The Golf Geek
Prescribing the Next Step for the Time-Starved Golfer
Golf Is 100 Per Cent Physical
Posted on 02. Nov, 2011 by Allan in Psychology
Golf just isn’t as “mental” as we’ve been led to believe.
Various figures are bandied about – 80, 90, even 100 per cent.
But they’re neither accurate nor realistic.
Why is that? Well, it’s because golf as a discipline is one hundred per cent physical. Think about it for a moment: do you hit a golf ball with your mind? Are your muscles and tendons passive when you swing a club?
Of course they’re not.
So golf is 100% physical…isn’t it?
But…wait a minute…
Who’s driving this bus?
Are bone and sinew able to move of their own volition?
Are they really capable of sequencing complex movements?
Can our ligaments pick a target, can our cartilage choose a club, can our bones track the ball as it flies through the air?
Of course they can’t.
So golf might be 100 per cent mental, after all?
If our brain is at the root of every choice, every movement, every decision, is it fair to say that golf is 100 per cent physical? Surely golf must then be more mental than physical?
But physical sensations affect our brain’s performance; being in pain or even being desperate for the toilet can affect our decision-making and make our execution of physical tasks poorer.
And it’s not limited to sensations – emotions can also affect our performance. There isn’t a golfer alive who doesn’t have first-hand experience of this; think of the times when anger at a bad shot has caused you to make a poor choice, or when hoping for victory or a low score allowed fear to stiffen your swing and slacken your resolve.
Does your head hurt yet? Are the twists and turns starting to irritate?
Why am I wasting your time with this blog post when I can’t even seem to make up my own mind?
The blog post isn’t a waste of time – but the debate is.
I have a novel solution.
Forget about it.
Let it go.
There’s a point to the discussion if you’re a philosopher or a psychologist, or even if you simply have an interest in such matters and enjoy a debate. But in practical terms, it’s something which will tie your brain in knots with absolutely no benefit to your golf.
And, just when you think you’ve got it sorted, someone will throw a situational spanner into the works making your head hurt as you try to work it out all over again.
This debate isn’t going to help you improve at golf.
Trying to separate the “mental” from the “physical” is pointless.
They’re simplifications, used to make convoluted concepts easier to discuss and understand. Without them, explanations become excessively complex: “mental game coach” is a lot easier to say than “I work with golfers to improve their games through focusing on the elements of performance which aren’t related to physical skills to ensure the golfer performs those physical skills to the highest possible percentage of their potential and thus seek to help them improve at golf without necessarily working on their physical skills”, for example.
I’m not suggesting such simplifications shouldn’t be used. They’re shorthand, an easy way to say that which is otherwise difficult. They’re great for this.
The problems start when we forget they’re a simplification and behave as if they’re real.
And this is the problem with the mental/physical debate I see played out in golf blogs, golf books and golf media.
Everything is physical. Everything is mental. It’s impossible to disentangle them. The proportions may vary – for example, anxiety may seem more mental than physical but it leads to an increase in the level of stress hormones circulating in your bloodstream. These raise your pulse and blood pressure, and can even cause a tremor.
Such effects are pretty darn physical from where I’m standing.
Equally, a broken toe seems at first glance to be physical – but the pain from the toe causes release of various different transmitter chemicals in the brain, altering our mental state….a “physical” event with decidedly “mental” effects.
So why not forget about the debate and concentrate on golf improvement?
After we’ve argued it out in the comments section, at least.
What do you think?
Have I hit the nail on the head, or do you think I’m wide of the mark? Is this an irrelevant rant?
Whatever your view, I’m looking forward to hearing it. Drop me a comment or two in the section below and let the debate begin!
(if for any reason your comment hasn’t appeared within 24 hours, please get in touch using the contact form or Twitter and I’ll use my long-handled retriever to fish it out of the “Spam Pool Water Hazard”)
[Image credit: both images in this post are by DigitalBob8 and used under Creative Commons License]
10 Responses to “Golf Is 100 Per Cent Physical”
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Allan: I spent the better part of the day saying the same thing.
It’s 100% both but I do feel that there is a reason to place certain focus on aspects that are more physical such as “can you rotate your torso” and to also place focus on issues that are more mental such as “What thoughts add to your confidence as you approach a shot?”
