else might be right, but I don't think that's what is going on here and I didn't come in here to say that you're wrong.

I don't have a problem with people recognizing a good idea or re-working a concept into a new approach, I just don't believe there is such a thing as a "ground-breaking" idea left in the game of golf. Your spin on the concept may be original (and I certainly haven't seen it before) but it doesn't have to be revolutionary to be important or valuable. I don't think that diminishes the value of the approach at all, because it will be new to some people and if it helps those people: GREAT. That's the purpose of teaching and the reward for doing what you do.

But no - I didn't read the entire thread. I've been a member here for years but I haven't been active until recently since 2012 and this thread is 91 pages long. I simply don't have the time or desire to go through that many pages on a single topic so I skimmed through. Topics like this really need a sticky with a FAQ at the top and a hyperlink menu to the posts with the most relevant information. It's a fair amount of work to set that up but I've seen it done on other forums and it makes discussions like this a lot more accessible to new people...
[/quote]

Aithos,

We all know you are "...very naturally athletic and (you're) also highly intellectual".

After reading your posts I have no doubt you have the trifecta everyone dreams about.

That is you are likely "seriously good looking" too.

"I wasn't like every other kid, you know, who dreams about being an astronaut, I was always more interested in what bark was made out of on a tree. Richard Gere’s a real hero of mine. Sting. Sting would be another person who’s a hero. The music he’s created over the years, I don’t really listen to it, but the fact that he’s making it, I respect that. I care desperately about what I do. Do I know what product I’m selling? No. Do I know what I’m doing today? No. But I’m here, and I’m gonna give it my best shot."

- Zoolander.

p.s. Please be sure to view the whole film before critiquing the trailer.

You at least made me laugh, even without seeing your swing.

Congrats on your pin Jim.

[Half Flush]

Hi Jim,

Re tilt switch.

Is hip flexion in DS to account for, among other things, for the fact you cannot move thoracic spine from left to right without moving your head? ie does the inital hip flexion movement in DS serve to keep the head steady?

[Jim Waldron]

[quote name='Half Flush' timestamp='1430486357' post='11478821']
Hi Jim,

Re tilt switch.

Is hip flexion in DS to account for, among other things, for the fact you cannot move thoracic spine from left to right without moving your head? ie does the inital hip flexion movement in DS serve to keep the head steady?
[/quote]

Interesting question! Never had this one before. Although you can certainly tilt from thoracic spine without moving your head, or at least with very little head movement. At least most folks have that potential. Its the same thing you do in a arms/shoulder conventional putting stroke - shoulder girdle rocking motion. I do see some students who struggle with this, and sometimes it is a flexibility issue, especially for endo body types. But mostly it is a brain/body connection issue, and fairly easily overcome with a little practice.

But I see your point. The hip flexion would seem to counter-balance any tendency of the head to move upwards. Makes sense...

[Jim Waldron]

Another in the continuing series of posts on some of the mental aspects of learning and practice.

Just some stuff to "chew on" that might lead you in a more productive direction on your journey to better golf.

A lot of this is radical information vs the dominant culture we all live in, at least in the West, although with all of the rapid technological changes happening globally, even in the East as well.

The concept of conscious v subconscious mind, and the relationship between the two is a Big Deal. It is why Sigmund Freud was such a controversial figure when he first burst on the scene. He was saying basically that a lot of your behavior is not coming from the conscious mind but rather from what he called the "unconscious". But even Freud was way off from what the latest discoveries in neuroscience are telling us about the limits of the conscious mind. Basically, very little of your actual waking state behavior originates in your conscious mind. Since this is a golf forum - not a psychology forum - I am not going to go into a lot of detail on this, only enough to make the point that what you should be attempting to achieve when learning new and better golf physical skills, is a body movement pattern that repeats effortlessly, without any need for conscious thought or direction.

Your conscious mind is sending information to your subconscious about the golf swing, for example. The really interesting thing that every golf teacher knows, is that sometimes the subconscious refuses to accept the new information. It clings to the old information, ie the old movement pattern. Especially under stress. And this is NOT simply of matter of "the myelin not being thick enough" or "not enough reps". That is sometimes the case, for sure. But I am talking about an earlier stage in the learning process.

I would like to describe a scenario that plays out on the lesson tee fairly often, in the very early stages of a lesson or golf school. And it is something that often is kind of shocking to the student, because his expectations of what is going to happen during the lesson are way off base. And the reason for that is that he - lets call him Bob - is someone who is convinced that nearly 100% of his behavior is a result of conscious choice, will power, thinking, etc. After all - that seems in a "common sense" way to be mostly true in terms of how he makes a living, working in an office, looking at information, analyzing it, and making choices about what to do with that information.

If you have played golf for 20 years to a fairly decent level of skill, let's say a 10 handicap, and have hit thousands of quality golf shots on the range and on the course, you have basically convinced your SM that the swing you used to hit those shots, is "pretty good". (Or as Larry David would say - "pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good"!). And now someone like me comes along and says to you "Well, Bob - you fail to match the model in a really important way in this one key area of your swing, and if you did learn how make this swing segment better, you would probably hit 4 more greens and 5 more fairways and gain 20 more yards off the tee and move from a 10 down to a 5 in the next 3-4 months". Naturally you want those things, or at least Conscious Mind Bob wants those things. The problem is that Subconscious Mind Bob sees ANY swing change as a "threat" to that "pretty good" swing that it took the first 15 years of his 20 year golfing career to master. And of course it is the SM that is actually "in charge" of your body motion when swinging at normal speed.

And you can see this conflict in the student playing out in Bob's body language during the lesson. Especially when taking it to actually striking a golf ball. The one hour of mirror work and other non-ball training was really good, and Bob was able to make the change that we both wanted when moving in slow motion and half speed. No problem. Full speed without a ball, you start to see some degradation in the new move. Add the ball - right back to the old pattern.

This is perfectly normal and accords with everything neuroscience is telling us about the motor learning process (and Freud too!). The problem is that Bob doesn't know sh** about neuroscience - all he knows is that he can't stop his body from doing his old bad move, he can now even feel it (after I show him some body awareness exercises) and he can see it on the video. But the old pattern repeats. So Bob "tries harder" to do the new move, or even worse, tries NOT to do the old move and do the new move at the same time. I am watching this and I notice that as he tries harder, he is holding his breath. (very common!). "Trying harder" is what the conscious mind always does (especially the male gender) when it is frustrated and not achieving success with its original strategy.

At this point, I always intervene and we begin to have a conversation about the golf learning process. Bob simply has never heard of this information before. He has been playing "conscious mind golf" for twenty years and here I am telling him that he will play much better, and have a lot more fun, if he switches to playing subconscious mind golf. Kind of like all the other sports he has played as a kid or even as an adult - subconscious basketball (free throws excepted!), hockey, soccer, etc.

We then talk a bit about how thinks about his golf swing at the most basic level. I ask him to describe how he understands power application, impact, swing shape or plane, what makes the ball go straight (or crooked). Basically I am attempting to expose how his SM understands the golf swing. We then talk about what is actually happening in a tour pro's golf swing and how that pros SM swing map would look about those same issues - power, shape, impact, etc, kind of like a print-out of the pro SM map. Usually, and often very quickly, Bob will experience a "light bulb moment", often a kind of "..are you f****** kidding me!". The very next attempt to do the new move, after that light bulb moment, is almost always dramatically better. And guess what - when we take it to the ball, the old move is absent, or mostly so, and the new move begins to manifest, and of course the ball flight is much better. So the first step in the journey to better ballstriking has been taken.

The point being that what matters is what you have programmed into your SM swing map - images, pictures, conclusions, beliefs about impact, club motion, power, basic body part mechanics, shape, etc. And when emotion is linked to those images - positive when you hit a good shot with your flawed swing, or negative when you hit a bad shot - then those images are more deeply imprinted into your neural networks. You create a dominant habit. Humans have this amazing ability to self-create conditioned reflexes and habits.

The learning process is about learning to how to make those unconscious images, beliefs, pictures, etc in your swing map CONSCIOUS so that you can then be aware of them, understand how toxic some of them are to good ballstriking, and then "delete them" from your hard drive (SM). Bob might say to me "Oh my god! I thought you were supposed to do X at that point in the swing! I mean, I never actually thought about that consciously before, but I see now that I just kind of accepted that this Flaw X was something that "obviously" had to happen in the golf swing". In other words, we as golfers form basic premises conclusions, when we first take up the game and as our journey proceeds, or "common sense" beliefs, while watching pros on tv or even in person, or by looking at pictures in golf magazines, etc. about the golf swing. A lot of it is based on two-dimensional optical illusions like the ASI.

To me, this is the whole point of my job, to create an environment where that light bulb moment can happen. Swing theory at the CM level is absolutely useless if the connection to the SM is not made. Maybe even worse than useless, ie it can lead to flinching.

[Reasonability]

[b][i]"The point being that what matters is what you have programmed into your SM swing map - images, pictures, conclusions, beliefs about impact, club motion, power, basic body part mechanics, shape, etc. And when emotion is linked to those images - positive when you hit a good shot with your flawed swing, or negative when you hit a bad shot - then those images are more deeply imprinted into your neural networks. You create a dominant habit. Humans have this amazing ability to self-create conditioned reflexes and habits."[/i][/b]

Pure gold.... THIS is the heart and soul of my earlier question!

[mc3jack]

[color=#282828][size=4]Jim said: "Swing theory at the CM level is absolutely useless if the connection to the SM is not made. Maybe even worse than useless, ie it can lead to flinching." [/size][/color]

[color=#282828][size=4]Got a big laugh out of this one, Jim! I play a lot of pickup golf with Floggers at the local munis . . . I hear guys start talking 'swing theory' on the course and it's Army Golf the rest of the round. [/size][/color]


[color=#282828][size=4] [/size][/color]

[Jim Waldron]

That process of making conscious what had previously been unconscious in the SM I like to call Deep Insight, or rather this is one form of that insight. The merging of CM and SM is where merely intellectual CM understanding is magnified at a deeper level of the mind is another kind.

I think that this is one of the foundational steps to making a swing change. But there are sometimes obstacles. One is that your body has to have the fitness level to actually do the new move. Sometimes lack of flexibility or core strength can be a limit. Another is that there is often an existing compensatory move in your swing pattern that is acting like a crutch,ie without that move, you would make very poor contact. But the crutch is masking a hidden Fatal Flaw. In order to address that Flaw, in order to get rid of it, you first have to stop doing the compensatory "crutch" move. Which is why making swing changes requires a certain amount of patience, persistence and perserverance.

Sometimes of course, you just really "get it", and the change comes quickly and easily. It just depends on the nature of the swing change. Certain things are easy to understand and to execute, like Balance, for example. No illusions there or strong destructive impulses.

[johnrobison]

[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430495779' post='11479821']
Another in the continuing series of posts on some of the mental aspects of learning and practice.

Just some stuff to "chew on" that might lead you in a more productive direction on your journey to better golf.

A lot of this is radical information vs the dominant culture we all live in, at least in the West, although with all of the rapid technological changes happening globally, even in the East as well.

The concept of conscious v subconscious mind, and the relationship between the two is a Big Deal. It is why Sigmund Freud was such a controversial figure when he first burst on the scene. He was saying basically that a lot of your behavior is not coming from the conscious mind but rather from what he called the "unconscious". But even Freud was way off from what the latest discoveries in neuroscience are telling us about the limits of the conscious mind. Basically, very little of your actual waking state behavior originates in your conscious mind. Since this is a golf forum - not a psychology forum - I am not going to go into a lot of detail on this, only enough to make the point that what you should be attempting to achieve when learning new and better golf physical skills, is a body movement pattern that repeats effortlessly, without any need for conscious thought or direction.

Your conscious mind is sending information to your subconscious about the golf swing, for example. The really interesting thing that every golf teacher knows, is that sometimes the subconscious refuses to accept the new information. It clings to the old information, ie the old movement pattern. Especially under stress. And this is NOT simply of matter of "the myelin not being thick enough" or "not enough reps". That is sometimes the case, for sure. But I am talking about an earlier stage in the learning process.

I would like to describe a scenario that plays out on the lesson tee fairly often, in the very early stages of a lesson or golf school. And it is something that often is kind of shocking to the student, because his expectations of what is going to happen during the lesson are way off base. And the reason for that is that he - lets call him Bob - is someone who is convinced that nearly 100% of his behavior is a result of conscious choice, will power, thinking, etc. After all - that seems in a "common sense" way to be mostly true in terms of how he makes a living, working in an office, looking at information, analyzing it, and making choices about what to do with that information.

If you have played golf for 20 years to a fairly decent level of skill, let's say a 10 handicap, and have hit thousands of quality golf shots on the range and on the course, you have basically convinced your SM that the swing you used to hit those shots, is "pretty good". (Or as Larry David would say - "pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good"!). And now someone like me comes along and says to you "Well, Bob - you fail to match the model in a really important way in this one key area of your swing, and if you did learn how make this swing segment better, you would probably hit 4 more greens and 5 more fairways and gain 20 more yards off the tee and move from a 10 down to a 5 in the next 3-4 months". Naturally you want those things, or at least Conscious Mind Bob wants those things. The problem is that Subconscious Mind Bob sees ANY swing change as a "threat" to that "pretty good" swing that it took the first 15 years of his 20 year golfing career to master. And of course it is the SM that is actually "in charge" of your body motion when swinging at normal speed.

And you can see this conflict in the student playing out in Bob's body language during the lesson. Especially when taking it to actually striking a golf ball. The one hour of mirror work and other non-ball training was really good, and Bob was able to make the change that we both wanted when moving in slow motion and half speed. No problem. Full speed without a ball, you start to see some degradation in the new move. Add the ball - right back to the old pattern.

This is perfectly normal and accords with everything neuroscience is telling us about the motor learning process (and Freud too!). The problem is that Bob doesn't know sh** about neuroscience - all he knows is that he can't stop his body from doing his old bad move, he can now even feel it (after I show him some body awareness exercises) and he can see it on the video. But the old pattern repeats. So Bob "tries harder" to do the new move, or even worse, tries NOT to do the old move and do the new move at the same time. I am watching this and I notice that as he tries harder, he is holding his breath. (very common!). "Trying harder" is what the conscious mind always does (especially the male gender) when it is frustrated and not achieving success with its original strategy.

