The Quadruple Whammy – A Recipe for Ruining Your Swing
The Quadruple Whammy – A Recipe for Ruining Your Swing
by Dr. T. J. Tomasi, Keiser University College of Golf Senior Faculty and Director of Research
There are four sure-fire ways to ruin your swing – these are the QUADRUPLE WHAMMY!
1. Thinking about your swing while you’re swinging.
I have written before about the danger of playing by “do’s and don’ts” – i.e. thinking about “doing this” or “not doing that” while you’re swinging.
This doesn’t work, because it introduces a conscious element into what should be unconscious execution.
Ralph Guldahl, asked to write an instruction book after he won a couple of U.S. Opens, analyzed his golf swing in such fine detail that he ruined his game.
After he figured out and explained exactly what he did, he couldn’t do it anymore – he never won again.
2. Getting Out Of Golf Shape.
The second step in the Recipe for Ruination is lacking golf fitness.
In addition to the exercise of actually playing the game, you need to keep in golf shape by doing golf stretches to maintain your ability to coil, plus hitting the weights so you can stabilize your positions during the downswing and build golf muscle.
Jack Nicklaus was still fit enough to walk the roller-coaster hills of Augusta National to win the Masters at age 46.
He wasn’t a gym rat, but he did stay in golf shape working with expert Pete Egoscue, his personal trainer.
Many golfers take summer and fall breaks in their workouts – hitting the gym only in the winter.
How fast you lose your conditioning when you stop exercising depends on your workout profile. If you don’t work out at all, you’ll lose muscle mass and strength faster than those who are fit before they stop.
If you stop exercising, it takes about two weeks before the effects kick in — The American Council on Exercise reports that athletes who train consistently and correctly begin to lose capillary density/size within two or three weeks, and strength after four weeks.
Working out the wrong way by lifting heavy weights but not using a full range of motion unbalances joint movement, as does not exercising both muscles in the antagonistic pair (e.g. triceps but not biceps).
Another mistake is changing your body physique – David Duval and Carl Pettersson tried to slim down, but played much worse, while Tiger Woods put on so much upper body muscle that it may have led to back/knee damage.
His oval shape kept Duval balanced, but then, to keep up with Tiger, Duval hit the gym and poof – “too slim to win.”
Matching your body type correctly with your swing type is a key fundamental of success (see my book The LAWs of Golf for the details of this matching process).
3. Bad Brain Running.
The number of golfers who never made it because of poor mental habits is legion.
And the list is long for those who made it but didn’t live up to their potential.
You’ve heard of them, but usually not good things — Michelle Wie, Charles Howell and Pat Perez lead the current parade.
Good but not great! (See my book, The 30 Second Swing for the details of running your brain while you golf).
4. The Absence of a Coach or Too Many Coaches.
In the “old” days, most of the tour players were self-taught with no one to rely on but themselves – I can’t imagine Ben Hogan taking a standard lesson.
Hogan ‘found it in the dirt,’ but that’s a slow process — it took him 10 years.
He started off as the “terror of the field mice,” but finally got that low hook under control to become the greatest ball striker of all time.
Still, while it’s dangerous to be self-taught, it’s even more dangerous to be self-maintained.
Today, most tour players have a coach whose job it is to keep the swing from breaking down, then fix it when it does.
The modern player has far less down time due to the ubiquitous presence of swing doctors backed by state-of-the-art technology who, at the first sign of disease, can fix the problem.
But even more detrimental than no swing coach is too many swing coaches – and more than one is too many.
There is cacophony in a choir of teachers.
Even listening to two teachers that are both correct can plant some bad seeds, since the same information stated differently is just as confusing as trying to learn from contradictory information.
In my opinion, Tiger would have been better off staying with one voice (Butch Harmon); instead, he had to learn a different swing pattern every few years.
And it’s not the ‘learning of the new’ that’s hard for a brain, it’s the forgetting of the old written in stone by repetition.
The Takeaway: Golf is best played by in-shape athletes guided by a single coach who has taught them how to run their own brain while focusing on the target (not the swing).
The champion realizes that golf is not played the way it’s learned – it’s learned on the practice tee one skill at a time (grip, stance, etc.). It’s played on the golf course using a unity of motion unfettered by conscious interference.
Thus, the greatest skill a champion has that rivals do not is “selective amnesia,” the skill of learning something so well that you don’t have to consciously focus on how to do it under pressure.
If you enjoyed this tip and are looking into Florida golf schools, contact College of Golf today.
