The Key To Accurate Distance
It is easy to give any golfer another 40 yards on their drives with the use of the Golf Swing Emulator. This may sound like a bold statement but it is true and this applies to pro golfers also. It is not impossible to add as much as 60 yards to your drives. How you use that distance will determine how intelligent you are. Accurate distance takes more work and this work has to do with understanding how your brain works and not just the use of muscles.
Learning the short game is so much easier than learning to master the long game. The short game has saved and extended the careers of many pro golfers over time. Even if you can only hit your drives 220 yards you can still become a scratch golfer if you know how to get up and down. There is no one way to approach the short game. Form is not as important here because the short game relies on feel as the main component to scoring well. This is the one area that you can get a quick golf fix and use
it immediately in your game.
When someone on the PGA tour comes along with a consistent long game for four consecutive days, this is why they usually win tournaments. When I say long game I am not just talking about hitting the drives 300 yards all the time. If you hit a drive 300 yards and then miss the green in regulation, you still have a long game problem. The long game is fairways and greens in regulation. It is the most difficult part of the game to perform consistently.
The long game is more about retrieving swing mechanics from motor memory than it is about delicate feel that is used to chip, pitch and putt. So, why is the long game more difficult to master and do it consistently? Because there are so many more things that affect the long game than there are things that affect the short game. For each golfer, these issues are not the same. Ironically, the biggest impediment to having an accurate long game is having the correct mental aspect. You have to play with a high level of confidence to hit 80% of the fairways and greens in regulation. If you are playing in a major tournament, the course is usually longer and the greens are tougher. You rarely see golfers like Corey Pavin or Jeff Sluman win contemporary major tournaments for this reason. Both of these guys have excellent short games but the lack of accurate distance really affects what they can do.
The Masters can't get much longer and this is why guys like Trevor Immelman, Zack Johnson and Mike Weir were successful there, but only once. In a major tournament, it is difficult to hit a long drive badly and not allow that to not influence what happens next. It is how you chose to deal with that mistake that affects what happens to the rest of your game. The accurate long game is how the results of many tournaments are now decided. Here are some of the things that affect the accurate long game.
1.The height and weight of your body.
Guys that weigh more than 195 lbs. have a distinct edge over guys that weigh 170 lbs. Extra weight gives your club more force and momentum, at impact, than someone that is lighter. This is a general rule because there are some guys that are short that hit the ball a long way.
Guys that are over 6'1' also have an advantage over shorter guys. The taller you are the more upright your swing can be. An upright swing, (when your hands are at least 6" above your head at the top of your backswing) will force you to use muscles in your back that someone who is 5'9" will not use. The main muscle in the back is the lat.
2.The ability to get a lot of electrical impulses from the brain to your muscles.
This is how someone like Anthony Kim and Ricky Fowler hit the ball 300 yards. They are not big in stature but they can make up for it because they have the ability to get more electricity to the muscles than the average golfer. You will notice that their swing speed is much higher than a larger golfer like Ernie Ells. Some of this electric output is genetic and some of it is because of the way they think about their game. It is difficult to tell which of these two is being used because you cannot identify these elements in the brain even with an electron microscope.
3.The ability to consistently retrieve motor memory information from the brain concerning muscle firing sequence.
When it comes to getting power, your golf swing is similar in ways to shifting gears in a car. If you have a car with a standard transmission, and your are starting out in 3rd gear, you will not have the same power that starting in first gear has. About 80-90% of amateur golfers have this problem. They are using their hands and arms first. When these golfers try to get more distance, the brain will enlist the use of extra muscles to help achieve this demand. Even for a pro golfer, using these extra muscles does not help get distance. Instead, these extra muscles get in the way of the muscles used to hit a more controlled shot. When any golfer tries to hit the ball as hard as they can, they usually use extra muscles thinking that if I swing harder, this will help.
Usually the longest ball that you ever hit is not one in which you were coming out of your shoes to perform. When you swing harder, your brain also scrambles the sequence that you normally use (assuming your sequence is good) and it uses a different sequence that makes your hands and arms fire before the core muscles.
Storing and retrieving sequential motor memory information, is the most difficult thing to do in the golf game. This is because we are not aware of how our thinking interferes with the brain's ability to retrieve this information. If you are on the tee of a hole that is 460 yards long and is only a par 4, there is usually a certain amount of fear that creeps into your thinking before you hit your drive. On one level you think that this fear and awareness of the extra stress is important for you to have. In reality, this fear makes your brain think that you are in physical danger.
How do most of us deal with this added stress? We have extra thoughts while we are standing over the ball because we have an extra demands to achieve more distance than normal. This extra demand is one that makes the brain go into a defensive mode. The swing gets shorter and faster and we usually hook or slice the shot badly. How do you solve this problem?
You have to stay within your game. This means that you have to hit a drive that you can get in the middle of the fairway even if it only goes 230 yards. When you do this you don't use extra muscles and this shot is easier to perform that trying to hit a drive 270 yards. Even if you are a pro this is the same issue you are dealing with but on a different scale.