At this point, I always intervene and we begin to have a conversation about the golf learning process. Bob simply has never heard of this information before. He has been playing "conscious mind golf" for twenty years and here I am telling him that he will play much better, and have a lot more fun, if he switches to playing subconscious mind golf. Kind of like all the other sports he has played as a kid or even as an adult - subconscious basketball (free throws excepted!), hockey, soccer, etc.

We then talk a bit about how thinks about his golf swing at the most basic level. I ask him to describe how he understands power application, impact, swing shape or plane, what makes the ball go straight (or crooked). Basically I am attempting to expose how his SM understands the golf swing. We then talk about what is actually happening in a tour pro's golf swing and how that pros SM swing map would look about those same issues - power, shape, impact, etc, kind of like a print-out of the pro SM map. Usually, and often very quickly, Bob will experience a "light bulb moment", often a kind of "..are you f****** kidding me!". The very next attempt to do the new move, after that light bulb moment, is almost always dramatically better. And guess what - when we take it to the ball, the old move is absent, or mostly so, and the new move begins to manifest, and of course the ball flight is much better. So the first step in the journey to better ballstriking has been taken.

The point being that what matters is what you have programmed into your SM swing map - images, pictures, conclusions, beliefs about impact, club motion, power, basic body part mechanics, shape, etc. And when emotion is linked to those images - positive when you hit a good shot with your flawed swing, or negative when you hit a bad shot - then those images are more deeply imprinted into your neural networks. You create a dominant habit. Humans have this amazing ability to self-create conditioned reflexes and habits.

The learning process is about learning to how to make those unconscious images, beliefs, pictures, etc in your swing map CONSCIOUS so that you can then be aware of them, understand how toxic some of them are to good ballstriking, and then "delete them" from your hard drive (SM). Bob might say to me "Oh my god! I thought you were supposed to do X at that point in the swing! I mean, I never actually thought about that consciously before, but I see now that I just kind of accepted that this Flaw X was something that "obviously" had to happen in the golf swing". In other words, we as golfers form basic premises conclusions, when we first take up the game and as our journey proceeds, or "common sense" beliefs, while watching pros on tv or even in person, or by looking at pictures in golf magazines, etc. about the golf swing. A lot of it is based on two-dimensional optical illusions like the ASI.

To me, this is the whole point of my job, to create an environment where that light bulb moment can happen. Swing theory at the CM level is absolutely useless if the connection to the SM is not made. Maybe even worse than useless, ie it can lead to flinching.
[/quote]

Jim,

I wonder if you're familiar with The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, by Tor Norretranders. I think it's something that would be right up your alley. His premise that we're almost entirely subconscious beings and it's the role of the CM to filter out and surface a few of the many millions of thoughts to act on - thoughts which are completely unknown to us until the CM decides to run with one. Like a computer interface. It's not necessarily a novel concept but his ability to put it into words and reference information to support it makes it a very accessible one. Here's a good review of it, in case you're not familiar
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/550

[Jim Waldron]

[quote name='johnrobison' timestamp='1430533479' post='11483735']
[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430495779' post='11479821']
Another in the continuing series of posts on some of the mental aspects of learning and practice.

Just some stuff to "chew on" that might lead you in a more productive direction on your journey to better golf.

A lot of this is radical information vs the dominant culture we all live in, at least in the West, although with all of the rapid technological changes happening globally, even in the East as well.

The concept of conscious v subconscious mind, and the relationship between the two is a Big Deal. It is why Sigmund Freud was such a controversial figure when he first burst on the scene. He was saying basically that a lot of your behavior is not coming from the conscious mind but rather from what he called the "unconscious". But even Freud was way off from what the latest discoveries in neuroscience are telling us about the limits of the conscious mind. Basically, very little of your actual waking state behavior originates in your conscious mind. Since this is a golf forum - not a psychology forum - I am not going to go into a lot of detail on this, only enough to make the point that what you should be attempting to achieve when learning new and better golf physical skills, is a body movement pattern that repeats effortlessly, without any need for conscious thought or direction.

Your conscious mind is sending information to your subconscious about the golf swing, for example. The really interesting thing that every golf teacher knows, is that sometimes the subconscious refuses to accept the new information. It clings to the old information, ie the old movement pattern. Especially under stress. And this is NOT simply of matter of "the myelin not being thick enough" or "not enough reps". That is sometimes the case, for sure. But I am talking about an earlier stage in the learning process.

I would like to describe a scenario that plays out on the lesson tee fairly often, in the very early stages of a lesson or golf school. And it is something that often is kind of shocking to the student, because his expectations of what is going to happen during the lesson are way off base. And the reason for that is that he - lets call him Bob - is someone who is convinced that nearly 100% of his behavior is a result of conscious choice, will power, thinking, etc. After all - that seems in a "common sense" way to be mostly true in terms of how he makes a living, working in an office, looking at information, analyzing it, and making choices about what to do with that information.

If you have played golf for 20 years to a fairly decent level of skill, let's say a 10 handicap, and have hit thousands of quality golf shots on the range and on the course, you have basically convinced your SM that the swing you used to hit those shots, is "pretty good". (Or as Larry David would say - "pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good"!). And now someone like me comes along and says to you "Well, Bob - you fail to match the model in a really important way in this one key area of your swing, and if you did learn how make this swing segment better, you would probably hit 4 more greens and 5 more fairways and gain 20 more yards off the tee and move from a 10 down to a 5 in the next 3-4 months". Naturally you want those things, or at least Conscious Mind Bob wants those things. The problem is that Subconscious Mind Bob sees ANY swing change as a "threat" to that "pretty good" swing that it took the first 15 years of his 20 year golfing career to master. And of course it is the SM that is actually "in charge" of your body motion when swinging at normal speed.

And you can see this conflict in the student playing out in Bob's body language during the lesson. Especially when taking it to actually striking a golf ball. The one hour of mirror work and other non-ball training was really good, and Bob was able to make the change that we both wanted when moving in slow motion and half speed. No problem. Full speed without a ball, you start to see some degradation in the new move. Add the ball - right back to the old pattern.

This is perfectly normal and accords with everything neuroscience is telling us about the motor learning process (and Freud too!). The problem is that Bob doesn't know sh** about neuroscience - all he knows is that he can't stop his body from doing his old bad move, he can now even feel it (after I show him some body awareness exercises) and he can see it on the video. But the old pattern repeats. So Bob "tries harder" to do the new move, or even worse, tries NOT to do the old move and do the new move at the same time. I am watching this and I notice that as he tries harder, he is holding his breath. (very common!). "Trying harder" is what the conscious mind always does (especially the male gender) when it is frustrated and not achieving success with its original strategy.

At this point, I always intervene and we begin to have a conversation about the golf learning process. Bob simply has never heard of this information before. He has been playing "conscious mind golf" for twenty years and here I am telling him that he will play much better, and have a lot more fun, if he switches to playing subconscious mind golf. Kind of like all the other sports he has played as a kid or even as an adult - subconscious basketball (free throws excepted!), hockey, soccer, etc.

We then talk a bit about how thinks about his golf swing at the most basic level. I ask him to describe how he understands power application, impact, swing shape or plane, what makes the ball go straight (or crooked). Basically I am attempting to expose how his SM understands the golf swing. We then talk about what is actually happening in a tour pro's golf swing and how that pros SM swing map would look about those same issues - power, shape, impact, etc, kind of like a print-out of the pro SM map. Usually, and often very quickly, Bob will experience a "light bulb moment", often a kind of "..are you f****** kidding me!". The very next attempt to do the new move, after that light bulb moment, is almost always dramatically better. And guess what - when we take it to the ball, the old move is absent, or mostly so, and the new move begins to manifest, and of course the ball flight is much better. So the first step in the journey to better ballstriking has been taken.

The point being that what matters is what you have programmed into your SM swing map - images, pictures, conclusions, beliefs about impact, club motion, power, basic body part mechanics, shape, etc. And when emotion is linked to those images - positive when you hit a good shot with your flawed swing, or negative when you hit a bad shot - then those images are more deeply imprinted into your neural networks. You create a dominant habit. Humans have this amazing ability to self-create conditioned reflexes and habits.

The learning process is about learning to how to make those unconscious images, beliefs, pictures, etc in your swing map CONSCIOUS so that you can then be aware of them, understand how toxic some of them are to good ballstriking, and then "delete them" from your hard drive (SM). Bob might say to me "Oh my god! I thought you were supposed to do X at that point in the swing! I mean, I never actually thought about that consciously before, but I see now that I just kind of accepted that this Flaw X was something that "obviously" had to happen in the golf swing". In other words, we as golfers form basic premises conclusions, when we first take up the game and as our journey proceeds, or "common sense" beliefs, while watching pros on tv or even in person, or by looking at pictures in golf magazines, etc. about the golf swing. A lot of it is based on two-dimensional optical illusions like the ASI.

To me, this is the whole point of my job, to create an environment where that light bulb moment can happen. Swing theory at the CM level is absolutely useless if the connection to the SM is not made. Maybe even worse than useless, ie it can lead to flinching.
[/quote]

Jim,

I wonder if you're familiar with The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, by Tor Norretranders. I think it's something that would be right up your alley. His premise that we're almost entirely subconscious beings and it's the role of the CM to filter out and surface a few of the many millions of thoughts to act on - thoughts which are completely unknown to us until the CM decides to run with one. Like a computer interface. It's not necessarily a novel concept but his ability to put it into words and reference information to support it makes it a very accessible one. Here's a good review of it, in case you're not familiar
[url="http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/550"]http://serendip.bryn...change/node/550[/url]
[/quote]

Yes, I read it when it was first released and have been recommending it to students of mine ever since, including in several threads on this forum. It is a great introduction to some of the more important discoveries in neuroscience, and really useful to anyone who wants to teach golf, learn golf skills or train in golf skills.

[johnrobison]

[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430581472' post='11486039']
[quote name='johnrobison' timestamp='1430533479' post='11483735']
[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430495779' post='11479821']
Another in the continuing series of posts on some of the mental aspects of learning and practice.

Just some stuff to "chew on" that might lead you in a more productive direction on your journey to better golf.

A lot of this is radical information vs the dominant culture we all live in, at least in the West, although with all of the rapid technological changes happening globally, even in the East as well.

The concept of conscious v subconscious mind, and the relationship between the two is a Big Deal. It is why Sigmund Freud was such a controversial figure when he first burst on the scene. He was saying basically that a lot of your behavior is not coming from the conscious mind but rather from what he called the "unconscious". But even Freud was way off from what the latest discoveries in neuroscience are telling us about the limits of the conscious mind. Basically, very little of your actual waking state behavior originates in your conscious mind. Since this is a golf forum - not a psychology forum - I am not going to go into a lot of detail on this, only enough to make the point that what you should be attempting to achieve when learning new and better golf physical skills, is a body movement pattern that repeats effortlessly, without any need for conscious thought or direction.

Your conscious mind is sending information to your subconscious about the golf swing, for example. The really interesting thing that every golf teacher knows, is that sometimes the subconscious refuses to accept the new information. It clings to the old information, ie the old movement pattern. Especially under stress. And this is NOT simply of matter of "the myelin not being thick enough" or "not enough reps". That is sometimes the case, for sure. But I am talking about an earlier stage in the learning process.

I would like to describe a scenario that plays out on the lesson tee fairly often, in the very early stages of a lesson or golf school. And it is something that often is kind of shocking to the student, because his expectations of what is going to happen during the lesson are way off base. And the reason for that is that he - lets call him Bob - is someone who is convinced that nearly 100% of his behavior is a result of conscious choice, will power, thinking, etc. After all - that seems in a "common sense" way to be mostly true in terms of how he makes a living, working in an office, looking at information, analyzing it, and making choices about what to do with that information.

If you have played golf for 20 years to a fairly decent level of skill, let's say a 10 handicap, and have hit thousands of quality golf shots on the range and on the course, you have basically convinced your SM that the swing you used to hit those shots, is "pretty good". (Or as Larry David would say - "pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good"!). And now someone like me comes along and says to you "Well, Bob - you fail to match the model in a really important way in this one key area of your swing, and if you did learn how make this swing segment better, you would probably hit 4 more greens and 5 more fairways and gain 20 more yards off the tee and move from a 10 down to a 5 in the next 3-4 months". Naturally you want those things, or at least Conscious Mind Bob wants those things. The problem is that Subconscious Mind Bob sees ANY swing change as a "threat" to that "pretty good" swing that it took the first 15 years of his 20 year golfing career to master. And of course it is the SM that is actually "in charge" of your body motion when swinging at normal speed.

And you can see this conflict in the student playing out in Bob's body language during the lesson. Especially when taking it to actually striking a golf ball. The one hour of mirror work and other non-ball training was really good, and Bob was able to make the change that we both wanted when moving in slow motion and half speed. No problem. Full speed without a ball, you start to see some degradation in the new move. Add the ball - right back to the old pattern.

This is perfectly normal and accords with everything neuroscience is telling us about the motor learning process (and Freud too!). The problem is that Bob doesn't know sh** about neuroscience - all he knows is that he can't stop his body from doing his old bad move, he can now even feel it (after I show him some body awareness exercises) and he can see it on the video. But the old pattern repeats. So Bob "tries harder" to do the new move, or even worse, tries NOT to do the old move and do the new move at the same time. I am watching this and I notice that as he tries harder, he is holding his breath. (very common!). "Trying harder" is what the conscious mind always does (especially the male gender) when it is frustrated and not achieving success with its original strategy.

At this point, I always intervene and we begin to have a conversation about the golf learning process. Bob simply has never heard of this information before. He has been playing "conscious mind golf" for twenty years and here I am telling him that he will play much better, and have a lot more fun, if he switches to playing subconscious mind golf. Kind of like all the other sports he has played as a kid or even as an adult - subconscious basketball (free throws excepted!), hockey, soccer, etc.

