HOW THE BRAIN LEARNS THE GOLF SWING

Most golfers are taught to think that if they hit enough golf balls that their brain will eventually learn what they want it to learn and this movement can be repeated just by swinging the club. This is not an accurate statement. A lot of adult golfers are hitting a lot of balls and nothing is changing. The brain does not allow you to learn new motor skills at 40 in the same manner that it did when you were 10.

Motor skills are the things that your brain learns to do from repetitive movement. When you perform any previously learned motor skill your brain is retrieving stored information that it has already learned. This information is stored in the brain and not in the muscles.  When you start to perform that learned skill the brain retrieves that information to make all the necessary muscles move without you having to think about all of the muscles that are being used. This learned program also makes specific muscles fire in the order or sequence necessary to perform that motor skill effortlessly and consistently. Some of our motor skills are walking, throwing a baseball and swinging a golf club.   There are also fine motor skills such as typing, knitting and playing a musical instrument.

You start to learn motor skills when you start to crawl. By the time you are a teenager, your learning capacity for motor skills is at it's peak. Whatever you do repetitively at this age will be stored in motor memory so it can be retrieved later. Just because you go out and play golf a few times as a child does not mean that you will learn to play golf well.

As a teenager or younger, when you start to swing a golf club regularly and repeat the swing over and over you must use the thinking part of the brain to do this. This part of the brain is an initiator of movement and it also controls coordination and timing. This thinking part of the brain can not help you duplicate the swing because it has no memory storing capacity.

When you start to swing the club repeatedly, your brain will search in motor memory to see if there is somethng similar to this movement.  If there is nothing resembling this movement of you swinging a golf club in motor memory then the brain will turn on the synthesizer. When you are a teenager or younger your brain has a synthesizer especially for learning motor skills. The thinking part of the brain initiates the primary movements. At this age, you are not thinking of all the dozens of muscles that are used to perform the swing. The thinking and reasoning part of the brain has interpreted your intent because it sees you trying to hit a ball over and over. Now the synthesizer is turned on to help you learn the golf swing.

The synthesizer figures out the best muscles to use and the best order that they should be fired in to allow you to have a sequentially powerful swing. This is your brain processing demand information and making muscle assignments for you to have the most powerful swing possible.  It will engage the use of small muscles that you are not even aware that you have to make this swing. The synthesizer does not alert the reasoning part of the brain of what it is doing. This is how a natural athlete evolves in all sports as a teenager or younger.

While the synthesizer is making muscle assignment and creating a specific timing of the firing of these specific muscles, the motor memory part of the brain is storing this information. The thinking and synthesizing parts of the brain use a lot of energy. Retrieving this information from motor memory is much less energy consuming. This is why the brain stores the specifics of the golf swing and any other motor skill. This is how the different parts of the brain help you to learn the swing as a kid.  I call this the default swing.

If you are healthy, the default swing is the swing that everyone learns from playing a lot of golf at an early age.  If you go to a driving range and see a group of 14 year old golfers that have been playing golf for once or twice a week since they were 10, without a lot of instruction, you will see that default swing.  This swing is not developed from taking instruction from a particular teacher.  Your own brain develops this swing.  You can see this swing in some of the PGA golfers on tour, but most of these guys have had an outside influence to develop a swing that does not look like this default swing.  The good thing is that as a teenager, you can learn any swing you want.  The negative thing is that a swing that is manufactured by an instructor is not necessarily the best swing to have when it comes to power and efficiency.  No one individual can develop a swing that is as efficient, thoughtless and powerful as your own brain.

When your bones and your growth plates solidify, around the age of 22, this ability to learn motor skills starts to dissipate. At this time the priority of the brain switches from learning motor skills to mental reasoning. Now your brain starts to give you the ability to think and reason more. It is ironic that at about the same time that you get out of college your ability to reason and absorb information increases dramatically. The ability to reason is one of the worst possible things that could happen to a golfer for swinging a golf club without thinking. But, from the perspective of the brain, it has given you the time to learn how to hunt and kill food.  Also at this age, your brain secretes  a high level of testosterone so that you will be motivated to procreate. When your bones solidify, the brain is basically telling you that you need to develop other tools to survive and take care of your offspring.  The brain stops synthesizing muscle assignment and you start to develop a higher level of the thinking and reasoning.  Your brain stops doing  one thing and it substitutes learning motor skills for reasoning more. 

