Do you play as well as you practice?

 #golf #golfinstruction #golfteaching #golfpsychology #sportpsychology #quieteyes #fightorflight #pressure #confidence

No?  Maybe you do, but not as often as you like.  Or maybe you play well in non-competitive situations but tend to lose it when the demand to excel intensifies.

 Hitting more balls at the practice range, even if you hit them perfectly, won't fix what ails you.  You already know you hit it well in practice.  That's not the problem.  You also know that you don't hit it as well or as consistently well while playing or competing.

 Working on building your confidence to play better only does so much good.  Focusing on your confidence while playing distracts you from the task at hand and that could lead to a mistake or poor course management.  One bad shot or unlucky bounce could send your confidence reeling.

 Even if your conscious mind is telling you to be confident your subconscious may not be getting the message.  Previous mistakes and failures have a way of causing an unconscious sense of threat to your expectations or hopes for success.  So even though your conscious mind is telling you “you have nothing to worry about,” your subconscious is whispering, “Be afraid, be very afraid!”

 This subconscious threat triggers your nervous system to go into fight-or-flight.  When that happens, powerful chemicals are released into your bloodstream intended to save your life.  That's because your subconscious doesn’t know the difference between what is real and what is vividly imagined so your nervous system treats all threats as if they are to your life.  Unfortunately, this wreaks havoc with your golf performance.

Here's what happens when you go into fight-or-flight.  The additional adrenaline causes your muscles to tense and your movements to speed up. So, your swing gets faster and shorter, compromising the extraordinary precision necessary to hit the ball at the correct time during your swing.

 The pupils in your eyes dilate, causing your peripheral vision to widen and your eyes to move side-to-side.  Because the information going from your peripheral vision to your brain occurs subconsciously, you're not aware of the loss of your state of quiet eyes, which has been proven time after time to be necessary for success in golf.

 Your memory, higher brain function and thought and emotional control centers are also switched off.  Having access to any information that is not survival-related could slow your reactions and lead to your demise.  Unfortunately, in golf this could lead to poor decision, loss of control over your thoughts and emotions, and even cause you to literally forget how to swing.  The greater the fear, conscious or unconscious, the worse your performance.

 The only way to improve your performance is to take back control of your nervous system. That means that you must be aware of and acknowledge the fact that, at some level, you fear the outcome of an individual shot or the entire round.  You then must engage in actions that rid your body of the fight-or-flight chemicals, so your body returns to a state of rest-and-digest.  That's our normal operating system.  Finally, you must re-activate all those internal systems necessary for your success.

None of these require great time or effort. In fact, with proper training, you can literally accomplish all of these in just seconds, but that takes the right kind of practice.  If you're serious about your game you will find the 30-60 minutes of daily practice necessary to play the golf you always knew possible.  And you don't even have to go to the course or practice range.