We then talk a bit about how thinks about his golf swing at the most basic level. I ask him to describe how he understands power application, impact, swing shape or plane, what makes the ball go straight (or crooked). Basically I am attempting to expose how his SM understands the golf swing. We then talk about what is actually happening in a tour pro's golf swing and how that pros SM swing map would look about those same issues - power, shape, impact, etc, kind of like a print-out of the pro SM map. Usually, and often very quickly, Bob will experience a "light bulb moment", often a kind of "..are you f****** kidding me!". The very next attempt to do the new move, after that light bulb moment, is almost always dramatically better. And guess what - when we take it to the ball, the old move is absent, or mostly so, and the new move begins to manifest, and of course the ball flight is much better. So the first step in the journey to better ballstriking has been taken.

The point being that what matters is what you have programmed into your SM swing map - images, pictures, conclusions, beliefs about impact, club motion, power, basic body part mechanics, shape, etc. And when emotion is linked to those images - positive when you hit a good shot with your flawed swing, or negative when you hit a bad shot - then those images are more deeply imprinted into your neural networks. You create a dominant habit. Humans have this amazing ability to self-create conditioned reflexes and habits.

The learning process is about learning to how to make those unconscious images, beliefs, pictures, etc in your swing map CONSCIOUS so that you can then be aware of them, understand how toxic some of them are to good ballstriking, and then "delete them" from your hard drive (SM). Bob might say to me "Oh my god! I thought you were supposed to do X at that point in the swing! I mean, I never actually thought about that consciously before, but I see now that I just kind of accepted that this Flaw X was something that "obviously" had to happen in the golf swing". In other words, we as golfers form basic premises conclusions, when we first take up the game and as our journey proceeds, or "common sense" beliefs, while watching pros on tv or even in person, or by looking at pictures in golf magazines, etc. about the golf swing. A lot of it is based on two-dimensional optical illusions like the ASI.

To me, this is the whole point of my job, to create an environment where that light bulb moment can happen. Swing theory at the CM level is absolutely useless if the connection to the SM is not made. Maybe even worse than useless, ie it can lead to flinching.
[/quote]

Jim,

I wonder if you're familiar with The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, by Tor Norretranders. I think it's something that would be right up your alley. His premise that we're almost entirely subconscious beings and it's the role of the CM to filter out and surface a few of the many millions of thoughts to act on - thoughts which are completely unknown to us until the CM decides to run with one. Like a computer interface. It's not necessarily a novel concept but his ability to put it into words and reference information to support it makes it a very accessible one. Here's a good review of it, in case you're not familiar
[url="http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/550"]http://serendip.bryn...change/node/550[/url]
[/quote]

Yes, I read it when it was first released and have been recommending it to students of mine ever since, including in several threads on this forum. It is a great introduction to some of the more important discoveries in neuroscience, and really useful to anyone who wants to teach golf, learn golf skills or train in golf skills.
[/quote]

Ahh.... Cool! I read it back then too and a number of your posts kept bringing it to mind again for me. I've only jumped around and not read all your posts so hadn't seen it recommended.

[Jim Waldron]

Some logical conclusions from a little of what I posted above.

SM has to be trained in proper body motion - the golf swing is NOT "innate" or "natural" (except for 1% of it, or "natural athletic throwing motion", ie throwing a rock or a spear at game while hunting is likely hard-wired into our neural networks). You have to imprint or "program" into the SM what you want the body to do. Once that has been achieved, you have to consciously choose to trust that new skill, and "let it go", ie DO NOT keep obsessing about the swing change that you have attained, trust it and let it remain unconscious. A lot of golfers do this fairly easily on the range but when they step onto the first tee they start "checking it out" to see if the "new move" (which ain't 'new' anymore!) is really happening. That is a form of paralzying "self-consciousness" that will almost always lead to some form of a flinch. When you step outside of yourself and go into second or even third person perspective, to "check out" if your body is doing the move, you weaken the brain-mind/body connection, and you lose your "naturalness" and "flow". You disrupt the communication from brain to body.

You need to perform in sports, acting, dance, music and comedy - from first person perspective, where your energy/intention flows from inside to outside. When you go "outside" and then look back to watch yourself ("inside") to see if you are "doing it right", you get in your own way. You stumble. Kind of like what happens with stuttering. In the speech pathology community, there is an old saying "stuttering is what stutters do when they try NOT to stutter".....in golf, "flinching is what golfers do when they try NOT to flinch"....or in golf, "hitting bad shots is what golfers do when try NOT to hit bad shots ( by "thinking" perfect mechanics) or when they try to hit "perfect shots".

I use the term "making the shift" a lot when working with students on their mental game, and that means shifting from over-controlling/over-thinking/trying too hard CM to freedom/feeling/trusting/ and letting go SM mode.

Bottom line is you need to learn the new mechanics, then deliberately choose to forgot about that piece of the puzzle - and play golf!

[starsail85]

[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430584115' post='11486193']
Some logical conclusions from a little of what I posted above.

SM has to be trained in proper body motion - the golf swing is NOT "innate" or "natural" (except for 1% of it, or "natural athletic throwing motion", ie throwing a rock or a spear at game while hunting is likely hard-wired into our neural networks). You have to imprint or "program" into the SM what you want the body to do. Once that has been achieved, you have to consciously choose to trust that new skill, and "let it go", ie DO NOT keep obsessing about the swing change that you have attained, trust it and let it remain unconscious. A lot of golfers do this fairly easily on the range but when they step onto the first tee they start "checking it out" to see if the "new move" (which ain't 'new' anymore!) is really happening. That is a form of paralzying "self-consciousness" that will almost always lead to some form of a flinch. When you step outside of yourself and go into second or even third person perspective, to "check out" if your body is doing the move, you weaken the brain-mind/body connection, and you lose your "naturalness" and "flow". You disrupt the communication from brain to body.

You need to perform in sports, acting, dance, music and comedy - from first person perspective, where your energy/intention flows from inside to outside. When you go "outside" and then look back to watch yourself ("inside") to see if you are "doing it right", you get in your own way. You stumble. Kind of like what happens with stuttering. In the speech pathology community, there is an old saying "stuttering is what stutters do when they try NOT to stutter".....in golf, "flinching is what golfers do when they try NOT to flinch"....or in golf, "hitting bad shots is what golfers do when try NOT to hit bad shots ( by "thinking" perfect mechanics) or when they try to hit "perfect shots".

I use the term "making the shift" a lot when working with students on their mental game, and that means shifting from over-controlling/over-thinking/trying too hard CM to freedom/feeling/trusting/ and letting go SM mode.

Bottom line is you need to learn the new mechanics, then deliberately choose to forgot about that piece of the puzzle - and play golf!
[/quote]

Jim

I have put several ideas of yours in play with my own personal swing changes with regard to learning the moves I am trying to do , mainly the idea of swinging at super slow speeds and building it up

A problem I have at the nearer I get to full speed is the greater effect of momentum in backswing and transition and how this changes the "feel" of the swing and also the physical positions achieved

I have never tried this SM trust you mention and although I am going to try it part of me thinks it will not work because my dominant habit will repeat if I don't try to make deliberate conscious alterations of my golf swing to offset my dominant habit and make the correct move.

I'm interested in how is best to program the SM for a new move, for example outward pressure with the right arm and a backswing that stops when the shoulders stop turning

Does visualisation before hand help?

Should I be doing several practice swings before a shot to try to feel the move and then just "trust" that the SM understands that this is the desired move?

It's all very interesting but I have no idea how best to apply it

[Jim Waldron]

[quote name='mizunostaffer' timestamp='1430642518' post='11489227']
[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430584115' post='11486193']
Some logical conclusions from a little of what I posted above.

SM has to be trained in proper body motion - the golf swing is NOT "innate" or "natural" (except for 1% of it, or "natural athletic throwing motion", ie throwing a rock or a spear at game while hunting is likely hard-wired into our neural networks). You have to imprint or "program" into the SM what you want the body to do. Once that has been achieved, you have to consciously choose to trust that new skill, and "let it go", ie DO NOT keep obsessing about the swing change that you have attained, trust it and let it remain unconscious. A lot of golfers do this fairly easily on the range but when they step onto the first tee they start "checking it out" to see if the "new move" (which ain't 'new' anymore!) is really happening. That is a form of paralzying "self-consciousness" that will almost always lead to some form of a flinch. When you step outside of yourself and go into second or even third person perspective, to "check out" if your body is doing the move, you weaken the brain-mind/body connection, and you lose your "naturalness" and "flow". You disrupt the communication from brain to body.

You need to perform in sports, acting, dance, music and comedy - from first person perspective, where your energy/intention flows from inside to outside. When you go "outside" and then look back to watch yourself ("inside") to see if you are "doing it right", you get in your own way. You stumble. Kind of like what happens with stuttering. In the speech pathology community, there is an old saying "stuttering is what stutters do when they try NOT to stutter".....in golf, "flinching is what golfers do when they try NOT to flinch"....or in golf, "hitting bad shots is what golfers do when try NOT to hit bad shots ( by "thinking" perfect mechanics) or when they try to hit "perfect shots".

I use the term "making the shift" a lot when working with students on their mental game, and that means shifting from over-controlling/over-thinking/trying too hard CM to freedom/feeling/trusting/ and letting go SM mode.

Bottom line is you need to learn the new mechanics, then deliberately choose to forgot about that piece of the puzzle - and play golf!
[/quote]

Jim

I have put several ideas of yours in play with my own personal swing changes with regard to learning the moves I am trying to do , mainly the idea of swinging at super slow speeds and building it up

A problem I have at the nearer I get to full speed is the greater effect of momentum in backswing and transition and how this changes the "feel" of the swing and also the physical positions achieved

I have never tried this SM trust you mention and although I am going to try it part of me thinks it will not work because my dominant habit will repeat if I don't try to make deliberate conscious alterations of my golf swing to offset my dominant habit and make the correct move.

I'm interested in how is best to program the SM for a new move, for example outward pressure with the right arm and a backswing that stops when the shoulders stop turning

Does visualisation before hand help?

Should I be doing several practice swings before a shot to try to feel the move and then just "trust" that the SM understands that this is the desired move?

It's all very interesting but I have no idea how best to apply it
[/quote]

First, the slow motion and half speed swings are never meant to be exact duplications of your normal speed swing in terms of feel or the dynamic forces at play - they are very different dynamically and so will indeed feel different. The duplication is only in terms of basic body motion positions and club motion moving through space, kind of a "connect the dots" thing. Think of those slower swing speeds as similar to training aids, they are just a tool to get to a better normal swing speed at some point in the future. Like any training aid or exercise, NOT the same thing as the eventual outcome, a normal swing speed that is functioning effectively.

Second, the reason you think that you need to "help out" by consciously attempting to inhibit the bad move dominant habit is because you still think that in fact you actually have that ability to "help" successfully. This is exactly what I was talking about when discussing the limits of the CM in terms of actually precisely controlling body parts that are moving at high rates of speed in very short time intervals. It is simply an illusion that we have that kind of conscious real time precision control - we don't actually have that ability. Once you "get" that CM "you" does not have that power, you will begin to make progress, because now it is all about communicating with your SM and finding ways to connnect with it, which does have the ability to inhibit (to some degree) a dominant habit and does have the ability, with sufficient practice, to form new movement patterns.

My point was that the CM trying to "force" a swing change or stopping a flaw usually ends up with some kind of a flinch happening and NO change to the flaw. So now you still have your old bad swing flaw but with a flinch added on top of it!

You learn to eventually eliminate swing flaws and to form positive new patterns through the process of instruction and training. Swing changes are never something that you "do" - they are the end result of a process. In the meantime, you play with the swing you actually have, and alter your aim to account for your directional miss.

The issue of how to communicate new pattern information to the SM is a huge topic - could be its own thread! But yes - visualization is one way, but not the most effective. Okay in the very early stages, but eventually you graduate from visual channel to feel. You can train the feel channel to form a direct line of communication with the SM. But you need to use objective feedback to train your feel channel so that what you are feeling is actually corresponding with what your body and club are truly doing.

Your brain uses two parallel processing systems, in tandem, when making a movement pattern change. One I call the Feed Forward System, is the SM sending information to your muscles, unconsciously at normal speeds, so that your correct muscles can fire in the correct sequence, and length of time, so that the proper body motion occurs. You can change the Feed Forward System through slow motion training, visualization, and basically achieving the Deep Insight discussed above. The Sensory Feedback System is using your feel channel to sense what the body is doing in real time, in the moment. Having what I call "awareness of awareness" or one part of the mind observing what the rest of the mind and/or body is doing, in the moment.

So if you are working on the proper arm pushaway during takeaway, for example, and your old swing bad habit was to activate your right biceps and bend your right arm while pulling it inside and around you, you can sense whether you have actually activated your triceps and are keeping your right arm straight - or if you are instead doing your old move. Knowing clearly - with 100% certainty, through a trained feel channel, and proven with objective feedback like video or a training aid - that you are indeed doing the new move, will strengthen the pathway of the Feed Forward System that is creating that new move in the first place.

Which is why in the early stages of training, I often ask my students to allow themselves to do the old bad habit, but simply notice themselves doing it, in feel channel. That alone will tend to quickly weaken that habit. Then I will have them make alternate swings with the old vs new pattern, in slow motion or half speed, often with their eyes closes, which makes access to feel channel easier.

When they can clearly feel the difference, they begin to strengthen the new pattern, and weaken the old pattern. Of course, this kind of training usually works best after they have achieved that Deep Insight.

With your issue, an overly-long backswing with arm run-off, you could approach that problem from a few different angles. One is simply achieving body feel channel awareness for where your Top position is and how long it takes to get there. If you switch from feel to visual or auditory channel, you will instantly lose a sense for where your body actually is. This is a very common awareness flaw I see everyday in my teaching practice. If you are seeing internal visual picture of your ideal Top position or saying the words to yourself "shorter backswing" (auditory or voice channel), you won't be able to know where your body is. The reason is that you are paying attention to a picture in your head or a voice in your head - you are NOT paying attention to the physical reality of your body.