The argument of whether it’s all mental or all physical or 90% this or that is as you say, pointless. I do believe I’ve developed a model for looking at one’s game that helps isolate where the focus should be right now based on the idea that the four elements of physical ability, technique, strategy, and mental state are ever present but can be given specific focus as well.
Perhaps you really hated this video I did a few weeks ago entitled “Is golf really all mental?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvHYQN0frgM
I don’t hate your video Nick, but I can’t say I agree. Your main thrust appears to be that the proportion which is mental and which is physical varies with skill level and physical constraints. Whilst this may be true for those who have significant disabilites, even those with restriction of torso rotation need mental skills. If you’re able to get a club onto the ball, there are mental factors which come into play to help ensure you’re able to do that to the best of your ability to do so. So I think your division of mental and physical based on your abilities isn’t relevant and just serves to obscure the issue. I can see why you’ve come up with your golf pyramid, and I can see why it’s an attractive concept, but it just doesn’t reflect the reality of golf improvement for me. No doubt you’ll challenge me to come up with a competing model; I’ll give it some thought, but for me it’s difficult to condense such a complex situation into a diagram which is simple enough to be useful and yet complex enough to be relevant. But I’ll certainly give it some thought!
Allan
I respect that. At least it’s better than the old food pyramid that encouraged massive consumption of breakfast cereal and white bread!
I guess it depends on the cereal; high-fibre, low sugar, high complex carb, low-GI cereal would be great, but Calvin’s Sugar Frosted Chocolate Bombs? Not so much.
Seriously, though, the changes in the food pyramid you’ve mentioned illustrates why it’s so important to keep up-to-date.
Nice images in your blogpost by the way!
Thanks Nick. I use my own images as well as those under Creative Commons License; these were the latter type. It’s easy to tell – there’ll always be an image credit at the foot of the post if they’re Creative Commons images; this will tell you where I got them, who took them and the cicrcumstances under which they are licensed for use.
If you or anyone else would like to use any of my images, just let me know what you plan to use them for via the Contact Form.
For me there is no point saying that the mental part of the game is any percentage, its like saying your need to grip the club with a 5 to 7 out of 10 pressure, this means nothing, so it doesn’t help when figures are put on the mental side of the game.
If it did and the percentage was agreed upon that golf is say 80% mental would that then mean that 80% of your time should be spent on mental coaching? No.
The fact is that golf is both a mental and physical side of the game, and for each and every single person who plays golf (or for that matter any sport) both have an affect on your performance.
Even if you could put an accurate percentage on it, this would change from person to person, day to day and shot to shot.
The main issues to consider are.
1 – Your mental state isn’t static
2 – Your physical ability isn’t static
3 – The course conditions aren’t static
For me the mental side of the game is a massive part of my game, I know when my mental state is affecting my performance, but I also know that a miss hit of the ball isn’t always because I hit a bad shot on the previous swing.
Leaning how to manage your mental state on and off the course is just one part of a multifaceted game.
I like an exert in “The Inner Game of Golf” whereby Timothy Gallwey asks one of his students
“How would you like to swing the club?”
And he goes ahead and shows him,
“Like this”
And swings the club few times. The swing produced after being asked this question is markedly different to his normal swing, just from the fact of being asked to affectively pretend.
So the swing is there but in this case the student is under the illusion that he can’t swing the club properly therefore he never does.
Stephen, I agree. I’d go even farther – the physical and the mental simply cannot be extricated from each other; every single thing we experience or do involves physical or mental actions (and, at a basic level, what gives rise to a mental action? is it not a series of electrical impulses across a vast network of nerve cells?). Dividing things into physical or mental is an artificial idea we construct to make explanations simpler…it’s not useful in guiding improvement.
I love your example: it reminds me of when a friend of a friend once said, in all seriousness, “I can’t say spaghetti, I say bisketti” seemingly unaware she’d done just that…
I was beginning to worry about all this, oops that would be all mental, then read the last comment by Stephen and was able to sigh in relief (I can’t do that it would be using both mental and physical) So now that clear I must agree with Stephen as you can not separate the two. But in saying this I also know that controlling mental will assist in the physical action. My first tourney day one was a prefect example.
Love the topic
Rick, thanks for your comment. The physical and the mental are forever intertwined and just cannot be separated in any meaningful fashion. Trying to think of them as discrete concepts & how that works for golf is just a waste of time. My intention writing this was to say “let’s stop wasting our time” (after we’ve had our say in the comments!) and get on with striving to improve at golf.
Are you playing this weekend?