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The Overdose Theory - Part 1 - Fixing your own Mistakes

So what has this internal electrical system got to do with fixing problems in your golf swing? Good question. Bear with me for just a moment longer and follow along with this little experiment.

Imagine that you have been blindfolded and I place two bowls of water in front of you. One of the bowls contains water that is a little over 0 degrees Celsius, while the other has water that is a little under 100 degrees Celsius.

Do you think that you’d be able to dip your finger into the water in each bowl and determine which bowl contains the freezing water and which bowl contains the boiling water? Not too much of a problem is it? Now, consider that I change the two bowls and water temperatures now become 35 degrees Celsius and 37 degrees Celsius. Determining which bowl contains which water is a significantly harder, if not impossible task.

The simple experiment illustrates a fascinating aspect of your body. You see, your nervous system is “wired up” in such a way as to make feelings large differences relatively easy; feeling small differences is much harder.

This is bad news for golfers because, as we all know, golf is a game of small differences, fine tolerances, little margins for error - call it what you will. It’s this perpetual battle with our nervous system and the small tolerances of golf that makes the game as addictive, fascinating and frustrating as it is.

Just a couple of examples to illustrate this point. The length of the arc of a golf swing is measured in feet and the clubhead is often moving at speeds well in excess of 100 miles per hour and yet a tolerance of only a single inch means the difference between hitting the ball sweetly or topping it horribly.

Similarly with the club moving along that lengthy arc, at that amazing speed, a tolerance of the club face angle at impact of less than five degrees produces shots that vary from slice to fade to straight to draw to hook.

It was a battle with the fine tolerances of golf that led Tommy Armour to say,

“The average expert player - if he is lucky - hits 5, 8 or 10 shots out the real sweat spot in a round. The rest are just good misses.”

In a similar vein Gene Little said,

“Golf is not a game of great shots. It is a game of the most accurate misses. The folks who wing make the smallest mistakes.”

For what it is worth I’d like to add my ten cents worth,

“If you cannot get your nervous system to feel big differences in your golf swing, then how the devil do you expect to feel the small differences that correct your faults and turn you into a better player?”

In essence, what I’m saying here is many of the faults which plague golfers can be fixed via relatively minor, in physical terms, adjustments. The problem is that making these small adjustments is really difficult for the nervous system to cope with. They are not easy to FEEL. It reminds me of growing up before digital tuning in radios. Back in my ‘early days’, you tuned a radio with a circular dial on the front of the set. It was almost guaranteed that as you tuned the dial, you went too far and ‘missed’ the station you wanted. You turned the dial back and ‘missed’ the station the other way. By gradually reducing the movements of your fingers to the most delicate of twitches you fine-tuned the dial and got the station you wanted. It’s this fine- tuning that you often need to perfect in your golf swing.

BUT, let me say again - if you cannot appreciate the large differences caused by large movements of muscles then how do you expect to feel and control the small movements required to be precise with your golf club?

Many of the lessons I share with golfers commence with tales of woe - wicked slices, dreadful putting, constant topping and so on. In many of these cases the first step to fixing the problem is to get the golfer to understand how to play a shot that produces the EXACT OPPOSITE of the shot(s) that trouble them. This is curing of problems by playing ‘opposites’ and it’s what I’ve come to call “The Overdose Theory.”