[starsail85]

[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430660250' post='11489637']
[quote name='mizunostaffer' timestamp='1430642518' post='11489227']
[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430584115' post='11486193']
Some logical conclusions from a little of what I posted above.

SM has to be trained in proper body motion - the golf swing is NOT "innate" or "natural" (except for 1% of it, or "natural athletic throwing motion", ie throwing a rock or a spear at game while hunting is likely hard-wired into our neural networks). You have to imprint or "program" into the SM what you want the body to do. Once that has been achieved, you have to consciously choose to trust that new skill, and "let it go", ie DO NOT keep obsessing about the swing change that you have attained, trust it and let it remain unconscious. A lot of golfers do this fairly easily on the range but when they step onto the first tee they start "checking it out" to see if the "new move" (which ain't 'new' anymore!) is really happening. That is a form of paralzying "self-consciousness" that will almost always lead to some form of a flinch. When you step outside of yourself and go into second or even third person perspective, to "check out" if your body is doing the move, you weaken the brain-mind/body connection, and you lose your "naturalness" and "flow". You disrupt the communication from brain to body.

You need to perform in sports, acting, dance, music and comedy - from first person perspective, where your energy/intention flows from inside to outside. When you go "outside" and then look back to watch yourself ("inside") to see if you are "doing it right", you get in your own way. You stumble. Kind of like what happens with stuttering. In the speech pathology community, there is an old saying "stuttering is what stutters do when they try NOT to stutter".....in golf, "flinching is what golfers do when they try NOT to flinch"....or in golf, "hitting bad shots is what golfers do when try NOT to hit bad shots ( by "thinking" perfect mechanics) or when they try to hit "perfect shots".

I use the term "making the shift" a lot when working with students on their mental game, and that means shifting from over-controlling/over-thinking/trying too hard CM to freedom/feeling/trusting/ and letting go SM mode.

Bottom line is you need to learn the new mechanics, then deliberately choose to forgot about that piece of the puzzle - and play golf!
[/quote]

Jim

I have put several ideas of yours in play with my own personal swing changes with regard to learning the moves I am trying to do , mainly the idea of swinging at super slow speeds and building it up

A problem I have at the nearer I get to full speed is the greater effect of momentum in backswing and transition and how this changes the "feel" of the swing and also the physical positions achieved

I have never tried this SM trust you mention and although I am going to try it part of me thinks it will not work because my dominant habit will repeat if I don't try to make deliberate conscious alterations of my golf swing to offset my dominant habit and make the correct move.

I'm interested in how is best to program the SM for a new move, for example outward pressure with the right arm and a backswing that stops when the shoulders stop turning

Does visualisation before hand help?

Should I be doing several practice swings before a shot to try to feel the move and then just "trust" that the SM understands that this is the desired move?

It's all very interesting but I have no idea how best to apply it
[/quote]

First, the slow motion and half speed swings are never meant to be exact duplications of your normal speed swing in terms of feel or the dynamic forces at play - they are very different dynamically and so will indeed feel different. The duplication is only in terms of basic body motion positions and club motion moving through space, kind of a "connect the dots" thing. Think of those slower swing speeds as similar to training aids, they are just a tool to get to a better normal swing speed at some point in the future. Like any training aid or exercise, NOT the same thing as the eventual outcome, a normal swing speed that is functioning effectively.

Second, the reason you think that you need to "help out" by consciously attempting to inhibit the bad move dominant habit is because you still think that in fact you actually have that ability to "help" successfully. This is exactly what I was talking about when discussing the limits of the CM in terms of actually precisely controlling body parts that are moving at high rates of speed in very short time intervals. It is simply an illusion that we have that kind of conscious real time precision control - we don't actually have that ability. Once you "get" that CM "you" does not have that power, you will begin to make progress, because now it is all about communicating with your SM and finding ways to connnect with it, which does have the ability to inhibit (to some degree) a dominant habit and does have the ability, with sufficient practice, to form new movement patterns.

My point was that the CM trying to "force" a swing change or stopping a flaw usually ends up with some kind of a flinch happening and NO change to the flaw. So now you still have your old bad swing flaw but with a flinch added on top of it!

You learn to eventually eliminate swing flaws and to form positive new patterns through the process of instruction and training. Swing changes are never something that you "do" - they are the end result of a process. In the meantime, you play with the swing you actually have, and alter your aim to account for your directional miss.

The issue of how to communicate new pattern information to the SM is a huge topic - could be its own thread! But yes - visualization is one way, but not the most effective. Okay in the very early stages, but eventually you graduate from visual channel to feel. You can train the feel channel to form a direct line of communication with the SM. But you need to use objective feedback to train your feel channel so that what you are feeling is actually corresponding with what your body and club are truly doing.

Your brain uses two parallel processing systems, in tandem, when making a movement pattern change. One I call the Feed Forward System, is the SM sending information to your muscles, unconsciously at normal speeds, so that your correct muscles can fire in the correct sequence, and length of time, so that the proper body motion occurs. You can change the Feed Forward System through slow motion training, visualization, and basically achieving the Deep Insight discussed above. The Sensory Feedback System is using your feel channel to sense what the body is doing in real time, in the moment. Having what I call "awareness of awareness" or one part of the mind observing what the rest of the mind and/or body is doing, in the moment.

So if you are working on the proper arm pushaway during takeaway, for example, and your old swing bad habit was to activate your right biceps and bend your right arm while pulling it inside and around you, you can sense whether you have actually activated your triceps and are keeping your right arm straight - or if you are instead doing your old move. Knowing clearly - with 100% certainty, through a trained feel channel, and proven with objective feedback like video or a training aid - that you are indeed doing the new move, will strengthen the pathway of the Feed Forward System that is creating that new move in the first place.

Which is why in the early stages of training, I often ask my students to allow themselves to do the old bad habit, but simply notice themselves doing it, in feel channel. That alone will tend to quickly weaken that habit. Then I will have them make alternate swings with the old vs new pattern, in slow motion or half speed, often with their eyes closes, which makes access to feel channel easier.

When they can clearly feel the difference, they begin to strengthen the new pattern, and weaken the old pattern. Of course, this kind of training usually works best after they have achieved that Deep Insight.

With your issue, an overly-long backswing with arm run-off, you could approach that problem from a few different angles. One is simply achieving body feel channel awareness for where your Top position is and how long it takes to get there. If you switch from feel to visual or auditory channel, you will instantly lose a sense for where your body actually is. This is a very common awareness flaw I see everyday in my teaching practice. If you are seeing internal visual picture of your ideal Top position or saying the words to yourself "shorter backswing" (auditory or voice channel), you won't be able to know where your body is. The reason is that you are paying attention to a picture in your head or a voice in your head - you are NOT paying attention to the physical reality of your body.
[/quote]

Fascinating stuff

I remember Faldo mentioning swinging with your eyes closed to tune yourself in with the important input channels

The crazy thing is that I play golf with complete conscious control of my swing, I'm not quite where i would like to be as i would like to just pick a target and react but I have been a plus handicap for ten years playing this way and the idea of playing unconsciously seems like a day in the future that I might never reach but I will try to get there. My backswing chain of thoughts are hand path on natural arc to 730 then allow the push away to occur and push my right hand into the top of my left thumb(what I would interpret as extensor action) and keep my arm motion in sync with the turn of my chest. feels like if my chest had an eye it would always be looking at my hands

One thing that I am sure you have an opinion of is the role of the ball and how hit impulse can alter your technique . I make my best swings when my backswing is done with no concern of the ball and my thought is simply to put the club where I need to put it in the backswing , although I do get what you refer to as flinch, feels like an over powering urge to smash the ball

I will try to learn where the end of my backswing should be as I don't feel any kind of stop signal , I'm not truly aware when exactly my shoulders stop turning, so need to feel when this moment is and increase my awareness of it

Is it a case of trying to trick my SM so that I believe the swing changes I am trying to make are correct?

[Half Flush]

[quote name='mizunostaffer' timestamp='1430729915' post='11493863']
[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430660250' post='11489637']
[quote name='mizunostaffer' timestamp='1430642518' post='11489227']
[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430584115' post='11486193']
Some logical conclusions from a little of what I posted above.

SM has to be trained in proper body motion - the golf swing is NOT "innate" or "natural" (except for 1% of it, or "natural athletic throwing motion", ie throwing a rock or a spear at game while hunting is likely hard-wired into our neural networks). You have to imprint or "program" into the SM what you want the body to do. Once that has been achieved, you have to consciously choose to trust that new skill, and "let it go", ie DO NOT keep obsessing about the swing change that you have attained, trust it and let it remain unconscious. A lot of golfers do this fairly easily on the range but when they step onto the first tee they start "checking it out" to see if the "new move" (which ain't 'new' anymore!) is really happening. That is a form of paralzying "self-consciousness" that will almost always lead to some form of a flinch. When you step outside of yourself and go into second or even third person perspective, to "check out" if your body is doing the move, you weaken the brain-mind/body connection, and you lose your "naturalness" and "flow". You disrupt the communication from brain to body.

You need to perform in sports, acting, dance, music and comedy - from first person perspective, where your energy/intention flows from inside to outside. When you go "outside" and then look back to watch yourself ("inside") to see if you are "doing it right", you get in your own way. You stumble. Kind of like what happens with stuttering. In the speech pathology community, there is an old saying "stuttering is what stutters do when they try NOT to stutter".....in golf, "flinching is what golfers do when they try NOT to flinch"....or in golf, "hitting bad shots is what golfers do when try NOT to hit bad shots ( by "thinking" perfect mechanics) or when they try to hit "perfect shots".

I use the term "making the shift" a lot when working with students on their mental game, and that means shifting from over-controlling/over-thinking/trying too hard CM to freedom/feeling/trusting/ and letting go SM mode.

Bottom line is you need to learn the new mechanics, then deliberately choose to forgot about that piece of the puzzle - and play golf!
[/quote]

Jim

I have put several ideas of yours in play with my own personal swing changes with regard to learning the moves I am trying to do , mainly the idea of swinging at super slow speeds and building it up

A problem I have at the nearer I get to full speed is the greater effect of momentum in backswing and transition and how this changes the "feel" of the swing and also the physical positions achieved

I have never tried this SM trust you mention and although I am going to try it part of me thinks it will not work because my dominant habit will repeat if I don't try to make deliberate conscious alterations of my golf swing to offset my dominant habit and make the correct move.

I'm interested in how is best to program the SM for a new move, for example outward pressure with the right arm and a backswing that stops when the shoulders stop turning

Does visualisation before hand help?

Should I be doing several practice swings before a shot to try to feel the move and then just "trust" that the SM understands that this is the desired move?

It's all very interesting but I have no idea how best to apply it
[/quote]

First, the slow motion and half speed swings are never meant to be exact duplications of your normal speed swing in terms of feel or the dynamic forces at play - they are very different dynamically and so will indeed feel different. The duplication is only in terms of basic body motion positions and club motion moving through space, kind of a "connect the dots" thing. Think of those slower swing speeds as similar to training aids, they are just a tool to get to a better normal swing speed at some point in the future. Like any training aid or exercise, NOT the same thing as the eventual outcome, a normal swing speed that is functioning effectively.

Second, the reason you think that you need to "help out" by consciously attempting to inhibit the bad move dominant habit is because you still think that in fact you actually have that ability to "help" successfully. This is exactly what I was talking about when discussing the limits of the CM in terms of actually precisely controlling body parts that are moving at high rates of speed in very short time intervals. It is simply an illusion that we have that kind of conscious real time precision control - we don't actually have that ability. Once you "get" that CM "you" does not have that power, you will begin to make progress, because now it is all about communicating with your SM and finding ways to connnect with it, which does have the ability to inhibit (to some degree) a dominant habit and does have the ability, with sufficient practice, to form new movement patterns.

My point was that the CM trying to "force" a swing change or stopping a flaw usually ends up with some kind of a flinch happening and NO change to the flaw. So now you still have your old bad swing flaw but with a flinch added on top of it!

You learn to eventually eliminate swing flaws and to form positive new patterns through the process of instruction and training. Swing changes are never something that you "do" - they are the end result of a process. In the meantime, you play with the swing you actually have, and alter your aim to account for your directional miss.

The issue of how to communicate new pattern information to the SM is a huge topic - could be its own thread! But yes - visualization is one way, but not the most effective. Okay in the very early stages, but eventually you graduate from visual channel to feel. You can train the feel channel to form a direct line of communication with the SM. But you need to use objective feedback to train your feel channel so that what you are feeling is actually corresponding with what your body and club are truly doing.

Your brain uses two parallel processing systems, in tandem, when making a movement pattern change. One I call the Feed Forward System, is the SM sending information to your muscles, unconsciously at normal speeds, so that your correct muscles can fire in the correct sequence, and length of time, so that the proper body motion occurs. You can change the Feed Forward System through slow motion training, visualization, and basically achieving the Deep Insight discussed above. The Sensory Feedback System is using your feel channel to sense what the body is doing in real time, in the moment. Having what I call "awareness of awareness" or one part of the mind observing what the rest of the mind and/or body is doing, in the moment.

So if you are working on the proper arm pushaway during takeaway, for example, and your old swing bad habit was to activate your right biceps and bend your right arm while pulling it inside and around you, you can sense whether you have actually activated your triceps and are keeping your right arm straight - or if you are instead doing your old move. Knowing clearly - with 100% certainty, through a trained feel channel, and proven with objective feedback like video or a training aid - that you are indeed doing the new move, will strengthen the pathway of the Feed Forward System that is creating that new move in the first place.

Which is why in the early stages of training, I often ask my students to allow themselves to do the old bad habit, but simply notice themselves doing it, in feel channel. That alone will tend to quickly weaken that habit. Then I will have them make alternate swings with the old vs new pattern, in slow motion or half speed, often with their eyes closes, which makes access to feel channel easier.

When they can clearly feel the difference, they begin to strengthen the new pattern, and weaken the old pattern. Of course, this kind of training usually works best after they have achieved that Deep Insight.

