Do your swing thoughts disappear when you're out on the course?

Does that feel that's been working so well on the range all of a sudden vanish?

No matter how hard you try you just can't make THAT move.

The logical explanation is that you just haven't worked hard enough on the new move yet.

You need to go back to the range and 'ingrain' it some more.

But it happens again, and again.

A constant cycle of flushing it on the range and then those same swing thoughts disappearing when it matters.

Soon enough golf is just a frustrating whirlwind of trying different swing thoughts in the hope of finding one that works.

Your 'natural' golf swing feels so far away you couldn't make it if you tried.

Golf is no fun anymore.

Trust me, I’ve been there.

In this situation you might change coach. You might try a completely different school of thought, MORAD, Stack & Tilt or something similar, but unless you fix the root cause of why those swing thoughts keep disappearing it won’t stop happening.

Allow me to explain why those swing thoughts disappear:

It starts with how your brain has evolved to function.

You can split your brain in to two distinct areas: Your conscious brain and your unconscious brain.

If you're driving a car and having a conversation with the person next to you, you're using your unconscious brain to drive the car and your conscious brain to have a conversation (mostly).

The golf swing is like driving a car, it's housed in the unconscious part of your brain.

If you’re somebody who has been driving for a few years or more you’ll notice that you barely have to think about anything whilst driving. You just think about what you want the car to do and everything happens ‘automatically’.

For a highly skilled golfer, it’s the same when it comes to hitting a golf ball.

They don't need to think about how every muscle needs to move to hit the ball.

But when you make a swing change you need to use your conscious brain. You need to think about the new movement.

Which creates a bit of friction, as you’re using your conscious mind to alter a task that is largely unconscious.

This is a necessary process (all swing changes are conscious to begin with) and you can hit the ball well using your conscious brain on the range.

But issues begin to arise when you try to control your swing consciously on the course.

Trying to control your golf swing consciously causes two main issues:

Firstly, your conscious brain has a limited capacity.

Secondly, the human brain has evolved to prioritise safety.

Which means when there's a risk present your brain will attend to it immediately.

To your ancestors that risk would have been a predator or some sort of threat to their life.

In the 21st century a risk to you as a golfer is more likely to be caused by some white wooden posts or a piece of card and a pencil in your pocket.

But that doesn’t matter, your brain processes these risks in the same way your ancestors would have processed theirs.

So when you see an out of bounds stake, a water hazard or think about your score, your brain will immediately attend to any potential risk.

And because your conscious brain only has a limited capacity (try remembering two phone numbers at once), this search for threats pushes your conscious mind to its capacity and leaves no room for any non-essential information.

Information like those conscious swing thoughts that worked so well on the range.

And as a result you resort back to your 'unconscious' swing.

The one you make when you don’t consciously think about movement at all.

Which is why that same old bad shot reappears.

Shots that you haven’t seen on the driving range in months.

So what is the answer?

You need to improve your unconscious golf swing.

So how do you do that?

The key is in how you practice.

By completing regular, high quality practice (link) you can start to embed those new movements in to your unconscious golf swing.

Random and Competitive Practice add variation and challenge to the shots you hit, which promotes the perfect environment for skill acquisition (one where you need to continually solve new and more difficult problems).

If you’d like to start completing high quality practice regularly you can check out my Free Practice Guide here.

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