When the bones start to solidify the synthesizer process that was used to help you learn new motor skills starts to go away quickly. The loss of this synthesizer more than anything else makes the learning of new motor skills progressively more difficult. The older you get the more time it will take you to learn the golf swing. As an adult, you have to go back to using the thinking part of the brain to initiate the muscles to make the swing.   Most adults that have taken the game up later in life, are using the thinkng  part of the brain to swing the golf club the majority of the time.

The initiator or thinking part of the brain does not have the ability to repeat the swing consistently from one swing to another. This is why most golfers who take up the game later in life can not get their brain to learn the golf swing as easily as someone who started to play in their teens. If you continue to play sports from the time you are young until you are about 22 it can be easier for you to learn any motor skill at a later age but this is not guaranteed.  Just because you were good at learning many sports as a teenager, does not mean that you will be able to learn golf with the same proficiency and speed.

As an adult, your brain is very efficient at using old stored information about motor skills.  If you have learned to play another sport as a teenager that is similar to the golf swing, such as baseball, your brain will retrieve this old learned motor skill and use as much of this as it can to help you to swing the golf club.  This is your brain being efficient.  This is why adult golfers that have played a lot of baseball as teens, have a lot of baseball in their golf swing.

For the average person at the age of 30, if you have not played any sports as a teenager,  it will take you 6 times longer to learn to play golf as it did when you were 14.  So for every large bucket of balls a teenager hits you will have to hit about 6 buckets of balls just to get the brain to turn on the learning switch at the same level as a teenager.  All the balls that you hit before that learning switch comes on, do not count towards trying to learn the golf swing.  Hitting all those balls does help you develop hand eye coordination but that is not the same as motor memory storage.  At age 40 it will take you at least 10 times longer to learn to play golf as it does a teenager. The older you get the more time you will have to spend hitting balls just to get your brain to turn on the motor memory switch. No one has the time or energy to learn to play golf like this. There are always some exceptions to the rule.

Every once in a while, an adult golfer will hit a drive that goes about 40-50 yards farther than their average drives.  This is you letting go of your concepts of what you should do and allowing the brain to show you what you would have developed if you had played a lot of golf as a teen.  This spike in distance is a glimpse of the default swing.  For 99% of us adult golfers, we don't have a clue as to what we did to create that long drive.

If you are 40 and older and you did not learn golf when you were a teenager, your swing is not going to look like golfers who started to play golf when they were young. There are many things that influence what your swing looks like as an adult.  The teens had extra help from the synthesizer in the brain to learn the new swing easily.  Lack of flexibility plays a roll in how well you can swing a golf club. If you use the thinking part of the brain to try and learn to swing the club as an adult, you can not get most of the small muscles to work in order to hit a ball in the same manner as a teenager would. The small muscles make up about half of the muscles that a teenager uses to hit the ball.  The adult can't use these muscles because they have not developed the neural connections, the synapse, in the brain to make those muscles work that would have been obtained by learning this as a teenager.

Even as an adult, the wiring is still in your brain to make these small muscles work but without having this wiring connected, you can not access the small muscles that create that smooth and fluid golf swing.  As an adult, if you spend a lot of time in a gym lifting heavy weights, this also makes your swing look very disjointed because the gym equipment only develops large muscles.

Is there hope to be a better player if you are not a teenager? Yes but to have the best swing available to you that is consistent, you must be able to do several things. You must be able to get the motor memory learning switch to come back on, you must be able to get the brain to use small muscles while it is on, you must be able to retrieve information that is stored in motor memory and not rely on thinking about swing mechanics.

When you use the Golf Swing Emulator, your learning switch starts to come on in 60 seconds.  The Emulator also forces you to use 100% of the muscles that are used in the default swing and the brain will learn this new swing and store it into motor memory so you can retrieve it without thinking about it.  This is how you can develop a consistent and thoughtless swing as an adult.

The best game of golf you will ever play will come from not having too many swing thoughts. If you are an older golfer you don't have the same tools as a teenager and you are going to have to learn the swing from a different perspective. Go back to the GSE DETAILS page and read the information on how the Golf Swing Emulator can help you with learning this swing even if you are 60.   If you have any questions about the golf swing or the learning process feel free to send us an e-mail. You can use the Contact Us link at the bottom of each page.