If you have a Golf Swing Emulator, and you use it correctly, you will get stronger in all of your movement specific muscles and this will start to happen instantly. I helped a pro golfer win a major tournament using this machine. He was tall with wide shoulders and this gave him an advantage. He already could hit drives 350 yards. I told him that in several months he would have the strength to hit drives 400 yards if he wanted. But then I told him how to use the extra strength wisely. This issue will pertain to amateur and pro golfers equally. I suggested that instead of trying to hit balls 400 yards, you will be able to slow down your swing speed by 10 or 12 mph and hit the ball just as far as you are currently hitting it. Then I ask him, "How would that affect you game?" He said "I will gain more accuracy". This was the smartest thing that he could have possibly done. He won that major tournament after working out on the Emulator for three months. This was a thinking and game management decision that had an extreme affect on his golf game.
Pro golfers lose tournaments from not making the right choices about their game. This usually happens on Sunday in the last 4 or 5 holes of the tournament. This happened recently at the PGA tournament in Atlanta. Jason Dufner had a 4 shot lead with four holes left to play and the pressure got to him. He looked as cool as a cucumber most of the day until the 15th hole when he hit a ball in the water. For the seasoned player, this was would not be the end of the tournament if they keep their thinking on the right track. Unfortunately, Dufner had more fear of losing in his head than he had anticipation and joy of winning.
Having this fear of losing makes your brain change your body and brain chemistry. Your heart starts to pump blood faster and this automatically makes the brain release more adrenaline. Now the muscles do not respond the same as they did when you were calm. Your brain reasons that you are in trouble and it gets your body ready for combat and your muscles contract a little before you even need to use them. It does not take much to get into this type of thinking. His opponent Keegan Bradley also had a similar hole but instead of getting into the fear of losing, he went the other way and he performed even better. Having already won an event in May helped Bradley use his thinking to come from four strokes behind with four holes to play and win this tournament.
This type of fear thought changes your muscle firing sequence. It does not have to change it dramatically. Even a little change in the sequence your muscles fire in can have enough of a consequence that you lose control of your normal movements.
Any type of fear can change how your body functions. For the average golfer it can be the fear of not being able to remember to do everything that you THINK that you need to do in order to perform a good shot. The best golf game that you will ever play is one in which you are not having many swing thoughts before you start to swing the club.
If you hit a bad shot you will only compound the problem by trying to make up for that mistake. This is when you feel that you have to hit hero shots in order to get back on your score schedule. This is still playing from fear. It does not usually work out well when you are using this kind of thought process. Fear changes your body and brain chemistry PERIOD whether you are an amateur or a pro. It is possible to get extra distance and not create stress to do it. This still requires that you manage your thinking well and make choices that do not get you in trouble.
Even some pro golfers that have financial security may develop a GO FOR IT attitude thinking that they can will their bodies to perform at a higher level. It gets complicated in this situation and it is not the same result for everyone. We used to think that Tiger was doing this. It seemed that he was playing with abandon when he would crush a drive and end up under some trees. He would then hit an impossible second shot in which he would have to hit a low slice that curved 50 yards and ended up on the green 250 yards away. In reality he had the tools to hit that shot and he had the same amount of confidence before he tried to perform that shot that he had when he had hit a drive 330 yards in the middle of the fairway on a previous hole. He was also playing on courses that had no underbrush under the trees and this also enabled him to hit shots from the trees that did not interfere with his overall game plan. So, when he his drive ended up in the trees, he did not feel a lot of pressure on the next shot.
In this case it was not just the physical ability to perform this shot that made it successful. It was also the ability to get the brain to do this without any fear or stress. Distance with accuracy cannot be achieved though fear. The Golf Swing Emulator can put 40-60 yards on your drive in a short time but you will not get this extra distance from coming out of your shoes. You have to be able to make the swing with a superior muscle firing sequence and using a minimum amount of thinking at the same time. You also have to understand your body's capacity and manage the choices you make by taking into consideration what this capacity is. Having no swing thoughts on the tee during your swing is usually a good thing to achieve.
There is a time to think and there is a time to perform. Your thinking should be done before you start the pre-shot routine. When you start the pre-shot routine, you have to use the thinking part of the brain so you can duplicate the same procedure each time you get on the tee. When you start to take the club back, the thinking has to stop because this is when you start to retrieve motor memory information. If you are thinking and trying to retrieve at the same time, you have two different parts of the brain fighting each other for control of your muscles. This is the number one cause of losing consistency in your shots. There should be no thinking during this takeaway if you have a good lie. Swing thoughts interfere with the ability to retrieve motor memory information. There are times that you need to have swing thoughts but it is not when you are on the tee or in the fairway with a clear view of your next shot.
You have to know what type of thinking causes good drives and what type of thinking causes melt downs. This is the most difficult thing that you will have to learn to get to your best game whether you are a pro or an amateur. Accurate distance only comes from understanding how your thinking affects your brain which in turn affects your body. Thinking and physical movement are not two different things. They are intrinsically linked together in your brain. The more you know about how YOUR BRAIN works, the easier it is to get to your best game. Having a Golf Swing Emulator is not enough to get you to your best golf game.
Solving this issue of accurate distance is like unlocking a pad lock. The inside of a pad lock has things called tumblers. These tumblers are like levers but they are not all the same length. The combination of the length of these levers and the order they are in is not the same from one lock to the next. In relation to your golf game, every person has a different set of issues or tumblers that prevents him from getting to his best game. These tumblers are like bits of information to your brain. When you are able to identify all of your tumblers, you unlock the secret to your best game. Getting additional strength in all of your movement specific muscles is easy. Learning to use the extra strength wisely is much more difficult.