With your issue, an overly-long backswing with arm run-off, you could approach that problem from a few different angles. One is simply achieving body feel channel awareness for where your Top position is and how long it takes to get there. If you switch from feel to visual or auditory channel, you will instantly lose a sense for where your body actually is. This is a very common awareness flaw I see everyday in my teaching practice. If you are seeing internal visual picture of your ideal Top position or saying the words to yourself "shorter backswing" (auditory or voice channel), you won't be able to know where your body is. The reason is that you are paying attention to a picture in your head or a voice in your head - you are NOT paying attention to the physical reality of your body.
[/quote]

Fascinating stuff

I remember Faldo mentioning swinging with your eyes closed to tune yourself in with the important input channels

The crazy thing is that I play golf with complete conscious control of my swing, I'm not quite where i would like to be as i would like to just pick a target and react but I have been a plus handicap for ten years playing this way and the idea of playing unconsciously seems like a day in the future that I might never reach but I will try to get there. My backswing chain of thoughts are hand path on natural arc to 730 then allow the push away to occur and push my right hand into the top of my left thumb(what I would interpret as extensor action) and keep my arm motion in sync with the turn of my chest. feels like if my chest had an eye it would always be looking at my hands

One thing that I am sure you have an opinion of is the role of the ball and how hit impulse can alter your technique . I make my best swings when my backswing is done with no concern of the ball and my thought is simply to put the club where I need to put it in the backswing , although I do get what you refer to as flinch, feels like an over powering urge to smash the ball

I will try to learn where the end of my backswing should be as I don't feel any kind of stop signal , I'm not truly aware when exactly my shoulders stop turning, so need to feel when this moment is and increase my awareness of it

Is it a case of trying to trick my SM so that I believe the swing changes I am trying to make are correct?
[/quote]

This is a fascinating post to me...

How do you get a +handicap golfer to get better without making what is already clearly unconscious conscious?

[starsail85]

[quote name='Half Flush' timestamp='1430732257' post='11493881']
[quote name='mizunostaffer' timestamp='1430729915' post='11493863']
[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430660250' post='11489637']
[quote name='mizunostaffer' timestamp='1430642518' post='11489227']
[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430584115' post='11486193']
Some logical conclusions from a little of what I posted above.

SM has to be trained in proper body motion - the golf swing is NOT "innate" or "natural" (except for 1% of it, or "natural athletic throwing motion", ie throwing a rock or a spear at game while hunting is likely hard-wired into our neural networks). You have to imprint or "program" into the SM what you want the body to do. Once that has been achieved, you have to consciously choose to trust that new skill, and "let it go", ie DO NOT keep obsessing about the swing change that you have attained, trust it and let it remain unconscious. A lot of golfers do this fairly easily on the range but when they step onto the first tee they start "checking it out" to see if the "new move" (which ain't 'new' anymore!) is really happening. That is a form of paralzying "self-consciousness" that will almost always lead to some form of a flinch. When you step outside of yourself and go into second or even third person perspective, to "check out" if your body is doing the move, you weaken the brain-mind/body connection, and you lose your "naturalness" and "flow". You disrupt the communication from brain to body.

You need to perform in sports, acting, dance, music and comedy - from first person perspective, where your energy/intention flows from inside to outside. When you go "outside" and then look back to watch yourself ("inside") to see if you are "doing it right", you get in your own way. You stumble. Kind of like what happens with stuttering. In the speech pathology community, there is an old saying "stuttering is what stutters do when they try NOT to stutter".....in golf, "flinching is what golfers do when they try NOT to flinch"....or in golf, "hitting bad shots is what golfers do when try NOT to hit bad shots ( by "thinking" perfect mechanics) or when they try to hit "perfect shots".

I use the term "making the shift" a lot when working with students on their mental game, and that means shifting from over-controlling/over-thinking/trying too hard CM to freedom/feeling/trusting/ and letting go SM mode.

Bottom line is you need to learn the new mechanics, then deliberately choose to forgot about that piece of the puzzle - and play golf!
[/quote]

Jim

I have put several ideas of yours in play with my own personal swing changes with regard to learning the moves I am trying to do , mainly the idea of swinging at super slow speeds and building it up

A problem I have at the nearer I get to full speed is the greater effect of momentum in backswing and transition and how this changes the "feel" of the swing and also the physical positions achieved

I have never tried this SM trust you mention and although I am going to try it part of me thinks it will not work because my dominant habit will repeat if I don't try to make deliberate conscious alterations of my golf swing to offset my dominant habit and make the correct move.

I'm interested in how is best to program the SM for a new move, for example outward pressure with the right arm and a backswing that stops when the shoulders stop turning

Does visualisation before hand help?

Should I be doing several practice swings before a shot to try to feel the move and then just "trust" that the SM understands that this is the desired move?

It's all very interesting but I have no idea how best to apply it
[/quote]

First, the slow motion and half speed swings are never meant to be exact duplications of your normal speed swing in terms of feel or the dynamic forces at play - they are very different dynamically and so will indeed feel different. The duplication is only in terms of basic body motion positions and club motion moving through space, kind of a "connect the dots" thing. Think of those slower swing speeds as similar to training aids, they are just a tool to get to a better normal swing speed at some point in the future. Like any training aid or exercise, NOT the same thing as the eventual outcome, a normal swing speed that is functioning effectively.

Second, the reason you think that you need to "help out" by consciously attempting to inhibit the bad move dominant habit is because you still think that in fact you actually have that ability to "help" successfully. This is exactly what I was talking about when discussing the limits of the CM in terms of actually precisely controlling body parts that are moving at high rates of speed in very short time intervals. It is simply an illusion that we have that kind of conscious real time precision control - we don't actually have that ability. Once you "get" that CM "you" does not have that power, you will begin to make progress, because now it is all about communicating with your SM and finding ways to connnect with it, which does have the ability to inhibit (to some degree) a dominant habit and does have the ability, with sufficient practice, to form new movement patterns.

My point was that the CM trying to "force" a swing change or stopping a flaw usually ends up with some kind of a flinch happening and NO change to the flaw. So now you still have your old bad swing flaw but with a flinch added on top of it!

You learn to eventually eliminate swing flaws and to form positive new patterns through the process of instruction and training. Swing changes are never something that you "do" - they are the end result of a process. In the meantime, you play with the swing you actually have, and alter your aim to account for your directional miss.

The issue of how to communicate new pattern information to the SM is a huge topic - could be its own thread! But yes - visualization is one way, but not the most effective. Okay in the very early stages, but eventually you graduate from visual channel to feel. You can train the feel channel to form a direct line of communication with the SM. But you need to use objective feedback to train your feel channel so that what you are feeling is actually corresponding with what your body and club are truly doing.

Your brain uses two parallel processing systems, in tandem, when making a movement pattern change. One I call the Feed Forward System, is the SM sending information to your muscles, unconsciously at normal speeds, so that your correct muscles can fire in the correct sequence, and length of time, so that the proper body motion occurs. You can change the Feed Forward System through slow motion training, visualization, and basically achieving the Deep Insight discussed above. The Sensory Feedback System is using your feel channel to sense what the body is doing in real time, in the moment. Having what I call "awareness of awareness" or one part of the mind observing what the rest of the mind and/or body is doing, in the moment.

So if you are working on the proper arm pushaway during takeaway, for example, and your old swing bad habit was to activate your right biceps and bend your right arm while pulling it inside and around you, you can sense whether you have actually activated your triceps and are keeping your right arm straight - or if you are instead doing your old move. Knowing clearly - with 100% certainty, through a trained feel channel, and proven with objective feedback like video or a training aid - that you are indeed doing the new move, will strengthen the pathway of the Feed Forward System that is creating that new move in the first place.

Which is why in the early stages of training, I often ask my students to allow themselves to do the old bad habit, but simply notice themselves doing it, in feel channel. That alone will tend to quickly weaken that habit. Then I will have them make alternate swings with the old vs new pattern, in slow motion or half speed, often with their eyes closes, which makes access to feel channel easier.

When they can clearly feel the difference, they begin to strengthen the new pattern, and weaken the old pattern. Of course, this kind of training usually works best after they have achieved that Deep Insight.

With your issue, an overly-long backswing with arm run-off, you could approach that problem from a few different angles. One is simply achieving body feel channel awareness for where your Top position is and how long it takes to get there. If you switch from feel to visual or auditory channel, you will instantly lose a sense for where your body actually is. This is a very common awareness flaw I see everyday in my teaching practice. If you are seeing internal visual picture of your ideal Top position or saying the words to yourself "shorter backswing" (auditory or voice channel), you won't be able to know where your body is. The reason is that you are paying attention to a picture in your head or a voice in your head - you are NOT paying attention to the physical reality of your body.
[/quote]

Fascinating stuff

I remember Faldo mentioning swinging with your eyes closed to tune yourself in with the important input channels

The crazy thing is that I play golf with complete conscious control of my swing, I'm not quite where i would like to be as i would like to just pick a target and react but I have been a plus handicap for ten years playing this way and the idea of playing unconsciously seems like a day in the future that I might never reach but I will try to get there. My backswing chain of thoughts are hand path on natural arc to 730 then allow the push away to occur and push my right hand into the top of my left thumb(what I would interpret as extensor action) and keep my arm motion in sync with the turn of my chest. feels like if my chest had an eye it would always be looking at my hands

One thing that I am sure you have an opinion of is the role of the ball and how hit impulse can alter your technique . I make my best swings when my backswing is done with no concern of the ball and my thought is simply to put the club where I need to put it in the backswing , although I do get what you refer to as flinch, feels like an over powering urge to smash the ball

I will try to learn where the end of my backswing should be as I don't feel any kind of stop signal , I'm not truly aware when exactly my shoulders stop turning, so need to feel when this moment is and increase my awareness of it

Is it a case of trying to trick my SM so that I believe the swing changes I am trying to make are correct?
[/quote]

This is a fascinating post to me...

How do you get a +handicap golfer to get better without making what is already clearly unconscious conscious?
[/quote]

The thing is my golf swing and short game is a conscious act I have a mechanical thought process on every shot...

[mikah]

SM has to be trained in proper body motion - the golf swing is NOT "innate" or "natural" (except for 1% of it, or "natural athletic throwing motion", ie throwing a rock or a spear at game while hunting is likely hard-wired into our neural networks). You have to imprint or "program" into the SM what you want the body to do. Once that has been achieved, you have to consciously choose to trust that new skill, and "let it go", ie DO NOT keep obsessing about the swing change that you have attained, trust it and let it remain unconscious. A lot of golfers do this fairly easily on the range but when they step onto the first tee they start "checking it out" to see if the "new move" (which ain't 'new' anymore!) is really happening. That is a form of paralzying "self-consciousness" that will almost always lead to some form of a flinch. When you step outside of yourself and go into second or even third person perspective, to "check out" if your body is doing the move, you weaken the brain-mind/body connection, and you lose your "naturalness" and "flow". You disrupt the communication from brain to body.

You need to perform in sports, acting, dance, music and comedy - from first person perspective, where your energy/intention flows from inside to outside. When you go "outside" and then look back to watch yourself ("inside") to see if you are "doing it right", you get in your own way. You stumble. Kind of like what happens with stuttering. In the speech pathology community, there is an old saying "stuttering is what stutters do when they try NOT to stutter".....in golf, "flinching is what golfers do when they try NOT to flinch"....or in golf, "hitting bad shots is what golfers do when try NOT to hit bad shots ( by "thinking" perfect mechanics) or when they try to hit "perfect shots".

I use the term "making the shift" a lot when working with students on their mental game, and that means shifting from over-controlling/over-thinking/trying too hard CM to freedom/feeling/trusting/ and letting go SM mode.

Bottom line is you need to learn the new mechanics, then deliberately choose to forgot about that piece of the puzzle - and play golf!


Jim

I have put several ideas of yours in play with my own personal swing changes with regard to learning the moves I am trying to do , mainly the idea of swinging at super slow speeds and building it up

A problem I have at the nearer I get to full speed is the greater effect of momentum in backswing and transition and how this changes the "feel" of the swing and also the physical positions achieved

I have never tried this SM trust you mention and although I am going to try it part of me thinks it will not work because my dominant habit will repeat if I don't try to make deliberate conscious alterations of my golf swing to offset my dominant habit and make the correct move.

I'm interested in how is best to program the SM for a new move, for example outward pressure with the right arm and a backswing that stops when the shoulders stop turning

Does visualisation before hand help?

Should I be doing several practice swings before a shot to try to feel the move and then just "trust" that the SM understands that this is the desired move?

It's all very interesting but I have no idea how best to apply it


First, the slow motion and half speed swings are never meant to be exact duplications of your normal speed swing in terms of feel or the dynamic forces at play - they are very different dynamically and so will indeed feel different. The duplication is only in terms of basic body motion positions and club motion moving through space, kind of a "connect the dots" thing. Think of those slower swing speeds as similar to training aids, they are just a tool to get to a better normal swing speed at some point in the future. Like any training aid or exercise, NOT the same thing as the eventual outcome, a normal swing speed that is functioning effectively.

Second, the reason you think that you need to "help out" by consciously attempting to inhibit the bad move dominant habit is because you still think that in fact you actually have that ability to "help" successfully. This is exactly what I was talking about when discussing the limits of the CM in terms of actually precisely controlling body parts that are moving at high rates of speed in very short time intervals. It is simply an illusion that we have that kind of conscious real time precision control - we don't actually have that ability. Once you "get" that CM "you" does not have that power, you will begin to make progress, because now it is all about communicating with your SM and finding ways to connnect with it, which does have the ability to inhibit (to some degree) a dominant habit and does have the ability, with sufficient practice, to form new movement patterns.

My point was that the CM trying to "force" a swing change or stopping a flaw usually ends up with some kind of a flinch happening and NO change to the flaw. So now you still have your old bad swing flaw but with a flinch added on top of it!

You learn to eventually eliminate swing flaws and to form positive new patterns through the process of instruction and training. Swing changes are never something that you "do" - they are the end result of a process. In the meantime, you play with the swing you actually have, and alter your aim to account for your directional miss.

The issue of how to communicate new pattern information to the SM is a huge topic - could be its own thread! But yes - visualization is one way, but not the most effective. Okay in the very early stages, but eventually you graduate from visual channel to feel. You can train the feel channel to form a direct line of communication with the SM. But you need to use objective feedback to train your feel channel so that what you are feeling is actually corresponding with what your body and club are truly doing.

