subject: Unconcious Golf [print this page] Unconcious Golf Unconcious Golf
If you think about it, in virtually any sport, your physical actions are a product of what you have learnt to do over the weeks, months or years of learning and playing the game. What my golf pro used to call "muscle memory". You do it without thinking. Unconsciously.
So when you've been playing golf (or any other sport) for years, what you do the next time out is what your brain has learnt to do. And normally it has learnt to do this through the physical experience of doing the exact same thing a million times before. And how many of these things are bad, sloppy or inadequate things and how many are good things?
Supposing, instead of going out on the driving range (or having yet another game of tennis, badminton or tiddlywinks), you actually just lie down in a darkened room and think about your game and how to do things well. If we stick to golf for the moment, think about the leisurely swing, the effortless power (as opposed to the powerless effort!), the still head, the wrists rotating at impact, .. . In your dreams you can speak that foreign language perfectly, you are always 25 years old or some indeterminate young age (never a croaky 80) and the golf ball goes sailing over the obstacle (tree, bunker, pond, whatever) and lands safely on the green. So, again, in your restful state you can imagine and actually practice or envisage all these things.
I know, because I've tried and done it.
To get technical for a moment, I have nodded off to sleep thinking about slowing the backswing down and consciously rotating the wrists well before impact. After a "good night" about three years ago, I quite surprised myself with my new-found straightness and length. I was doing more or less what I had imagined myself doing. It didn't work every time of course and when I got tireder I slipped back into my former slicing style. But there was a marked improvement, and one that I have been working on ever since.
