Where Is Your Focus?...42
Focus is the Swing's Primary Influence
Commonly understood by golfers is that their setup and swing are the defining factors creating their ball flight. Much less commonly understood is the matter of our mental focus “during the swing”. Changes in our focus is the primary reason successive seven iron shots can be so different.
Taking it one step further, “where” we have our focus is so significant. Our focus can be “internal” paying attention to our body movements. The focus can be “external” paying attention to our club’s action relative to the target or the ball’s action relative to the target. The following is an excerpt of research that is hot off the press.
…Internal focus has been shown to be detrimental to performance by disrupting the motor system, whereas external focus enhances performance by promoting automaticity. …Our results suggest that external focus may strengthen focus on task-relevant features, while internal focus moves people’s attention away from important features, potentially explaining why the motor system is disrupted by internal focus. Do attentional focus cues affect the type or number of explicit rules? Proof of concepts of the self-invoking trigger or explicit knowledge hypotheses M Yamada, KR Lohse, CK Rhea, RJ Schmitz… - Psychology of Sport and …, 2024
Our golf swing is a highly complex coordination of muscles and joints to produce a very specific action within a 2.5-second time frame. Putting our attention on any aspect of those parts of our body skews performance of the rest. Whereas putting our attention on the task (e.g. swinging club to target or sending ball to target) creates a context within which the brain then directs all the muscles and joints.
Bottom Line: Working on your setup and the swing technique of your swing is time well spent. However, for the 2.5-second duration of the swing when playing a shot, we should accept the state of our setup and swing and direct our focus externally to the task we want to achieve.
Each Thursday we’ll bring you a helpful insight.
Swing to the target,
Ed
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