Your brain uses two parallel processing systems, in tandem, when making a movement pattern change. One I call the Feed Forward System, is the SM sending information to your muscles, unconsciously at normal speeds, so that your correct muscles can fire in the correct sequence, and length of time, so that the proper body motion occurs. You can change the Feed Forward System through slow motion training, visualization, and basically achieving the Deep Insight discussed above. The Sensory Feedback System is using your feel channel to sense what the body is doing in real time, in the moment. Having what I call "awareness of awareness" or one part of the mind observing what the rest of the mind and/or body is doing, in the moment.

So if you are working on the proper arm pushaway during takeaway, for example, and your old swing bad habit was to activate your right biceps and bend your right arm while pulling it inside and around you, you can sense whether you have actually activated your triceps and are keeping your right arm straight - or if you are instead doing your old move. Knowing clearly - with 100% certainty, through a trained feel channel, and proven with objective feedback like video or a training aid - that you are indeed doing the new move, will strengthen the pathway of the Feed Forward System that is creating that new move in the first place.

Which is why in the early stages of training, I often ask my students to allow themselves to do the old bad habit, but simply notice themselves doing it, in feel channel. That alone will tend to quickly weaken that habit. Then I will have them make alternate swings with the old vs new pattern, in slow motion or half speed, often with their eyes closes, which makes access to feel channel easier.

When they can clearly feel the difference, they begin to strengthen the new pattern, and weaken the old pattern. Of course, this kind of training usually works best after they have achieved that Deep Insight.

With your issue, an overly-long backswing with arm run-off, you could approach that problem from a few different angles. One is simply achieving body feel channel awareness for where your Top position is and how long it takes to get there. If you switch from feel to visual or auditory channel, you will instantly lose a sense for where your body actually is. This is a very common awareness flaw I see everyday in my teaching practice. If you are seeing internal visual picture of your ideal Top position or saying the words to yourself "shorter backswing" (auditory or voice channel), you won't be able to know where your body is. The reason is that you are paying attention to a picture in your head or a voice in your head - you are NOT paying attention to the physical reality of your body.


Fascinating stuff

I remember Faldo mentioning swinging with your eyes closed to tune yourself in with the important input channels

The crazy thing is that I play golf with complete conscious control of my swing, I'm not quite where i would like to be as i would like to just pick a target and react but I have been a plus handicap for ten years playing this way and the idea of playing unconsciously seems like a day in the future that I might never reach but I will try to get there. My backswing chain of thoughts are hand path on natural arc to 730 then allow the push away to occur and push my right hand into the top of my left thumb(what I would interpret as extensor action) and keep my arm motion in sync with the turn of my chest. feels like if my chest had an eye it would always be looking at my hands

One thing that I am sure you have an opinion of is the role of the ball and how hit impulse can alter your technique . [b]I make my best swings when my backswing is done with no concern of the ball and my thought is simply to put the club where I need to put it in the backswing [/b], although I do get what you refer to as flinch, feels like an over powering urge to smash the ball

I will try to learn where the end of my backswing should be as I don't feel any kind of stop signal , I'm not truly aware when exactly my shoulders stop turning, so need to feel when this moment is and increase my awareness of it

Is it a case of trying to trick my SM so that I believe the swing changes I am trying to make are correct?


This is a fascinating post to me...

How do you get a +handicap golfer to get better without making what is already clearly unconscious conscious?


The thing is my golf swing and short game is a conscious act I have a mechanical thought process on every shot...


Mizunostaffer,

Great post, thank you. Its no wonder that your a plus hdcp.

[b]I make my best swings when my backswing is done with no concern of the ball and my thought is simply to put the club where I need to put it in the backswing [/b]

What your calling "conscious act" is simply calling up a preprogram in your SC
by what Dr Gabrielle Wulf calls 'external focus'.

If you were swinging as a conscious act, you would have an internal focus on all the "wriggling body parts"


[color="#000000"]Ernest Jones:[/color]
[color="#000000"]"Those who think in terms of golf being a science have, unfortunately, tried to part from each other the arms, the head, the shoulder, the body, the hips, and the legs. They make the golfer a worm cut into bits with each part wriggling in every-which-way direction."[/color]

[mc3jack]

<<<<<The thing is my golf swing and short game is a conscious act I have a mechanical thought process on every shot...>>>

I hear ya! There is a list of decisions to make regarding lie, shot shape, trajectory etc. besides the calming ritual of going thru the setup fundamentals. I love playing Look and Go but it's when I'm playing for laughs . . . usually at the absurd misses I'll make because I slacked on a fundamental and 'reverted' to the silly swing I invented for myself as a beginner. You know... the "natural swing" jokers try to peddle.

The breakdown is similar to executive decision making. There's analysis, away from the ball. Then decision-makin -- what kind of setup and swing I'm going to use, and how I'm going to do it. The actual shot, where analysis and decisions don't belong....*thats* where target or shot shape focus comes into play. I may use a swing thot that fits the kind of shot I want, if I know that's worked in the past or in practice.

For example, grip pressures to create a draw or fade. Or right knee pressure with a driver. Or, somewhat like Mizunostaffer, I 'know' that if I backswing toward my right shoulder, tilt switch with my pivot and 'feel' like I'm driving the right shoulder, arm-hand-shaft downward, I'm going to get reliable shot results. But these things are more like security blankets for execution, because my subconscious 'knows' and 'likes' the outcomes its seen from these keys in the past.

But I'm not thinking "Do That". In the actual swing, I just exhale and execute whatever I've told my subconscious I've decided to do. Trouble happens when I decide I want a certain shot, and my subconscious is telling me back, "You sure about that, buddy?" That's where the 'hit it and hope' shots come from.

Ben Hogan used to have pal that maybe represented his subconscious at times. He called his pal "Henny Bogan." I have a buddy who carries a pad in his bag and 'listens' to what his 'spirit guides' tell him about his swing using automatic writing. I'm pretty sure he's really just translating his subconscious feels. I yakked at him about how important balance was in the swing...next time I see him he's striping it . . . I say, "what's up?" . . . he says his 'spirit guides' are talking to him about feeling his shots in his feet. . .

[Jim Waldron]

[quote name='mizunostaffer' timestamp='1430729915' post='11493863']
[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430660250' post='11489637']
[quote name='mizunostaffer' timestamp='1430642518' post='11489227']
[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430584115' post='11486193']
Some logical conclusions from a little of what I posted above.

SM has to be trained in proper body motion - the golf swing is NOT "innate" or "natural" (except for 1% of it, or "natural athletic throwing motion", ie throwing a rock or a spear at game while hunting is likely hard-wired into our neural networks). You have to imprint or "program" into the SM what you want the body to do. Once that has been achieved, you have to consciously choose to trust that new skill, and "let it go", ie DO NOT keep obsessing about the swing change that you have attained, trust it and let it remain unconscious. A lot of golfers do this fairly easily on the range but when they step onto the first tee they start "checking it out" to see if the "new move" (which ain't 'new' anymore!) is really happening. That is a form of paralzying "self-consciousness" that will almost always lead to some form of a flinch. When you step outside of yourself and go into second or even third person perspective, to "check out" if your body is doing the move, you weaken the brain-mind/body connection, and you lose your "naturalness" and "flow". You disrupt the communication from brain to body.

You need to perform in sports, acting, dance, music and comedy - from first person perspective, where your energy/intention flows from inside to outside. When you go "outside" and then look back to watch yourself ("inside") to see if you are "doing it right", you get in your own way. You stumble. Kind of like what happens with stuttering. In the speech pathology community, there is an old saying "stuttering is what stutters do when they try NOT to stutter".....in golf, "flinching is what golfers do when they try NOT to flinch"....or in golf, "hitting bad shots is what golfers do when try NOT to hit bad shots ( by "thinking" perfect mechanics) or when they try to hit "perfect shots".

I use the term "making the shift" a lot when working with students on their mental game, and that means shifting from over-controlling/over-thinking/trying too hard CM to freedom/feeling/trusting/ and letting go SM mode.

Bottom line is you need to learn the new mechanics, then deliberately choose to forgot about that piece of the puzzle - and play golf!
[/quote]

Jim

I have put several ideas of yours in play with my own personal swing changes with regard to learning the moves I am trying to do , mainly the idea of swinging at super slow speeds and building it up

A problem I have at the nearer I get to full speed is the greater effect of momentum in backswing and transition and how this changes the "feel" of the swing and also the physical positions achieved

I have never tried this SM trust you mention and although I am going to try it part of me thinks it will not work because my dominant habit will repeat if I don't try to make deliberate conscious alterations of my golf swing to offset my dominant habit and make the correct move.

I'm interested in how is best to program the SM for a new move, for example outward pressure with the right arm and a backswing that stops when the shoulders stop turning

Does visualisation before hand help?

Should I be doing several practice swings before a shot to try to feel the move and then just "trust" that the SM understands that this is the desired move?

It's all very interesting but I have no idea how best to apply it
[/quote]

First, the slow motion and half speed swings are never meant to be exact duplications of your normal speed swing in terms of feel or the dynamic forces at play - they are very different dynamically and so will indeed feel different. The duplication is only in terms of basic body motion positions and club motion moving through space, kind of a "connect the dots" thing. Think of those slower swing speeds as similar to training aids, they are just a tool to get to a better normal swing speed at some point in the future. Like any training aid or exercise, NOT the same thing as the eventual outcome, a normal swing speed that is functioning effectively.

Second, the reason you think that you need to "help out" by consciously attempting to inhibit the bad move dominant habit is because you still think that in fact you actually have that ability to "help" successfully. This is exactly what I was talking about when discussing the limits of the CM in terms of actually precisely controlling body parts that are moving at high rates of speed in very short time intervals. It is simply an illusion that we have that kind of conscious real time precision control - we don't actually have that ability. Once you "get" that CM "you" does not have that power, you will begin to make progress, because now it is all about communicating with your SM and finding ways to connnect with it, which does have the ability to inhibit (to some degree) a dominant habit and does have the ability, with sufficient practice, to form new movement patterns.

My point was that the CM trying to "force" a swing change or stopping a flaw usually ends up with some kind of a flinch happening and NO change to the flaw. So now you still have your old bad swing flaw but with a flinch added on top of it!

You learn to eventually eliminate swing flaws and to form positive new patterns through the process of instruction and training. Swing changes are never something that you "do" - they are the end result of a process. In the meantime, you play with the swing you actually have, and alter your aim to account for your directional miss.

The issue of how to communicate new pattern information to the SM is a huge topic - could be its own thread! But yes - visualization is one way, but not the most effective. Okay in the very early stages, but eventually you graduate from visual channel to feel. You can train the feel channel to form a direct line of communication with the SM. But you need to use objective feedback to train your feel channel so that what you are feeling is actually corresponding with what your body and club are truly doing.

Your brain uses two parallel processing systems, in tandem, when making a movement pattern change. One I call the Feed Forward System, is the SM sending information to your muscles, unconsciously at normal speeds, so that your correct muscles can fire in the correct sequence, and length of time, so that the proper body motion occurs. You can change the Feed Forward System through slow motion training, visualization, and basically achieving the Deep Insight discussed above. The Sensory Feedback System is using your feel channel to sense what the body is doing in real time, in the moment. Having what I call "awareness of awareness" or one part of the mind observing what the rest of the mind and/or body is doing, in the moment.

So if you are working on the proper arm pushaway during takeaway, for example, and your old swing bad habit was to activate your right biceps and bend your right arm while pulling it inside and around you, you can sense whether you have actually activated your triceps and are keeping your right arm straight - or if you are instead doing your old move. Knowing clearly - with 100% certainty, through a trained feel channel, and proven with objective feedback like video or a training aid - that you are indeed doing the new move, will strengthen the pathway of the Feed Forward System that is creating that new move in the first place.

Which is why in the early stages of training, I often ask my students to allow themselves to do the old bad habit, but simply notice themselves doing it, in feel channel. That alone will tend to quickly weaken that habit. Then I will have them make alternate swings with the old vs new pattern, in slow motion or half speed, often with their eyes closes, which makes access to feel channel easier.

When they can clearly feel the difference, they begin to strengthen the new pattern, and weaken the old pattern. Of course, this kind of training usually works best after they have achieved that Deep Insight.

With your issue, an overly-long backswing with arm run-off, you could approach that problem from a few different angles. One is simply achieving body feel channel awareness for where your Top position is and how long it takes to get there. If you switch from feel to visual or auditory channel, you will instantly lose a sense for where your body actually is. This is a very common awareness flaw I see everyday in my teaching practice. If you are seeing internal visual picture of your ideal Top position or saying the words to yourself "shorter backswing" (auditory or voice channel), you won't be able to know where your body is. The reason is that you are paying attention to a picture in your head or a voice in your head - you are NOT paying attention to the physical reality of your body.
[/quote]

Fascinating stuff

I remember Faldo mentioning swinging with your eyes closed to tune yourself in with the important input channels

The crazy thing is that I play golf with complete conscious control of my swing, I'm not quite where i would like to be as i would like to just pick a target and react but I have been a plus handicap for ten years playing this way and the idea of playing unconsciously seems like a day in the future that I might never reach but I will try to get there. My backswing chain of thoughts are hand path on natural arc to 730 then allow the push away to occur and push my right hand into the top of my left thumb(what I would interpret as extensor action) and keep my arm motion in sync with the turn of my chest. feels like if my chest had an eye it would always be looking at my hands

One thing that I am sure you have an opinion of is the role of the ball and how hit impulse can alter your technique . I make my best swings when my backswing is done with no concern of the ball and my thought is simply to put the club where I need to put it in the backswing , although I do get what you refer to as flinch, feels like an over powering urge to smash the ball

I will try to learn where the end of my backswing should be as I don't feel any kind of stop signal , I'm not truly aware when exactly my shoulders stop turning, so need to feel when this moment is and increase my awareness of it

Is it a case of trying to trick my SM so that I believe the swing changes I am trying to make are correct?
[/quote]

Lots of very important issues here, about how to go about making a swing change effectively.

