Do You Play Most of Your Golf at Jurassic Park?
DO YOU PLAY MOST OF YOUR GOLF AT ‘JURASSIC PARK’?
by Dr. T. J. Tomasi
Keiser University College of Golf Senior Faculty and Director of Research
What Science Says
According to researchers at the University of Essex in England, humans have a system which demands that we focus on threatening images until the threat is resolved.
Dr. Elaine Fox reports that people facing threatening images must focus on them. “These experiments are evidence that anxious people are not just shifting their attention toward the location of the threat.
They are unable to disengage their attention to a noticed threat…. .” Given this aspect of our human “survival package,” as soon as you label what you’re looking at as threatening, you’ll focus on the threat until it goes away.
If you’re in the habit of viewing on-course hazards as scary, you’ll lock onto the image of the hazard, and you won’t let it go – your golf course will be all threat and no treat.
Thus, the label you put on the situation is the key factor in your subsequent response: label it as dangerous, and you’ll produce scary pictures that you must fixate on.
Then, instead of hitting “into the picture,” you’ll try to keep your ball “out of the picture” – basically you can’t play your best when all you see is the trouble.
Bracing
In addition to steering the ball away from the trouble, there is another problem when you perceive a threat – it triggers your code-red alarm, producing a body-wide muscle tension that operates below your level of consciousness; i.e., you don’t know you’re doing it.
Under stress, the bottom of your spine curls up and in toward your stomach to protect the spinal cord.
The big banded muscles of the back tighten in an attempt to give your body an armor-like coating.
As part of the body armor, the shoulders rise and hunch forward to shield the neck and head.
This natural protection system worked well when the fastest thing coming at you was a stone, a stick or a fist, but, when you brace continuously over a five + hour round of golf, it doesn’t work well for your golf swing. Bracing wears you out and a tired muscle is a slow muscle.
Your DNA doesn’t know it’s 2017
So the dicey part of ‘perceived threats’ is that the bracing response is launched.
There is no triage here – nothing but the full Monty every time.
The problem is that your DNA doesn’t know its 2017 vs 10,000 BC; so if you are in the habit of classifying hazards, the wind, mounds in the greens, etc. as ‘real’ danger, then you’ll body-brace just as fully as if a Dinosaur was on your tail.
Takeaway: If you are in the habit of treating the challenges of the golf course as threats, you’ll trigger subconscious bracing – then it’s a long 18 holes at Jurassic Park.
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