If you’re following this blog, I’m getting into the zone where golfers fear to tread…
But in my life, I’ve made the greatest discoveries by taking that next step when I wasn’t sure what would happen…
We’re working on playing golf from the subconscious mind and improving THAT process. The response is to a comment on the post below.
Here’s the catch: Your goal isn’t to just hit the ball…
Your goal is to “see” the image the subconscious is trying to see.
When you see the image, you’ll hit the ball.
It sounds backwards, but that’s how it always works. That’s also how I know that the ball on the ground is the present and the target is in the future…
The subconscious MUST stay in the present because that’s where it must be to keep the body alive.
And the subconscious controls movement through the use of images.
SO… Any image that the subconscious uses to control a movement is positively in the present!
If the target were the present image, that’s what you would see, but that is the goal of the shot and doesn’t come into play for the subconscious until AFTER the ball is hit.
You see, there’s an argument as to whether the target is present or future. I base my findings on the pictures the subconscious uses to control movement (which again, HAVE to be in the present).
Those on the other side of the argument use a demonstration of throwing a ball to a farget, which makes the target the present… And for that case it is, because the ball is in your hand and the subconscious can FEEL it, making it part of the feedback the subconscious can use to gauge the movement needed to propel it toward the target. The target is the present because the distance and the arc of the throw between the hand and the target is what the subconscious has to picture.
But when you hit a golf ball, the golf ball is NOT connected to the body; the GOLF CLUB is, so the feedback the subconscious uses to make the swing can only be gauged by getting feedback from the weight and movement of the golf club towards it’s target… the golf ball.
As a side note, Biomechanically, the golf swing IS a throw, but in this case we are throwing the club, NOT the ball, which is why Fred Shoemaker’s method of throwing golf clubs in his book “Extraordinary Golf” gets results.
What decides the target for the subconscious is based on the goal of the movement the subconscious has to control combined with the live feedback from the object being moved. The subconscious uses the feedback from the object the body is controlling to adjust that movement toward the goal.
In golf, the target is an additional step away from the goal of striking the ball, so unfortunately, the target of the shot is in the future.
And this is why focusing on the target during the golf swing has caused so much anguish for so many golfers for so many years. The damage is caused when the golfer finds that focusing on the target isn’t working…
AND HE HAS NOWHERE ELSE TO TURN. Imagine that feeling of loss… I know because I was there (yup, I used to focus on the target and wonder WTF when the shot didn’t work), and it took ONLY 20 years or so to figure out the answer that DOES work.
Sorry, just a little bit of pent-up frustration venting there…
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