1. Mz - you need to be 100% clear about the change, ie make sure you have identified correctly the most important thing to work on, either a Fatal Flaw to eliminate, or a new fundamental move to ingrain.

2. As a plus handicap, it is very likely that you have already achieved a swing controlled by your SM. The way it works is best explained by an analogy. Let say your goal is to build an automatic door on your house, the kind that has a sensor that activates to open the door when you cross the threshold. So you build the door, ie cut the hole in the wall, frame it in, install the door, etc. The last thing to install is the automatic opening mechanism. In the meantime, until you do in fact install that mechanism, you are using the door to enter and leave your house, and you lock it with a key. Every time you enter, you use the key to unlock the door. Using CM swing feels (I dont like "thoughts" since visual and auditory images have a very poor track record at normal swing speeds) as a way of triggering your SM swing program is like using the key to open your door. The term "swing keys" is used a lot on Tour.

3. One test you can use to see if your swing change is now a habit that will execute automatically, is to count backwards from 100, once you are set up over the ball, by threes - "100, 97, 94, 91". When you hit "91", you start your takeaway, ie use that number as your swing trigger. And keep counting till the Finish. Try this for about a half hour. You will know by then whether your swing is on auto pilot, or whether your SM still needs a CM key to get the program running.

4. It is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to clearly distinguish between effective "self-awareness" mode of functioning, always from first person in feel channel, and neurotic "am I doing it right" paralzying self-consciousness, which is always from second or even third person perspective, and in visual or auditory channel. The first way allows you to keep your athletic "naturalness" and the SM working flawlessly, and allows your CM to notice what is actually happening with your body and club motion. The second way - you are lost! The first way is passive awareness, the second is actively interfering by trying to "help out". Hogan said that he tried to "remove myself from my golf swing. My amateur partners are always trying to 'add themselves'".

The point being two things: until you install the automatic opening mechanism (lots of reps), you will need to use a key to open the door. Once you have indeed installed the auto mechanism (true dominant habit formation) you can throw away the key!!

One of the problems with using CM keys, when you really don't need to use them anymore, is that under stress/pressure, your CM tends to add an emotional element to the mental focus on the swing key, kind of like using the key to unlock the door with too much pressure, and you end up twisting the key in the lock so quickly that the key gets stuck in the lock and the door remains shut. In other words, a flinch.

Your CM can ruin your golf shot by "trying to help out". At some point in your evolution as a player, if you are truly going to breakthrough to the next level of performance, you need to start trusting the swing you have - flaws and all - and commit to your target, and let go. "Letting go" is a skill that can be learned, just like learning to pivot properly.

Taming the CM in understanding it's proper role is key. It is vitally important to know what in your SM swing map needs to become conscious, ie that one key move you are going to work on, so that you can fix it, and what needs to remain unconscious!

My advanced students often hear me say in response to a detailed technical question - "you don't need to worry about that, or even know anything about it. That piece of your swing is fine - leave it alone".

[starsail85]

[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430760467' post='11496073']
[quote name='mizunostaffer' timestamp='1430729915' post='11493863']
[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430660250' post='11489637']
[quote name='mizunostaffer' timestamp='1430642518' post='11489227']
[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430584115' post='11486193']
Some logical conclusions from a little of what I posted above.

SM has to be trained in proper body motion - the golf swing is NOT "innate" or "natural" (except for 1% of it, or "natural athletic throwing motion", ie throwing a rock or a spear at game while hunting is likely hard-wired into our neural networks). You have to imprint or "program" into the SM what you want the body to do. Once that has been achieved, you have to consciously choose to trust that new skill, and "let it go", ie DO NOT keep obsessing about the swing change that you have attained, trust it and let it remain unconscious. A lot of golfers do this fairly easily on the range but when they step onto the first tee they start "checking it out" to see if the "new move" (which ain't 'new' anymore!) is really happening. That is a form of paralzying "self-consciousness" that will almost always lead to some form of a flinch. When you step outside of yourself and go into second or even third person perspective, to "check out" if your body is doing the move, you weaken the brain-mind/body connection, and you lose your "naturalness" and "flow". You disrupt the communication from brain to body.

You need to perform in sports, acting, dance, music and comedy - from first person perspective, where your energy/intention flows from inside to outside. When you go "outside" and then look back to watch yourself ("inside") to see if you are "doing it right", you get in your own way. You stumble. Kind of like what happens with stuttering. In the speech pathology community, there is an old saying "stuttering is what stutters do when they try NOT to stutter".....in golf, "flinching is what golfers do when they try NOT to flinch"....or in golf, "hitting bad shots is what golfers do when try NOT to hit bad shots ( by "thinking" perfect mechanics) or when they try to hit "perfect shots".

I use the term "making the shift" a lot when working with students on their mental game, and that means shifting from over-controlling/over-thinking/trying too hard CM to freedom/feeling/trusting/ and letting go SM mode.

Bottom line is you need to learn the new mechanics, then deliberately choose to forgot about that piece of the puzzle - and play golf!
[/quote]

Jim

I have put several ideas of yours in play with my own personal swing changes with regard to learning the moves I am trying to do , mainly the idea of swinging at super slow speeds and building it up

A problem I have at the nearer I get to full speed is the greater effect of momentum in backswing and transition and how this changes the "feel" of the swing and also the physical positions achieved

I have never tried this SM trust you mention and although I am going to try it part of me thinks it will not work because my dominant habit will repeat if I don't try to make deliberate conscious alterations of my golf swing to offset my dominant habit and make the correct move.

I'm interested in how is best to program the SM for a new move, for example outward pressure with the right arm and a backswing that stops when the shoulders stop turning

Does visualisation before hand help?

Should I be doing several practice swings before a shot to try to feel the move and then just "trust" that the SM understands that this is the desired move?

It's all very interesting but I have no idea how best to apply it
[/quote]

First, the slow motion and half speed swings are never meant to be exact duplications of your normal speed swing in terms of feel or the dynamic forces at play - they are very different dynamically and so will indeed feel different. The duplication is only in terms of basic body motion positions and club motion moving through space, kind of a "connect the dots" thing. Think of those slower swing speeds as similar to training aids, they are just a tool to get to a better normal swing speed at some point in the future. Like any training aid or exercise, NOT the same thing as the eventual outcome, a normal swing speed that is functioning effectively.

Second, the reason you think that you need to "help out" by consciously attempting to inhibit the bad move dominant habit is because you still think that in fact you actually have that ability to "help" successfully. This is exactly what I was talking about when discussing the limits of the CM in terms of actually precisely controlling body parts that are moving at high rates of speed in very short time intervals. It is simply an illusion that we have that kind of conscious real time precision control - we don't actually have that ability. Once you "get" that CM "you" does not have that power, you will begin to make progress, because now it is all about communicating with your SM and finding ways to connnect with it, which does have the ability to inhibit (to some degree) a dominant habit and does have the ability, with sufficient practice, to form new movement patterns.

My point was that the CM trying to "force" a swing change or stopping a flaw usually ends up with some kind of a flinch happening and NO change to the flaw. So now you still have your old bad swing flaw but with a flinch added on top of it!

You learn to eventually eliminate swing flaws and to form positive new patterns through the process of instruction and training. Swing changes are never something that you "do" - they are the end result of a process. In the meantime, you play with the swing you actually have, and alter your aim to account for your directional miss.

The issue of how to communicate new pattern information to the SM is a huge topic - could be its own thread! But yes - visualization is one way, but not the most effective. Okay in the very early stages, but eventually you graduate from visual channel to feel. You can train the feel channel to form a direct line of communication with the SM. But you need to use objective feedback to train your feel channel so that what you are feeling is actually corresponding with what your body and club are truly doing.

Your brain uses two parallel processing systems, in tandem, when making a movement pattern change. One I call the Feed Forward System, is the SM sending information to your muscles, unconsciously at normal speeds, so that your correct muscles can fire in the correct sequence, and length of time, so that the proper body motion occurs. You can change the Feed Forward System through slow motion training, visualization, and basically achieving the Deep Insight discussed above. The Sensory Feedback System is using your feel channel to sense what the body is doing in real time, in the moment. Having what I call "awareness of awareness" or one part of the mind observing what the rest of the mind and/or body is doing, in the moment.

So if you are working on the proper arm pushaway during takeaway, for example, and your old swing bad habit was to activate your right biceps and bend your right arm while pulling it inside and around you, you can sense whether you have actually activated your triceps and are keeping your right arm straight - or if you are instead doing your old move. Knowing clearly - with 100% certainty, through a trained feel channel, and proven with objective feedback like video or a training aid - that you are indeed doing the new move, will strengthen the pathway of the Feed Forward System that is creating that new move in the first place.

Which is why in the early stages of training, I often ask my students to allow themselves to do the old bad habit, but simply notice themselves doing it, in feel channel. That alone will tend to quickly weaken that habit. Then I will have them make alternate swings with the old vs new pattern, in slow motion or half speed, often with their eyes closes, which makes access to feel channel easier.

When they can clearly feel the difference, they begin to strengthen the new pattern, and weaken the old pattern. Of course, this kind of training usually works best after they have achieved that Deep Insight.

With your issue, an overly-long backswing with arm run-off, you could approach that problem from a few different angles. One is simply achieving body feel channel awareness for where your Top position is and how long it takes to get there. If you switch from feel to visual or auditory channel, you will instantly lose a sense for where your body actually is. This is a very common awareness flaw I see everyday in my teaching practice. If you are seeing internal visual picture of your ideal Top position or saying the words to yourself "shorter backswing" (auditory or voice channel), you won't be able to know where your body is. The reason is that you are paying attention to a picture in your head or a voice in your head - you are NOT paying attention to the physical reality of your body.
[/quote]

Fascinating stuff

I remember Faldo mentioning swinging with your eyes closed to tune yourself in with the important input channels

The crazy thing is that I play golf with complete conscious control of my swing, I'm not quite where i would like to be as i would like to just pick a target and react but I have been a plus handicap for ten years playing this way and the idea of playing unconsciously seems like a day in the future that I might never reach but I will try to get there. My backswing chain of thoughts are hand path on natural arc to 730 then allow the push away to occur and push my right hand into the top of my left thumb(what I would interpret as extensor action) and keep my arm motion in sync with the turn of my chest. feels like if my chest had an eye it would always be looking at my hands

One thing that I am sure you have an opinion of is the role of the ball and how hit impulse can alter your technique . I make my best swings when my backswing is done with no concern of the ball and my thought is simply to put the club where I need to put it in the backswing , although I do get what you refer to as flinch, feels like an over powering urge to smash the ball

I will try to learn where the end of my backswing should be as I don't feel any kind of stop signal , I'm not truly aware when exactly my shoulders stop turning, so need to feel when this moment is and increase my awareness of it

Is it a case of trying to trick my SM so that I believe the swing changes I am trying to make are correct?
[/quote]

Lots of very important issues here, about how to go about making a swing change effectively.

1. Mz - you need to be 100% clear about the change, ie make sure you have identified correctly the most important thing to work on, either a Fatal Flaw to eliminate, or a new fundamental move to ingrain.

2. As a plus handicap, it is very likely that you have already achieved a swing controlled by your SM. The way it works is best explained by an analogy. Let say your goal is to build an automatic door on your house, the kind that has a sensor that activates to open the door when you cross the threshold. So you build the door, ie cut the hole in the wall, frame it in, install the door, etc. The last thing to install is the automatic opening mechanism. In the meantime, until you do in fact install that mechanism, you are using the door to enter and leave your house, and you lock it with a key. Every time you enter, you use the key to unlock the door. Using CM swing feels (I dont like "thoughts" since visual and auditory images have a very poor track record at normal swing speeds) as a way of triggering your SM swing program is like using the key to open your door. The term "swing keys" is used a lot on Tour.

3. One test you can use to see if your swing change is now a habit that will execute automatically, is to count backwards from 100, once you are set up over the ball, by threes - "100, 97, 94, 91". When you hit "91", you start your takeaway, ie use that number as your swing trigger. And keep counting till the Finish. Try this for about a half hour. You will know by then whether your swing is on auto pilot, or whether your SM still needs a CM key to get the program running.

4. It is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to clearly distinguish between effective "self-awareness" mode of functioning, always from first person in feel channel, and neurotic "am I doing it right" paralzying self-consciousness, which is always from second or even third person perspective, and in visual or auditory channel. The first way allows you to keep your athletic "naturalness" and the SM working flawlessly, and allows your CM to notice what is actually happening with your body and club motion. The second way - you are lost! The first way is passive awareness, the second is actively interfering by trying to "help out". Hogan said that he tried to "remove myself from my golf swing. My amateur partners are always trying to 'add themselves'".

The point being two things: until you install the automatic opening mechanism (lots of reps), you will need to use a key to open the door. Once you have indeed installed the auto mechanism (true dominant habit formation) you can throw away the key!!

One of the problems with using CM keys, when you really don't need to use them anymore, is that under stress/pressure, your CM tends to add an emotional element to the mental focus on the swing key, kind of like using the key to unlock the door with too much pressure, and you end up twisting the key in the lock so quickly that the key gets stuck in the lock and the door remains shut. In other words, a flinch.

Your CM can ruin your golf shot by "trying to help out". At some point in your evolution as a player, if you are truly going to breakthrough to the next level of performance, you need to start trusting the swing you have - flaws and all - and commit to your target, and let go. "Letting go" is a skill that can be learned, just like learning to pivot properly.

Taming the CM in understanding it's proper role is key. It is vitally important to know what in your SM swing map needs to become conscious, ie that one key move you are going to work on, so that you can fix it, and what needs to remain unconscious!

My advanced students often hear me say in response to a detailed technical question - "you don't need to worry about that, or even know anything about it. That piece of your swing is fine - leave it alone".
[/quote]

Thanks for this great information

I've always thought one day I will get my mechanics to the point I'd like to and then just let go and play golf rather than golf swing. Do not know if I will ever get there though always seems a quest for technical improvement although sometimes I feel I make changes for asthetic quality rather than a functional requirement

I will try the backwards counting test

I know nobody has an exact answer with required reps to autopilot a swing change but how many quality reps are required to reprogram?

Thanks again!

[mc3jack]

<<<One of the problems with using CM keys, when you really don't need to use them anymore, is that under stress/pressure, your CM tends to add an emotional element to the mental focus on the swing key, kind of like using the key to unlock the door with too much pressure, and you end up twisting the key in the lock so quickly that the key gets stuck in the lock and the door remains shut. In other words, a flinch.>>>

Fantastic stuff as usual, Jim! I'd like to ramble a bit about how golfers get derailed, as in CM focused even when they don't want to be.

We say we must forget the mechanics and Trust, and so we do. But every golf shot does not come off the way we 'pictured it' . . . and the deep emotional placement of Trust is . . . violated!

As you know, this is where Zen can come in handy for golfers.

I like to say Trust your decision, Commit to what you've decided....but most importantly, Accept whatever Outcome. Shots that don't come off can 'shock' a golfer into the CM flogger zone. A zen-like detachment from outcome expectation can help with execution . . . but detachment or perhaps "bemused observation" of the actual outcome, accepting that outcome as maybe a pleasant good shot or an opportunity to hit a great shot out of trouble, etc. . . . Acceptance is a huge part of playing well and especially enjoying golf.

And I should mention. A lot of times it's not the SM's 'fault' that a shot didn't work out. Often its the decision-making in the CM beforehand. Accepting your own dumb decision is a serious hurdle for what I call Ego-golfers. Accepting that your lie or the wind or your skill level that day won't let you have the shot "you want" in the decision making process. And hey. [size=4]My SM will deliver a 100% driver blast that has a 60-yard shot dispersion for me whenever I want. Should I ask my SM for that shot from every tee? Hmmmm.[/size][size=4] [/size]

[size=4]Acceptance is something that does not require athletic talent or physical fitness. Not easy, though. People like to chase their wants. They 'want' that putt to go in. Then they 'don't get what they want.' Then they wind up getting mad, or 'trying harder' or doubting their putting stroke. Same goes with golf shots. And we've all heard that swirling sound of a round going down the drain. Seen it so many times. Lived it for years. A golfbud shot one of the best rounds I'd ever seen him do recently...I'm excited after the round, he's moping because he bogeyed the last two holes. Hey, maybe he shouldn't have added up his score on the 17th tee box. Whatever. He 'wanted' to score 8 strokes better than his handicap, instead he got "only" six, and he's unhappy. People chasing their wants, man......talk about a flinch-maker.[/size]

[Jim Waldron]

[quote name='mc3jack' timestamp='1430763558' post='11496479']
<<<One of the problems with using CM keys, when you really don't need to use them anymore, is that under stress/pressure, your CM tends to add an emotional element to the mental focus on the swing key, kind of like using the key to unlock the door with too much pressure, and you end up twisting the key in the lock so quickly that the key gets stuck in the lock and the door remains shut. In other words, a flinch.>>>

Fantastic stuff as usual, Jim! I'd like to ramble a bit about how golfers get derailed, as in CM focused even when they don't want to be.

We say we must forget the mechanics and Trust, and so we do. But every golf shot does not come off the way we 'pictured it' . . . and the deep emotional placement of Trust is . . . violated!

As you know, this is where Zen can come in handy for golfers.

I like to say Trust your decision, Commit to what you've decided....but most importantly, Accept whatever Outcome. Shots that don't come off can 'shock' a golfer into the CM flogger zone. A zen-like detachment from outcome expectation can help with execution . . . but detachment or perhaps "bemused observation" of the actual outcome, accepting that outcome as maybe a pleasant good shot or an opportunity to hit a great shot out of trouble, etc. . . . Acceptance is a huge part of playing well and especially enjoying golf.

And I should mention. A lot of times it's not the SM's 'fault' that a shot didn't work out. Often its the decision-making in the CM beforehand. Accepting your own dumb decision is a serious hurdle for what I call Ego-golfers. Accepting that your lie or the wind or your skill level that day won't let you have the shot "you want" in the decision making process. And hey. My SM will deliver a 100% driver blast that has a 60-yard shot dispersion for me whenever I want. Should I ask my SM for that shot from every tee? Hmmmm.

Acceptance is something that does not require athletic talent or physical fitness. Not easy, though. People like to chase their wants. They 'want' that putt to go in. Then they 'don't get what they want.' Then they wind up getting mad, or 'trying harder' or doubting their putting stroke. Same goes with golf shots. And we've all heard that swirling sound of a round going down the drain. Seen it so many times. Lived it for years. A golfbud shot one of the best rounds I'd ever seen him do recently...I'm excited after the round, he's moping because he bogeyed the last two holes. Hey, maybe he shouldn't have added up his score on the 17th tee box. Whatever. He 'wanted' to score 8 strokes better than his handicap, instead he got "only" six, and he's unhappy. People chasing their wants, man......talk about a flinch-maker.
[/quote]

Interesting stuff!

I think Acceptance in golf is huge! And hard to get to that state....certainly. Ego drives most of us, in our daily lives, more often that it should. I think as we age we start to see it's toxic influence and we start to let that go. Zen and Buddhist philosophy is all about acceptance of "what is" - that is the reality that is right in front of you in this moment. Tough to do - my wife always tells me that I am "the worst Buddhist on the planet" because I struggle with the acceptance part so much, and she is a natural born genius at it!
I have a theory that Jordan Spieth might also be a natural born genius at acceptance. He has all the signs...

Last year at Quail Valley, in the midst of our Great Shot! golf school, a student of mind came to talk with me and the students, he had just finished his career low round in a men's club event, shooting 28 on the front nine, eight birdies and one par. He talked about how calm and detached he was from shot outcome in that front nine. He said he felt that total absence of any effort mentally or emotionally to "help out". Of course he knows that I teach this, and so came over to share it with the group. It was pretty cool. He seemed like a different person to me, very "detached" - he wasn't even that excited about his low round, more curious that he was able to shoot it. His thinking/ego mind kicked in though on the 10th tee, and he pulled his drive in the rough, ended up with a bogey on that hole. The rest of the back nine he shifted in and out of the zone, and ended up I think shooting 4 over, for a 68.

[Jim Waldron]

Chasing perfection is golf quite addictive, hard to give up, for sure! Comes down to why you play - if you are a Shotmaker mainly, even tougher to give up. Swing mechanics can be like a drug, and popular golf culture encourages the addiction - just look at how many threads in this forum are on highly technical mechanics vs the mental game, for example. Ratio has to be 500 to 1, easily.

If golfers truly understood how little positive impact all that swing theory and over-thinking had on their game - and how toxic! - they would give it up in a heartbeat! You don't need a lot of technical detailed info to make a swing change in any case. The teacher needs to know this stuff, not the student.

How many reps, there is no clear number. Depends on many factors: high degree of natural athletic talent, good fitness, mental focus, body feel channel awareness, Deep Insight about the change, 100% clarity about and belief in the change, playing stick and ball sports as a kid, dedication level to improvement, are some of the factors that will speed up the process.

One last thought. Often times advanced golfers will keep on using CM swing thoughts simply as a "crutch" or "security blanket" - ie to keep the fear of a bad shot outcome at bay. I usually advise golfers to face their fears, ie to accept it and then let it go. Same with hope. Hope and fear are two sides of the same coin. You need to see both clearly and then let them go. Golf is inherently a very difficult game, even for the very talented "naturals". Bad shots happen way more often that good shots. Might as well accept this as part of the game, and find a way to build a game that allows you to play with freedom, and a way to recover from the bad shots when they do happen. "Recover" meaning both how to hit that "recovery" shot (whether trouble shot or short game shot) well enough most of the time to prevent a high score on that hole and also "recover" meaning how not to lose your cool.

[mc3jack]

[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430764587' post='11496603']
[quote name='mc3jack' timestamp='1430763558' post='11496479']
<<<One of the problems with using CM keys, when you really don't need to use them anymore, is that under stress/pressure, your CM tends to add an emotional element to the mental focus on the swing key, kind of like using the key to unlock the door with too much pressure, and you end up twisting the key in the lock so quickly that the key gets stuck in the lock and the door remains shut. In other words, a flinch.>>>

Fantastic stuff as usual, Jim! I'd like to ramble a bit about how golfers get derailed, as in CM focused even when they don't want to be.

We say we must forget the mechanics and Trust, and so we do. But every golf shot does not come off the way we 'pictured it' . . . and the deep emotional placement of Trust is . . . violated!

As you know, this is where Zen can come in handy for golfers.

I like to say Trust your decision, Commit to what you've decided....but most importantly, Accept whatever Outcome. Shots that don't come off can 'shock' a golfer into the CM flogger zone. A zen-like detachment from outcome expectation can help with execution . . . but detachment or perhaps "bemused observation" of the actual outcome, accepting that outcome as maybe a pleasant good shot or an opportunity to hit a great shot out of trouble, etc. . . . Acceptance is a huge part of playing well and especially enjoying golf.

And I should mention. A lot of times it's not the SM's 'fault' that a shot didn't work out. Often its the decision-making in the CM beforehand. Accepting your own dumb decision is a serious hurdle for what I call Ego-golfers. Accepting that your lie or the wind or your skill level that day won't let you have the shot "you want" in the decision making process. And hey. My SM will deliver a 100% driver blast that has a 60-yard shot dispersion for me whenever I want. Should I ask my SM for that shot from every tee? Hmmmm.

Acceptance is something that does not require athletic talent or physical fitness. Not easy, though. People like to chase their wants. They 'want' that putt to go in. Then they 'don't get what they want.' Then they wind up getting mad, or 'trying harder' or doubting their putting stroke. Same goes with golf shots. And we've all heard that swirling sound of a round going down the drain. Seen it so many times. Lived it for years. A golfbud shot one of the best rounds I'd ever seen him do recently...I'm excited after the round, he's moping because he bogeyed the last two holes. Hey, maybe he shouldn't have added up his score on the 17th tee box. Whatever. He 'wanted' to score 8 strokes better than his handicap, instead he got "only" six, and he's unhappy. People chasing their wants, man......talk about a flinch-maker.
[/quote]

Interesting stuff!

I think Acceptance in golf is huge! And hard to get to that state....certainly. Ego drives most of us, in our daily lives, more often that it should. I think as we age we start to see it's toxic influence and we start to let that go. Zen and Buddhist philosophy is all about acceptance of "what is" - that is the reality that is right in front of you in this moment. Tough to do - my wife always tells me that I am "the worst Buddhist on the planet" because I struggle with the acceptance part so much, and she is a natural born genius at it!
I have a theory that Jordan Spieth might also be a natural born genius at acceptance. He has all the signs...

Last year at Quail Valley, in the midst of our Great Shot! golf school, a student of mind came to talk with me and the students, he had just finished his career low round in a men's club event, shooting 28 on the front nine, eight birdies and one par. He talked about how calm and detached he was from shot outcome in that front nine. He said he felt that total absence of any effort mentally or emotionally to "help out". Of course he knows that I teach this, and so came over to share it with the group. It was pretty cool. He seemed like a different person to me, very "detached" - he wasn't even that excited about his low round, more curious that he was able to shoot it. His thinking/ego mind kicked in though on the 10th tee, and he pulled his drive in the rough, ended up with a bogey on that hole. The rest of the back nine he shifted in and out of the zone, and ended up I think shooting 4 over, for a 68.
[/quote]

It's funny, there is such a disconnect between golf broadcasting, which is trying infuse some kind of drama for the viewer, and actual golf played at the highest level, which is zenned-out non-drama. Guys walk off the 18th tee and some joker asks them, "We're you worried about blah blah blah" and the tour player goes, "Huh?" In real life golf, guys are actually playing mock TV golf drama in their heads, or even saying it out loud. Or yakking about CM swing junk. I was playing a career-best round once with a pal and a pickup golfer, typical 12 handicapper, who asked me on the 16th tee, "What's your handicap?" I really wanted to say, "Having to play with you."

And the want-chasing. Let's face it, we're bombarded with marketing telling us to chase our wants. It's the basis of capitalist society. Figure out what you want, and go get it! And there are a LOT of capitalists who play golf hahahaha.... so it's counter-intuitive to take out that set of irons I always wanted and then . . . not care much about the shots they produce? Golf is hard for a lot of reasons, one of the most subtle being that often the opposite of what you think will work is what works.

Spieth has been sooo much fun, because of that young putting and he *almost* has the Que Sera Sera down . . . yet still has a block-right flinch that's becoming rarer. Back in the day, before tour guys had mind coaches, we saw guys blowing up under pressure a lot . . . it made golf more fun to watch. Nowadays we have to pretend pushed four-footers are 'dramatic.'

[Jim Waldron]

Probably a good time to remind everyone - especially anyone new to this thread and only reading the past few pages - that I do indeed teach swing mechanics! In fact, I spend at least 70% of my time teaching full swing mechanics, about 20% of the time putting and short game mechanics, and mental game about 10% of the time.

But I want my students to clearly separate learning/training mechanics -which is a science/craft/engineering project (and a lot of it is done at slower than normal swing speeds away from a ball) - from playing golf, which is an art/athletic performance. Polar opposite states of mind.

[mc3jack]

[quote name='Jim Waldron' timestamp='1430768365' post='11497019']
Probably a good time to remind everyone - especially anyone new to this thread and only reading the past few pages - that I do indeed teach swing mechanics! In fact, I spend at least 70% of my time teaching full swing mechanics, about 20% of the time putting and short game mechanics, and mental game about 10% of the time.

But I want my students to clearly separate learning/training mechanics -which is a science/craft/engineering project (and a lot of it is done at slower than normal swing speeds away from a ball) - from playing golf, which is an art/athletic performance. Polar opposite states of mind.
[/quote]

I know you're busy. . .but I sure wish you had time to start another mega-thread about the mind game. The ASI concept may be your greatest contribution to golf lore (I think it's one of THE greatest) but hardly anyone (maybe no one) has been able to deliver Zen concepts well for golfers . . . or is it non-concepts? I think you have the mind and golf instructional experience to be the master the game has been waiting for. Maybe someday . . . .